Gilberto Gil has left the Brazilian Ministry of Culture. He says that music has called him back.

A quick look at reactions surfacing this week in the headlines of the Brazilian mainstream media tell of a singer-minister who did a passable job in using his social capital to boost the ministry’s actions into international channels. Gil’s assignment was almost passed off as just one more of Lula’s ‘populist tricks’ to hold qualified support for himself.

The seemingly condescending tone of Brazilian media comments and analyses about Gil’s performance as a minister are definitely not a surprise. During his term, the mainstream outlets basically ignored or ridiculed some major international coverage such as 2004 Wired magazine article, telling about Gil’s ahead-of-the-curve awareness of the importance of openness among the principles of the digital revolution.

He was ridiculed, indeed, when during an inauguration class at the University of Sao Paulo (USP) in August 2004 he declared:

“I, Gilberto Gil, Brazilian citizen, world citizen and Minister of Culture of Brazil, develop my work in music, in the ministry and in all the dimensions of my existence under the inspiration of hacker ethics; I am concerned about the issues that my world and my time pose to me, such as the issue of the digital divide, of free software and also the issue of regulation and development of audiovisual content production and distribution, by any media, for any purpose”.

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“Elite Squad”, a much-hyped film about Rio’s special forces police is having its official launch today in Rio and São Paulo, and the nationwide premiere is scheduled for Oct. 12. The peculiar thing about this release is that an estimated crowd of 3.5 million people have already seen it before its debut. The [unauthorized] copy of the film can be viewed or downloaded from many different places on the web, and the speculation is that more than a million copies of the DVD have been sold on Brazilian streets across the past few weeks.

Capitão Nascimento

Praised as a “City of God 2″, but presenting a narrative based on a policeman’s perspective, the film is provoking heated debates across the country about the causes of violence in big cities. There are interesting discussions also on the morality of the widespread use of an unauthorized copy leaked to the web of an unreleased film. Surely, this case has made Brazilians go deeper into the actual meanings of piracy in the digital era, and it can turn out to be a defining moment for the audiovisual industry. Bloggers are all around it.

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I was invited to represent the Brazilian Ministry of Culture in the conference panel “Making the Local Global: Virtual Worlds, Migration, and Linguistic Diaspora” of an event called ‘Interdependence Day‘ in Mexico City. I’ve met a fine man called Joshua Fouts (Director, USC Center on Public Diplomacy) at the iSummit in Rio last year, and he was really excited about connecting the work we do at the cultural hotspots with virtual worlds. We’ve been exchanging messages since then, but I kept telling him that Second Life’s platform needed some developments in order to be included in our program. Still, they wanted to hear about what we’ve been doing in Brazil in terms of using technology to outreach and enhance cultural bridges.

I managed to make a video containing a message from Minister Gilberto Gil on the panel’s theme, and prepared myself to go to Mexico. But then, I was given the wrong information about the need for a Brazilian to have a visa in order to visit Mexico, and so I was stopped in São Paulo and was not permitted to fly to Mexico City. The solution at hand was to participate in the panel through Second Life, and it worked out pretty well as you can see below.

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 Prokofy Neva comments on the panel - Podcast by Metaversed [7:39m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The Ashaninkas are the largest indigenous group in the Peruvian Amazon and differently from the majority of the South American original dwellers, their cultural identity is greatly preserved. Apart from being among the native nations of the continent connected with the traditional use of Ayahuasca, the Ashaninkas are specially known for their use of beautiful cotton robes, or cushmas, which are woven by the Ashaninka women for the men of their tribe. Cushmas are an Ashaninka’s most prized possession and there is a very long tradition of giving and exchanging cushmas and cloth with nyomparis (or trading partners) which linked distant Ashaninka villages into cycles of meetings, collaboration and resource sharing.

Accounts from the beginning of the last century tells about some Ashaninka groups that escaped from the Peruvian “caucheiros” [rubber tappers], and today a few hundred of them live on the Brazilian side of the border. There are stories about the braveness of the skilled warriors who expulsed the wild Amahuakas from the area around the Amonia River in the Upper Juruá. These few groups achieved the ownership of their land in the 90s, after many decades of struggle against the successive waves of colonization, and nowadays they strive to engage in activities that can help them to communicate with the world, and better defend their land and their culture from their current enemies.
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There is no clear consensus about the specific reasons that occasionally boost Brazil to the cutting edge of the open source revolution. For us here in the field, facing so many difficulties, ranging from simple misunderstandings to big resource constraints, the international acclaim sounds a bit exaggerated, and at times misinformed. Ever since the remarkable 2004 Wired magazine article — We Pledge Allegiance to the Penguin — started the world buzz, and until quite recently, the Brazilian media was not following what was really going on. Partly because of innocent ignorance and partly because of economic and political reasons the full story was not being delivered to the mass TV audience. But now that some fruits of the first generation of “seed” ideas are starting to ripen into visibility to bigger audiences, and as principles of the ‘open’ protocol start to be tested in other sectors more and more commentators are joining in the conversation focusing on specific areas that catch their attention.

No brilhante texto de Dibbell (leia na íntegra), o ministro da Cultura, Gilberto Gil, já atacava “os fundamentalistas do controle absoluto sobre a propriedade” e o seu iminente fracasso. “Um mundo aberto pelas comunicações não pode se manter fechado em uma visão feudal de propriedade”, diz. “Nenhum país, nem os Estados Unidos, ou a Europa, pode ficar no caminho. É uma tendência global. É parte do próprio processo de civilização. É a abundância semântica do mundo moderno, do mundo pós-moderno – e não há por que resistir a isso”. Com esse pensamento compartilhado por uma parte do governo Lula e com o Fórum Internacional de Software Livre (fisl) realizado em abril pela oitava vez em Porto Alegre, o Brasil continua como um dos maiores inimigos da propriedade intelectual como a conhecemos hoje na indústria do conhecimento capitalista, como já vem sendo noticiado pelo mundo todo.
Brasil perpetua-se como inimigo número um da propriedade intelectual, por Carlos Gustavo Yoda - Blog do Turquinho

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Varjão do Torto is a low income settlement area on the outskirts of Brasília, Brazil’s political capital. It neighbors the land where my community is located, and it is full of young people eager to make things happen. This is where I am collaborating in a workshop for the local ‘Ponto de Cultura’ (Cultural Hotspot), a government program sponsored by the Ministry of Culture:

“The cultural hotspot, a program with a budget of R$ 37 millions (£ 9.2 millions), is about democratization, permitting ideas of different places, from rich to poor cities, be exchanged. “The main goal is to plant seeds” says Claudio. A hotspot is established with a broadband connection, infrastructure made with recycled equipments and, most of all, technical workshops of open-source software, allowing anyone to digitalize their creativity. The workshops aim to create independency, leaving on the hands of each community the ownership of their individual process, decentralizing the system. Technology has always been a tool for social inclusion, but here the main objective is not only to make possible the incorporation of labor to the market, but to give people voice, power over their expression, to give them citizenship.”
Cultural Hotspots - Brazilian open-source and copyleft - Mazine.ws

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