Commonisms in the Amazon: a study of the NGO Casa do Rio and its outcomes

• Grant number: 25/15401-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: September 01, 2025
• End date: August 31, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts
• Principal Investigator: Christine Greiner
• Grantee: Thiago Cavalli Azambuja
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Comunicação, Letras e Artes. Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 25/01865-2 - Laboratory of Experiments to Co-Imagine Possible Worlds: Commonism, Anarchic Composting and other Seedings., AP.R

Abstract

The objective of this master's project is to map, analyze, and document experiences in the Brazilian Amazon that trigger what Pascal Gielen calls common-ism. We selected as our study object Casa do Rio, a non-profit non-governmental organization (NGO) founded by me in 2014 that operates in the rural Amazon, specifically around the municipality of Careiro, Amazonas state. In addition to documenting its trajectory, the proposal is to present recent interactions between the Casa's activities and the work carried out by the Center for Indigenous Medicine - Bahserikowi, located in the urban area of Manaus, Amazonas state. The founder of this center, Professor Dr. João Paulo Barreto, is an Indigenous member of the Tukano people and a prolific researcher and activist who analyzes the concepts of body and image in the Altorionegrino region, as well as their impacts on medical practices and daily life. Both Casa do Rio and the Medical Center have explored the emergence of common-isms through their work with Indigenous and riverine communities, as well as working on relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. In terms of theoretical foundation, Gielen uses the term common-ism to refer to the political ideology of an imagined possible society that assumes equality, cooperation, solidarity, and reciprocity as indispensable elements for any society, focusing on social relations. The term originated in medieval England, where the concept of commons referred to resources managed and shared by all members of a community to ensure their way of life. Later, this concept was enriched by scholars and activists such as Peter Linebaugh, David Boller, and Silke Helferich, who expanded the discussion to include social practices and other cultural values. Dockx and Gielen (2018) argue that culture, art, and aesthetics are guiding elements of common-isms, while community operates to maintain social cohesion and sustain an integrative sense of who we are. To create something within the community that could provide elements for imagining new possibilities for existence through art, our first move was to collectively build a house: Casa do Rio. In this space, we sought to generate confluences, as suggested by Antonio Bispo (2023, p. 9). We brought together community members, artists, educators, thinkers, and others. As Gielen argues, cosmolocalism combines the best of both worlds: local knowledge, community spirit, international orientation, and an inclusive worldview (2024, p. 172). The aim of this master's degree, therefore, is to analyze the practices of building the commons, based on the concept proposed by Pascal Gielen, but analyzing the work of Casa do Rio and the Indigenous Medicine Center based on local knowledge. It is not a mere application of a theory conceived in Europe, but rather, to observe intersections between certain issues, with the aim of activating movements, both theoretically and in practical experiments. During the research and in dialogue with the guests of the FAPESP regular grant project, we will also begin to develop the proposal for an artistic residency in the region near the Tupana River, to specifically test the power of art in the process of activating the commons in a fabulatory way. In this sense, bibliographies focused on fabulatory practices and artisticities should also be analyzed during the research, with emphasis on Erin Manning's work, The Minor Gesture (2021) and some excerpts from Greiner's book, Crip Bodies: Establishing Strangeness to Exist (2023).