Temos uma Questão!
7 November 2015
19:00 Rio time (find your local time here)
Multicidade Festival, Rio de Janeiro
In preparation for hosting the 2016 Olympic Games, Brazilian officials promised to clean up Guanabara Bay, where sailing, rowing and windsurfing competitions will be held. The water is heavily polluted, with nearly 70% of Rio de Janeiro’s untreated sewage going directly into the bay. The impending international attention of the Olympics has highlighted the massive ongoing problem of water pollution but authorities seem to be doing very little about.
What can we as individuals do in response to this serious environmental crisis? In this “situation”, we researched the topic and created a live online cyberformance as a provocation for a networked global discussion seeking solutions for Rio’s water pollution problem.
The performance took place on 7 November 2015 at Multicidade Festival in Rio de Janeiro (coincidentally, just two days after the collapse of a Samarco mining waste dam caused Brasil’s worst ever environmental disaster, contaminating the Rio Doce and Atlantic Ocean).
The Team:
“We have a Situation – Rio” was created by a large team of artists and participants, both online and offline, and directed by Helen Varley Jamieson. The online participants began researching and experimenting a few months beforehand, while the Rio participants met during the first week of November and worked over an intense 6 days.
The online team:
- Gabriella Sacco (Italy/Netherlands)
- Elaine vaan Hogue (USA)
- Letícia Castilho (Belo Horizonte, Brasil)
- Miljana Perić (Serbia)
- Vicki Smith (Aotearoa New Zealand)
The team in Rio:
- Alda Passos
- Ana Júlia Costa Fraga
- Eriangelis Nardelli da Silva
- Marcia Bloch
- Renata Lopes de Barros
- Zaba Azevedo
- Helen Varley Jamieson
And thanks to:
- Haveté Sustentabilidade (Rio de Janeiro, Brasil)
- Petyr Veenstra (graphics, Netherlands)
- Martin Eisenbath (streaming, Germany)
- Paul Rohrlach (UpStage, New Zealand)
- the technicians and organisers of Multicidade Festival
- Juliana Barbassa, Betty Martins, Adriano Belisário, Rafael Bacelar, Victor Ribeiro, Celso Sanchez (networking and research)