Big Ideas: Brazil. Go with the flow

Brazil is not a country for beginners, as Tom Jobim warned. The Brazilian composer who made the world swoon to the sway of ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ advised of the danger of thinking Brazil can be understood or explained. Despite this warning, People’s Palace Projects has been promoting cultural dialogues between Britain and Brazil for over a decade. We build collaborative projects in both countries, focusing on the exchange of transformative ideas about how the arts engage in social action. Four decades after Jobim and others launched bossa nova – the ‘new beat’ revolution – we are asking what is the Brazilian cultural ‘beat’ that could change the way we think about and believe in the arts in Britain today? Can Brazil’s recent cultural policies – forged in response to extreme social crises – offer hope at a time of despair?

A big ask
Continental in size, Brazil’s own national anthem describes the country as being defined by its incomprehensible size and diversity. Shame on the UK arts programmer who tries to sell a ‘Brazilian season’ on the basis of football, carnival and samba. The growing numbers of Brazilian residents in Britain – many of them artists – will testify articulately to the rich vitality that is denied every time their country is reduced through lazy marketing. When Gilberto Gil became Minister of Culture in 2004, he declared that diversity is what defines Brazil. It is not something to be attained or promoted through cultural policy initiatives. Diversity is what makes Brazil ‘Brasil’.
Gil recognised from the outset that his Ministry’s function was not to make culture happen. His challenge was to find a way of supporting and developing the art of Brazil that is at the heart of how life is lived. With the world’s greatest inequality in wealth distribution, Brazil has the most urgent reasons not to fund the arts. Yet under first Gil and then Juca Ferreira, the Brazilian Ministry of Culture has successfully argued that the arts are vital to progress and to the construction of new Brazilian social order.
Which forms of art? Which artists? Which plays, films, dances, sculptures or books? How to prioritise in the face of such urgency, abundance and diversity? Traditionally, the European heritage of cultural production and its associated institutions have absorbed the majority of Brazil’s cultural investment. The question that faces those creating cultural policy for the twenty-first century – as much in Britain as in Brazil – is how to respect such traditions even where they have created a legacy of inequality and exclusion. And how to fund the forms and structures of popular artistic expression that are at the bottom of the funding pyramid yet are an intrinsic part of contemporary cultural identities?

Freedom of expression
Key to the programmes that have been implemented in Brazil is the concept of allowing a high-level of self-determination for artists and arts companies. Building on Gil’s statement that “culture is what we make here”, the Ministry is trying to find ways to fund what it calls ‘Points of Culture’ that already exist within communities. Some of the points have existed for decades and are based on historic popular manifestations, such as maracatu or capoeira, others represent contemporary cultural energies such as graffiti collectives or street dance. Most of the funding goes into the flow between the points, rather than investment in the actual points themselves. The Ministry sees its role as being to fund the infrastructure that allows these points to communicate with each other and share information, resources, skills, etc. It funds the flow between the points and, like an acupuncturist, increases the force and energy at those points which will make a difference to the social body as a whole.
Currently there are 740 ‘Points of Culture’ based in 263 towns and cities across 26 states in Brazil. President Lula has declared that his aim is to see 20,000 of them established before the end of 2010 at the rate of an annual investment of £20,000 per point. In addition, the Ministry funds an annual network event – known as a ‘teia’ or spider’s web – that brings representatives of each point together for four days. They also make extra resources available for stimulating links with other state education and health programmes. The priority for funding is the stimulation of the interconnectivity of artistic organisations and the building of their capacity for social engagements, which is indeed the new beat – the contemporary bossa nova – of Brazilian culture.

Problem solving
The urgent crises that affect Brazilian urban society have produced arts initiatives on a scale that has never been imagined in the UK. There is a growing catalogue of arts organisations emerging from the marginal, often improvised communities on the peripheries of Brazilian cities, and while not all of them are directly orientated towards the resolution of social problems, they are increasingly seen as offering viable solutions. Whether it is in the resolution of conflict; the renewal of the urban landscape; reversal of economic decline or rescue of lives lost to crime/delinquency, the arts are looked to as offering real alternatives to social exclusion and fragmentation. It is the totalising way in which so many of these Brazilian groups respond that first alerts the British visitor to the gap between UK and Brazilian initiatives in this field. In the absence of adequate healthcare, education, family structures, economic activity and security, arts organisations fill the void with an intensity that makes invidious any meaningful comparison with almost all British arts-based initiatives.
The Brazilian situation raises important questions for current debates within the UK where the questions of what the arts can do has moved from the implicit to the explicit, as the management of social crises is increasingly seen as a validating purpose for artists in the new millennium. It is now for us to decide what is the level of alert in terms of the various social crises that affect British society, and what sort of response we expect from our artists. And for the DCMS and the Arts Councils to respond with an appropriate framework for the UK to be able to respond as robustly, creatively and effectively as Brazil has shown is possible.