For the day of my departure

This November was marked by the departure of our friend and great artist Jaider Esbell. On “the day of the dead” our friend left his body as a freedom act or, as his indigenous relatives say, he got enchanted.

As the media has put it, Jaider was on a meteoric rise and reaching a dimension of recognition unprecedented for any brazilian indigenous artist of all times. In addition to being the spearhead of the 34th Bienal de São Paulo, a few of his main works were purchased by the Center Pompidou and many other pieces acquired by other important art collections this year. Many mysteries and questions surround his departure, but this type of consideration must be investigated by other vehicles and another type of professional. As an artist and researcher myself, I will refrain from making a free translation of the text written by Jaider in 2013 and which gives an account of the moment when he would leave this dimension of life - which, sooner than we had hoped, arrived.

For the day of my departure

“This afternoon everyone should drink pajuaru, the drink of my life, and thus raise their souls so that we are in unison.

When this body is there, solemnly rested, when my head is at last still, I want it to be covered with a fine degradable cloth. On top of that cloth, I want lots of dry leaves, picked from large native trees. On the day of my departure, I don't want them to spend all the pain in the world on their desire for my return. My time has come, which has always been awaited. I want your hearts, now cold, to feel the burning of the flames of life, to heat so much until awakening your eyes to all the beauty that still exists. I want this pain of death to be transformed, often, into a source of life, that it be like a spring, or like the waters of the first rains on the scorched ground, which is slowly soaking, moving the grains of sand and, when they soak, awaken the seeds of the past sleep to stop being like that to be lives and go out in search of the sun.

At this moment, my soul must be seeing everything from above, just as I always dreamed, absolutely free without needing protection, foundation or any material connection. Below, just the cold, comforting emptiness of infinity. I will certainly be happy.

I will accompany the birds, sometimes on their crusades. I will be part of the arrow that I have often observed from below, where everyone, at one time, must take the lead and go forward, breaking the air. Like a child for a toy, an ant for a candy, a moth for a light, I will always be following the object of my desire, which I imagine is insatiable and never loses its flavor, or a light that will never go out. I want to be like this, I miss seeing you all. I ask, my people, a little more strength. I ask this favor one more time. I want the women of my family, my eternal women, to go out in the fields to pick flowers. I ask you to accompany these women, all the others who find in me at least a hint of dignity, those who are with me and who consider this soul captive before. I want you to leave early, grab your baskets and fill them with assorted flowers. May virgin flowers be picked, still dew, the most beautiful and fragrant. I want them to see the beauties of our plowed fields, to tread the earth, to leave their tracks registered in these fields swept by the wind. These who will never be erased from the memory of those who know them. Wrongful, wrongly interpreted as bad land, that its grass is of no use, that nothing survives there. Lazy, as they say of the native who craves nothing more than food and the hammock.

I want the men, my brothers, my father and friends, for whom I would do it without measures, to go out in search of mixiri trunks. I want you to bring firewood for an entire night of fire. The fire must be bright. On that day, it must be windy and the sparks of the great fire will rise to heaven. I ask you to watch with me one more sunset and, when it descends, see the first stars shine excitedly, the scattered clouds buttery. I want to go to orange, in the eternal imminence of the beginning of a new day or a new night. I want to lie down, at this time, in the blush of the twilight. I want the birds to still see me when they are returning to their homes. So let me go. Put the mother blanket over my body and give me away so that I can be among you again in other ways. From here, I'll leave soon to be in other corners of this world. I will split, disintegrate into atomic particles that one day will still meet and be part of it again as they always will be. Part of me goes to sea and, finally, I'm going to dive with the shoals, accompany them on their routes, travel through their territory. I can go to the top of the Earth and freeze in a winter sleep, hoping to feel the heat of the sun again. I will now be starting another crusade for this old world. My soul will no longer have a place in this infinite universe and may be recycled in another body. I ask you to slowly play the land so as not to destroy the flowers, which now accompany me on this trip. I want to see my family in one body, in one desire, dreaming the same dream. I want them to remember me in my best days, when they saw my very rare and sincere smile, when they felt up close the caress of my heart, which I always believed to exist. I am a child again, in fact, I have always been one of them and always will be. I want my body to feed the children of this great tree that I am already part of, for now. The fire should be hot and their tired bodies will be lit up. I want you to look at the laboredas and follow the sparks until they merge with the stars in the sky. From there, I see the fire, a ball of light in the middle of the darkness, and in the sky, I light my star never to go out."

August Afternoons, September Mornings, October Nights, April 2013, Jaider Esbell

Entidades, 2021: monumental sculpture that, I believe, needs to be immortalized by the Bienal de São Paulo and by the state and federal governments of Brazil. Jaider's departure is historic, as is this Sao Paulo Bienal. This is the peak moment in his art career and indigenous fight for a relevant voice within western society.

The lens of simplicity: a memoir for a possibility of an integral capitalism

The similarity in their round frames is no coincidence. Comparing Steve Jobs' death to John Lennon's passing is not unreasonable. While comparing Jobs' impact on our time to that of Gandhi may be seen as a delusion, but it still holds meaning. All three of them have significantly shaped the world we inhabit today.

Revolution is the word that unites these geniuses.  Each one revolutionized the world in his own way. Gandhi brought us a political revolution, Lennon a behavioral revolution, Jobs a technological revolution. Gandhi stopped a war with flowers. Lennon showed that dreaming can be bigger than life.  Jobs flooded the world with the hope of simple, humane technology. After them, the world could no longer be the same.

If Beatles is bigger than Jesus, Jobs is bigger than The Beatles.

Jobs' revolution began with the creation of the first personal computer and culminated in the realization of the age-old dream of an all-knowing book: with the vision of iPad (which iteration led to iPhone) his devices reshaped the personal device industry and other content-related industries for good.

iPhone is the most successful single product in the entire history of capitalism. 

At this point, I no longer need to say anything for you to prove you that this product alone has changed humanity and the way it lives forever. In that sense, we could say that if the Beatles are greater than Jesus (as John once said) giving the works of time its whole, then we can also say that Jobs is, definitely, bigger than the Beatles. Again, we live in another time the time of The Beatles and the apples of capitalism keep unfolding it's powers a prowess.

He was a creative genius and a master of aesthetics. Someone once asked him about the design of PCs and he said, "They might be nice on the outside, but have you seen how horrible they are on the inside?"  This was Jobs, concerned with the integral design of the object, with the elegance of a product both outside and inside. That's the secret of Steve's apple, the concern for the whole and the detail. The integrity of the whole experience.

If there's anything the world can learn from Jobs, Lennon and Gandhi I think it's this: dream and beauty must be alive, inside and outside. What the world needs is integral people, integral brands, integral products and integral institutions with a true soul. Simple, deep and clear like a prosaic pair of round lenses.

*this article was adapted from the original article published on October 7, 2011 in the newspaper ‘Estado de São Paulo’ on account of the death of Steve Jobs.

Global Mental Health: the Invisible Pandemic

People are very simple and pretty fragile. Any help is relevant for us at this point in time. The demands are many and the resources to support our mental health in a BANI world are relatively scarce.

Today, the Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, sent an open letter to all world leaders asking for the prioritization of Mental Health in the agenda of all governments. Today, despite more than 70% of human work being mental and cognitive, only 2% of the global budget for Health is allocated to Mental Health - and as the secretary general himself says in his open letter: this is unacceptable!

The issue of mental health is a wicked problem, the kind that requires countless joint efforts so that the basis of the equation of psychic suffering can be reversed and start to evolve into syntropy.

Global resources for mental health care are still very scarce and poorly structured. According to the UN and WHO, COVID19 is being controlled, but the mental health pandemic, if not given due attention, could last for more than two decades.

In developed countries, 75% of people in mental suffering say they are not receiving adequate care. In poor countries, more than 75% of the population that needs mental health care does not have any kind of help or support. But why did it took us so long to realize this? Well, as a famous prince says, maybe because the essential is invisible to the eye.

"Thinking that a talk will solve your company's mental health is like having a child addicted to drugs and thinking that a pamphlet would solve the problem."

We know that giving lectures within companies or governments about mental health, for example, is a relevant activity for raising awareness. But this has minimal potential to solve the problem. Giving a mental health talk thinking it will solve the problem is a bit like having a drug-addicted child at home and giving him a pamphlet and thinking it will change him. The action itself may even be well intentioned, but it's the legitimate case of looking the other way.

The resources needed to solve or at least address a problem such as mental health, whether inside or outside organizations, requires much more resources than we want to accept. But the point is, we need to accept. The mind is the foundation of human life and if the mind is not organized and functional - and we have a million reasons for that nowadays - everything else goes into a kind of entropy. Cognitive resources and emotional resources need to be exerted forcefully in the search and construction of solutions. As a matter of fact, the issue of mental health is a wicked problem, the kind that requires countless joint efforts so that the basis of the equation of psychic suffering can be reversed and start to evolve into syntropy.

You as a parent, employer or educator need to do a lot more in situations like these. You really need to devote more than you think you are cognitively capable of and more than you think you are emotionally capable of. Caring takes us beyond. We push our own limits - and by helping others we lift ourselves.

In terms of systems, first we need to find possible solutions and then actively transform these solutions into a culture within your organization. Furthermore, as we all have a mind, we should use this effort on ourselves first of all and, in parallel, use it on each other. Put the mask on yourself first and then on the child sitting next to you - remember that ideia?

This double effort is worth it, as the return on that investment does not directly affect your bank account, but adds more years to your life and more life to your years. First for yourself and, after understanding this new language of care, for your neighbors, colleagues, bosses, subordinates, you name it. Eventually, everyone around you. This, very briefly, is the real cadence of the mental health revolution we are starting to build now - one step at a time, onde day after another.

Let's flow

My sole intention in this post is to talk here about my different lines of work that range between Future Studies, Artificial Intelligence and Human Development. Besides this bed of knowledge (where ideas have sex) they generate culture artifacts that investigate the limits of drawing, sculpture and representation. I play with those resonances through my artwork and poetry. 

Infraslims, 2012-2024

All these interests surround a main structure of human theory to wellbeing, which also ends up connecting to what I believe to be the most important issue of the 21st century: human mental health. As a basis for this mental health is the self-regulation approach proposed by the mindfulness methodology. Mental health is not only about preventing mental conditions of suffering and low performance, but also - and more importantly - it is about promoting longer life and higher performance within this longer life. 

Certainly, in addition to the endless scientific works in this direction, one of its central beacons is the evolving and always expanding Flow theory. Initially proposed and structured over 30 years by professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, flow has become a center point to many theorists and an organizing destiny to the myriad of interests of my personal journey. As an introduction to the topic, I recommend the text about flow by Dr. Solange Mata Machado, scientific research coordinator at Positiv - our start-up of interfaces for mental health.

Biogramaturgies

Biograms and Space: the visibility of the monad.

Following the process of the design research course at the Berlin Art Institute, professor and artist Dagmara Genda teased me about the relationship between biograms and space. My premise that “drawing is the trail of dance in space” seemed to her still very incipient and asked for experiments along these lines. Below are 4 raw videos taken from my experimental sessions:

The Future of Biogramaturgies.

The idea of ​​continuity for this project is to edit it and a single video, using sounds taken from the album of functional songs Recursive Iterations by artist Ryan Teague who works with the idea of ​​sound architecture and generative music.

The final goal of this study of Biogramaturgies (still hidden on the horizon of future years) is to arrive in a luminous device (light hands / light fingers) that draw sculptures in space (drawing sculptures) at the same time that they react and recreate sounds.

Light and sound are two of the pillar phenomena of human perception and in the world of biograms they are one thing - synaesthetic objects.

Biograms and other Directions.

Other correlation created by this global workshop is the interest aroused in me by the project of Juan Eduardo Páes Cañas, one of the students of the course, but a seasoned semiotician whose thesis is Raíces Corporales del Dibujo. In addition to the materiality and visual virtuality of the biograms, I also understand these as signifiers of new meanings that have not yet been fully processed by humans, crediting them with a cognitive or even ontological existence.

Biograms and Biology: a task for the “long future”.

Another provocation made by Dagmara was about the relationship between biograms and biology. For this essay, even deeper questions need to be addressed and directed so that they do not become just a rhetorical exercise on the origins of biograms and their relationship with biological life itself.