Portuguese
“(…) That the culture are the ways to behave. That the culture is all human creation”
Paulo Freire
The “Raízes – Guimarães 2012/European Capital of Culture” Project was corpus for a dense and extensive matter published in the Issue 01 of UniFreire Bulletin. Now, in the second issue, it is back. Just over two months after the first Bulletin was launch, the project of the city of Guimarães completed, on June, 11 of 2013 to be more precised, its collection of five works on vimaranenses memories and knowledge, with its fifth book. The last one of publications is steeped in migrations problematic.
The series was born worried about to cherish the memory of its citizens through the systematization and democratization of their knowledge, being local, individual, collective, or from any origin. Result of an ethnographic research work – descriptive and interpretive regarding the forms of people’s life, customs, values, beliefs, from economy plan to the plan of art – was developed between 2010 and 2012 by the Institute of Paulo Freire Portugal (IPFP), by Paulo Freire Resource Center and the Center for Educational Research and Intervention at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Porto (FPCEUP).
The project in the last issue of the Bulletin
The first book of the collection, “When I born, that factory was already there”, is about an activity that marked strongly the region, the industry. While professional activity, provides the building of an identity in some way common to a group, at this case, the workers. Hence the first anthropological cut.
The second book, “Oh mother, give us bread” Listening everyday poverty”, brings past and present experiences and sufferings of citizen that are related to poverty as main intervening. The third book, “Hunger March of Pevidém”, recalls a popular movement which the population of Pevidém had to fight to get bread for the children, reveling a situation of extreme difficulty and in a time that any manifestation was violently suppressed. The fourth book, entitled “Kaleidoscope of cultural fragments: Looking and listing Guimarães”, was the retract of several aspects of vimaranense cultural production.
Cover
The fifth and final book is called “The whole world is everyone’s – Narratives of migrants in Guimarães” and, like the others, was also coordinated by Luiza Cortesão, president of IPFP. This work, however, specifically, had the joint coordination of Rosário Silva, who had been collaborating on the book “Oh mother, give us bread!”. The book seeks to show concrete Guimarães through stories of those who lived and still lives the reality of migration, presenting pathways and situations experienced by those who launched themselves, across borders, in search of a new life. The role is, thus, given to the reports in the first person. They constitute, thus, the core of this work narratives of those who left and who came to the area of Guimarães.
On Thursday, July 11, the book was launched and the presentation was made by Prof. João Teixeira Lopes. The session was held in the foyer (external area, reserved to cocktails, launches, small exhibitions) of the small Auditorium of the Cultural Center Vila Flor de Guimarães, at 18h30, contrary to what was previously scheduled (in the forum of Railway Station of Guimarães).
In Guimarães, the diversity of cultures is a reality and an invaluable patrimony, that deserves to be preserved and brought to the attention, the human movements that have occurred here continuously have made an important contribution to this reality.
Synopsis of The whole world is everyone’s
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire said: “By founding in love, humility, faith in man, the dialogue becomes a horizontal relationship, in which the confidence of a pole on the other is an obvious consequence. It would be a contradiction if, loving, humble and full of faith, the dialogue did not cause this eliminate confidence among its individuals” (1987, p.46). More than publishing academic studies, this collection, through testimonies, presents a non-academic, but human vision, on the lives of people and on the problems of the region.
Regarding the collection of memories, knowledge, events, joys and sufferings that have marked and still do its history, this horizontal relationship pointed dialogue, surpassing the arrogant and restrictive relationship that separates and compares the researched and the researcher in the plastered productions of official science, means the contribution of a set as an authentic and true effort and, above all, respectful, appreciation of existing cultural and historical roots in the context of the citizens of Guimarães.
For over a year, the team led by Luíza Cortesão analyzed the vimaranense cultural riches, treating the publication of the works as an opportunity for the community to enjoy a more complete reading of its own reality by having and seeing themselves as agents of this auto-investigation. Paulo Freire argued insistently that the effectiveness of a coherent educative practice needed to endeavor to unveil the semantics and syntax of the culture of the popular classes with which one finds. The Paulo Freire Institute Portugal, the University of Porto and the Center for Resource Paulo Freire established themselves as a target for the collection an exercise fascicle in 05 steps of reading the world from the syntax, elected forms, and semantic, the elected contents, of its natives. And the best: being these natives of inside, the descendants of Vímara Peres, or outside, as in the last book, dedicated to migrants.
For further information, the contacts are: IPFPortugal@fpce.up.pt e www.ipfp.pt.
