Make no mistake, technology is for those who are black, Indigenous and also slum-dwellers

In this interview, we are two black people communicating using different strategies produced from our identities. These are created not only for survival, but also for reworking the future along with the present from an ancestral perspective.

Obirin: To begin with, tell us a little about your trajectory, João?

João: My name is João Araió and I’m talking to you now from the territory of Baixada Fluminense, in Rio de Janeiro. I was born in Piauí and came here when I was 10 years old. I’m a journalist by trade, and when I found myself in the job market I suffered some professional disappointment, especially while working as a press secretary. So, I decided to look for another way. I joined a collective called ‘Ocupa Alemão’, from which the idea of GatoMídia was created.

The ‘Ocupa Alemão’ collective emerged in the context of violence against the youth of that territory, at the turn of 2012 to 2013. We were at the height of the advance of the Public Security policy in Rio de Janeiro with the implementation of the UPPs (Police Pacification Units). We emerged at a time of increasing police violence, which brought about a lot of violation of the rights of the black population, along with criminalisation of daily life in the favela, and of culture and knowledge. It brought about a  kind of mechanisation of life within the communities. They begun implementing curfews from 10 o'clock at night in the Complexo do Alemão and Borel. The collective carried out action to confront this curfew which also included a cultural activity in order to raise awareness of the residents. This desire of ours to create a space that was also for exchange and sharing of knowledge and experiences is how the idea of GatoMídia was born. At first, it was a set of workshops where we brought some content to the young people of Complexo do Alemão and, little by little, we created and built upon our own identity. There was a need for these young people to look with new eyes at the technology that already existed, of which they already had a certain understanding, so we took this path and developed the project bit by bit.

Obirin: So, it's already been 10 years since this initiative was born, right? I find this story very interesting, because there are a series of urgent demands that arise when we are in a context of militarisation such as this, which directly impacts the body and daily life. The public security of the state, in the favelas, emerges as a control over all aspects of life and creates demands for the community that must be upheld in order for the people there to survive.

Discussing technology, in this context, can seem distant, but technology is also about (re)creating the possibility to exist. It is incredible to observe how GatoMídia nurtures this dream amid so many politics of death, which makes thinking about technology a bigger challenge than it already is. How did you build this narrative and even go about spreading this idea in such a context?

João: What you just mentioned reminded me of something Ailton Krenak said in an interview. He explained that, with technology, the mediation between the local and the global ceases to exist. So, without technology, the young person who is in the periphery is passed through various filters accessing information. With technology, he now has a more fluid path to this information and he can either have direct access to this information or he can produce information and take the opposite path as well.

The logic of GatoMídia is very much in line with this, as it works to transform each young person from the periphery into a potential communicator, as a creator of their own narrative. Therefore, our axis of learning aims to bring about more training workshops, with a methodology that we create over time.

Obirin: I am always happy when the ideas of black people materialise because we know that Brazil produces many setbacks for us that make it hard to realise our dreams, ideas and projects. Imagining is already a difficult process for us to glimpse possible scenarios and it is very beautiful and powerful to see how an idea from a group of young, black and favela youths has been alive and kicking for 10 years.

In terms of the formative perspective of GatoMídia, you base a lot on black, peripheral and Indigenous people in the field of technology. When we look at the formal education in Brazil, according to the Higher Education Census that was prepared by the Ministry of Education in 2020, Brazil trained 51,000 professionals in the area of computing and information and communication technology, of which only 32% are from black and brown people and one percent from Indigenous people. That is, in the courses that most directly prepare people for technology, we have the large majority of white people. Additionally, there is also the perspective which does not consider the contribution of the African continent and the Amerindian peoples, as if only Europe and the USA had something to contribute to the area and, consequently, to the future.

Obirin: How does GatoMídia think the technology and the training of black and Indigenous people can enable us to enter this area?

João: The academy in general is very Eurocentric. That's why we can already see that the coloniser is there to deny the identity, humanity, and knowledge of the colonised peoples. The pre-colonial civilisations here in the Americas were already developing their technologies and everything was contained within this idea of so-called ‘discovery’ and colonisation. This line of thinking is the same as denying that there are technologies being created in peripheral, traditional and Indigenous communities. So, when we are going to debate about academic teaching, we already start from that place. That is why GatoMídia comes with this counter-discourse; to say that black, Indigenous and peripheral knowledge does exist and that it is not here to ‘transfer’ knowledge, but to share and exchange.

When we think about training, one of the criteria is the capacity to apply knowledge, so the contents that we promote in the laboratories come from the territory, thus joining African philosophies and Indigenous cosmologies. This happens in our Amerindian permanent laboratory, for example.

Obirin: Can you explain more about how GatoMídia started its formative processes in a laboratory format?

João: We started with workshops on photography, creative writing, and social networks. At the beginning, we were very much into the web 2.0 wave. After we became independent, we started to produce residencies that were slightly larger and with more elaborate workshops. Our first residency was called ‘Favelado 2.0’, precisely to bring this idea of using social networks as a tool for the production of communication and narrative from within the favela. We began to diversify the residencies as we managed to obtain more partnerships and resources to pay for everything we were creating. In 2018, the first Afrofuturist Lab emerged, also bringing new content for labs on technologies such as artificial intelligence. In 2019, we made the second edition still with this intention of bringing about learning in virtual realities and, from 2020, with the pandemic, we needed to readapt. This was kind of a blessing and a curse, as we now have a more national reach because of the online format.

We reached many people in the north and northeast of Brazil, and with this we realised the greater importance of bringing content that is linked to the ancestry of these territories. We also began to incorporate African philosophy, along with knowledge of the African diaspora, knowledge of the peoples originating from Brazil, which today form part of the Afro-Amerindian permanent laboratory. In this lab we have a compulsory content grid, and then we divide the class according to the interests of each student, in three different ‘languages’: technological narratives, immersive narratives and visual narratives. In the last issue, we produced a campaign which we are now publicising. It’s called ‘The Brazil We Imagine’, where we bring political concepts that come from these territories. This offers a very rich heritage of this ancestral knowledge.

Obirin: How was your relationship with technology at first, given that it is not your area of training?

João: I was a young man who had access to technology very late in life. I only had my first computer when I was already in college, and access to the internet only happened in late adolescence. Because of this, I still have a troubled relationship with networks and social platforms. When I decided to join GatoMídia, I still had this little knowledge, but we usually say that we learn when we do. The most accessible technology for us is the mobile phone, which is and has always been a tool that most young people from favelas and the periphery had access to, even in a precarious way. So, we started with this tool and went on to gain access to other technologies.

Obirin: It is important to say that, in order to discuss technology, we do not need to be trained in areas of computer science necessarily, right? We can start with what we have and what we already know.

Thinking about the relationship between technology and race, we realise that whiteness has other concerns because she does not have her life put at risk because of her racial identity. I think that's the first point: not having to worry about survival allows a reallocation of energy, such as being able to think about molecular gastronomy, flying cars, robots that clean houses... there are other concerns because they have time to think about other things in life.

I think about this a lot when we talk about technology from the perspective of someone who is white, straight, cis, from the global north, and in general those who are thinking about technology on a global level. It is not only a question of lack of representation. Not including people with other identities, such as black and Indigenous people, women, Latinos, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ and the like, is also not talking about the purpose of the technology they produce, because technology is a product of our concern, and of how we perceive and live the world. On that basis I would like you to share at least one project that was produced in the laboratories by black, Indigenous and/or slum people.

João: We like to say that, just like communication, technology is not neutral. It brings a whole set of values from those who do it, and when we think about technology produced by black and Indigenous people, we are thinking about technology with a different set of ethics.

Throughout the existence of GatoMídia, we produced a lot of content, both creating and thinking visually, as well as in the reproduction of this knowledge. We had a laboratory in which the students thought of a game depicting daily life in the favela and the idea was to deconstruct some stereotypes about the people who live in the favela and how we solve the daily problems in our own way.

Another example is the immersive narratives we launched in 2019. It was the year of the second Afrofuturist laboratory, where we were already thinking of producing some ideas including virtual reality. We applied for a UN call for proposals for a programme aimed at the production of immersive narratives. We were selected, and we had the equipment to produce, so we assembled a team and produced two immersive narratives in the Complex do Alemão and Maré. They are the first 360° documentaries, in short film format, made by people from the favela. One of them was selected to be exhibited during the UN assembly that year in New York, with nine others from around the world.

Finally, within the laboratories also came the idea of the Immersive Favela Festival to popularise technology among people from favelas and the periphery based on the need of people to show more content produced from within these communities and to stimulate these people to produce more of this content, which happened in 2021. This generated other connections beyond the seas, with Africans who also produce territory-based narratives.

The idea is for us to produce more, and further in partnership with the people who have passed through GatoMídia. We are a living network that is always producing.

Obirin: To conclude, João, I would like you to answer: what is technology for you?

João: I think that technology only makes sense when it starts from our understanding of our bodies. It's understanding the needs of that body, where it is, and what we want to leave, express, speak, which stories we want to make visible. I think that technology is a means for us to bring these stories to the forefront. Technology is a way for us to think about relations of production, relations of consumption, of care. That is, how we can also use technology to think about care, not only thinking about mental health, but also thinking about our territory, body, home, where the people live.

Obirin: Thank you, João. I hope that with this, more black and Indigenous people of the world feel encouraged to compete for technology under another paradigm. Congratulations to GatoMídia and long life to this project!