LANDscape Brazil | Rituals for Discernment and Inseparation | School of Reparar Ed.2024[#5]

School of Reparar 2024

LANDscape Brazil Retreat-Course

Rituals for Discernment and Inseparation

Nest & Flock: the re(e)nunciation of the Irreparable

Deepening the Modus Operandi AND & embodied political-affective practices with the tools of the 2024 edition of the School of Reparar

with Fernanda Eugenio + Companion Practices - with members of the AND Collective

8 to 12 January 2025 | Fazendinha, Serra da Caneca Fina National Park, Guapimirim, Rio de Janeiro

Host: Fazendinha / Casa Amarela

Partnership: AND Lab Brasil Network / Rio de Janeiro Centre

Support: Portuguese Republic - Culture / DGArtes

THE PROPOSAL

As an immersive landscape programme, the LANDscape retreat-course unfolds as a journey of artistic-political, collective and embodied research into the ethical and communitarian tools of the Modus Operandi AND, towards the constitution of a body of implication in repairing the Irreparable. Together we will focus on:

- the new tool-concept of ‘dis-cernment’, as an operation that provides access to inseparability at the level of sensation and direct experience;

- the frequentation of the states of ‘nest’ and ‘flock’, as ways of individually and collectively gestating ‘renunciations and re-enunciations’ which, in turn, may allow for the suspension and/or micro-interruption of entrenched systemic violence and consequent subjective reorientations away from the modern, individualistic and anthropocentric illusion of the human point of view.

Bringing together different relationship interfaces - transmission-sharing in workshop mode; collaborative research-creation; somatic and relational practices in studio and with the surrounding nature; listening, accompanying and caring for matters of intimacy and coexistence - each LANDscape constitutes a unique experience, interconnected as a whole by an articulation between play and ritual, which permeates all the propositions, integrating them into a single practical and reflective (per)course, within an emergent dramaturgy of trans-form-action, (self-)reparation, re-historicisation and restoration.

Led by Fernanda Eugenio and with the support of companion practices from different members of the AND Collective at each edition, the journey begins with the small-scale AND board games, towards practices in which the body as a somatic-political aggregate becomes itself the board for care-healing games. It also includes outdoor games dedicated to researching inseparability with a more-than-human biodiversity, in the encounter with herbs and plants, lands and river waters.

The practical use of the constellation of games and conceptual-tools that make up the language, the modulation of presence and the ethics of Modus Operandi AND establish a common ground so that we can enter, together and little by little, into a more complex plane of sensitive and experiential research, at once political and affective, intimate and collective, concrete and magical, of performative-ritual modes of ex-conjuration of the systemic Irreparable.

School of Reparar's LANDscape programme takes place in retreat mode twice a year, once in Portugal and once in Brazil, in locations far from urban centres, in a proposal of immersion and focus close to nature, interspersing work in the studio and outdoors.

In Brazil, the programme takes place every January, as a synthesis and culmination of the School of Repair process from the previous year.

In January 2025, concluding the cycle of the 2024 edition of the School of Repair, our retreat course will once again take place in the Fazendinha space, in the Atlantic Forest reserve Parque Natural da Caneca Fina, in Guapimirim, in the mountainous region of Rio de Janeiro.

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GENERAL INFO & DEADLINE FOR ENROLMENT

• Total number of places with accommodation and meals (lunch and dinner): 16
• Total number of places with a full scholarship (for residents of Guapimirim; includes only the course, without accommodation and meals): 4
• Don't leave it to the last minute! For operational reasons and due to the Christmas and New Year holidays, registration closes on 20/12/2024;
• Help us ensure the viability of our retreat course by registering early. This is an artisanal event that depends entirely on registrations to make it viable and is looked after locally by a small, dedicated team. The further in advance we close the group, the lower the overall costs of accommodation and food, and the smoother the logistical organisation. Advance notice will also allow us to eventually open up more places on scholarship;
• Warning: between Christmas and New Year's, if there are still vacancies, the website will continue to receive automatic applications, but the team will be on collective holidays and will only respond to queries/questions from 06/01/2025;
• Online Content: students from School of Reparar are invited to access the AND Net online Content Space for 60 days, with a centralised collection of digital artefacts such as the web series "Survival Guide for Irreparable Times" and the Documentary "AND Lab: Re-Membering 10 Years", among videos and published articles;
• Prerequisites: none. If you have not had previous contact with the Modus Operandi AND, it is recommended to watch the aforementioned web series, in the Content Space.
• Language: the workshop will be conducted in Portuguese.

WHAT'S INCLUDED

• Accommodation in a shared chalet with kitchen and bathroom (4 to 5 participants per chalet)
• Swimming pool at Fazendinha and several natural pools at Serra da Caneca Fina Park
• Daily lunches and dinners (with vegetarian/vegan options)
• Complete 34-hour course
• 60-day access to the AND Net Content Space
• Ten Positions in the Face of the Irreparable poster
• School of Repair totebag

Attention - Not included:

• Ingredients and preparation of daily breakfasts at the expense of each participant.
• Return transport to/from Guapimirim at the expense of each participant
• Participation with a full scholarship includes only the course (without accommodation and meals)

VALUES

• EARLY REGISTRATION (until 30/11/24) - 30% DISCOUNT: R$ 1680
• FROM 30/11/24 to 20/12/24 - full price without discount: R$ 2400
• Online payment options via cards or Paypal
• Offline payment option via PIX (can be paid in installments directly with your bank, if necessary)
• Free for scholarship holders (residents of Guapimirim): excludes accommodation and meals
• Request: even if you're registering within the discount period, if you can afford to pay the full price of the course, consider doing so, as this will help us to offer more places with a bursary to those who really need it, as well as providing fairer pay for the people facilitating the course.

SCHOLARSHIPS

In all of School of Reparar's activities, we offer scholarships for 25% of places, for racialised people; disabled people and/or other dissident corporealities; LGBTQIAPN+ people; people affected by gender and/or social class inequalities; unemployed people; migrants; refugees.

In this retreat course, bursaries will be offered only to people with a profile of vulnerability living in Guapimirim, for full participation in the course (without accommodation and meals). To apply for a bursary, fill in the application form, tell us about your profile and motivation for the application and wait for us to contact you.

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THE LOCATION

Fazendinha is a refuge surrounded by beautiful waterfalls and lots of greenery, located in the Serra da Caneca Fina Natural Park in Guapimirim, in the mountainous region of Rio de Janeiro. It has a communal area with a lounge/studio, swimming pool, barbecue facilities, wood-burning cooker and fruit trees, as well as 4 chalets with private kitchen and bathroom. To see photos of the landscape and facilities, visit the link in the instagram bio @marilene22020

How to get there | Transport:

• For those arriving by car: From Rio de Janeiro, put the final destination Parque da Serra da Caneca Fina in your GPS. When you arrive at the park, the gatekeepers will give you a map and explain how to get to Fazendinha. There is no internet signal in the park, but if necessary, there is a café near the gate with wi-fi, from where you can contact us.
• For those travelling by bus: From Rio de Janeiro, take bus 196-C - Viação Reginas - Central X Guapimirim (price as quoted on the website: R$11.50). The bus leaves Central do Brasil every half hour. The journey takes an average of 2 hours. Get off at the Caneca Fina bus stop.
• Pick-up at the bus stop: the course producer will organise times to pick up participants at the bus stop. Please indicate on the registration form if you will be needing this pick-up, or contact us after you have finished registering, informing us of your expected arrival time, which must be within the time range indicated in the Schedule of Activities (between 3pm and 4pm on 8 January). If you arrive outside the pick-up time, you can travel from the bus stop to Fazendinha by taxi or Uber. If you are travelling from another city and need help finding public transport, please contact us.
• Uber: for those who prefer, there are Uber drivers who make the journey from Rio to Guapimirim or internally from the city to the park. Here are some reliable contacts: Adauto: (21) 964669121; Berg: (21) 972951313; Tiago: (21) 981734760;
• Carpooling: as a sustainable alternative, after registration closes, a carpooling board will be organised in a shared document so that interested people can arrange it independently.

FOOD

• Daily lunches and dinners are included in the course fee, cooked with local organic ingredients and with vegetarian/vegan or meat options;
• Please indicate any other dietary restrictions on the enrolment form, which we will endeavour to accommodate as far as possible, or  inform you in time so that you can bring any additional items if you need them;
• Each participant is responsible for bringing the necessary ingredients and making their own breakfast. Each chalet has an equipped kitchen for this purpose. Each participant should also bring snacks of their liking to make up a shared snack each day during the afternoon breaks;
• We suggest that each person comes travelling with the food items they will need during the retreat, before going up to Fazendinha, as there won't be time to go to the supermarket once the course has started.
• In the condominium where Fazendinha is located, there is also a kiosk that serves meals and a café with a small grocery store, but for both you will need to travel there by car.

WHAT TO BRING

• Light, comfortable clothes for the day and warm clothes for the night;
• Bathing suit, yoke, sunscreen, hat
• Trainers, slippers;
• Repellent;
• Medicines
• Breakfast items and snacks for the collective afternoon snacks, and other special food items you may need;
• Fazendinha provides bed and bath linen and a blanket. For those who feel very cold, we recommend bringing an extra blanket or sleeping bag. If you wish;
• You can also bring an extra towel, as the place is very humid and the bath towel can sometimes take a while to dry.

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+INFO ABOUT  MODUS OPERANDI AND

The Modus Operandi AND (MO_AND) is a methodology for the ethical-aesthetic, somatic-political and experiential investigation of relationships and reciprocity, based on a radical commitment to repairing (the) Irreparable, created by anthropologist and artist Fernanda Eugenio.

Mobilising a constellation of concept-tools and game-propositions, MO_AND provides a direct and experiential investigation of the mechanisms of living together, in other words, of composition practised as an ethics of position-with, through the triple exercise embedded in the portuguese word Reparar: stopping again, making the inventory-invention of what is possible each time, and repairing through the durational care-curation of relationships. By practising an embodied consciousness and ways of doing based on the circumscription of the common and the performativity of affection, which place thinking, feeling and doing on the same plane, MO_AND paves the way for the emergence of collaborative landscapes and territories of sufficiency, based on the co(m)passionate exercise of presence and reconnection with the sensitive experience of inseparability.

MO_AND offers concrete tools to foster processes of collaboration, co-learning and the negotiation of coexistence. In particular, it makes it possible to perceive behavioural patterns and relational tendencies, contributing to the development of emotional self and co-regulation skills, self-management of attention (selection, focus and coordination of stimuli), and consequent and embodied decision-making.

In the context of laboratories and workshops, the ‘board game’ interface is the one that serves as the basis for sharing, which then unfolds in different more complex exercises, on different scales, in the studio or outside, depending on the group and the duration of the meeting.

In this game there are no pre-established rules, but rather immanent rules that emerge from the game itself, in other words, from the co-positioning and co-response-ability of those taking part. Through fold-and-unfold work and direct handling of the materiality of events, it is possible to embody the issues of coexistence, sustainability, creativity, empathy/synergy, availability to difference and reciprocity.

The exercises allow participants with the most diverse interests and profiles - from any field, with or without previous contact with each other or with MO_AND - to share the same plane of enquiry, experiencing in an intimate and collective way the ethical-political and affective issues involved in the co-responsive construction of the common.

+INFO ON LANDscape Brazil's WORK ISSUES

LANDscape Brasil 2024/25 proposes that we enter the constellation of ethical-somatic-political practices of the Modus Operandi AND through the portal of its most recent conceptual tool, Dis-cern(ment), which invites us to exercise the ethical muscles of differentiating, of re-knowing the cerns/cores, in a modulation in which it is precisely access to the multiplicity of vital perspectives (between-cerns and intra-cerns) that allows us to (re)enchant and reconnect with the sensitive experience of inseparability.

This is an invitation to linger over two operations: re-knowledge - simultaneously an honouring of the ancestries that give us (an)c(h)ourage (anchoring and courage) and a firm and frank commitment to getting to know ourselves again - and re(e)nunciation - simultaneously a renunciation of the systemic illusions clustered around individual points of view and a re-enunciation of the self that unblocks access to the ‘view from the point’.

The states of Nest and Flock, which we'll visit throughout the ritual journey of the LANDscape retreat-course, are also associated with the conceptual tools Alight/Support & Flight/Enchant, and will be approached as sensitive experiences of antidote to the helplessness and disenchantment that, in the form of tiredness, exhaustion and confusion, on the one hand, and sadness, apathy and dullness, on the other, configure the symptomatic of capitalist expropriation, and produce the illusion of separation characteristic of contemporary subjectivities, reiterating the perpetuation of the Irreparable plunder.

Discontinuing the Irreparable thus involves re-membering - remembering that we are inseparable and also putting back together what has been separated, repairing the access to a wisdom of the (i)limit, much vaster than each one of us: the embodied, implicated and timeless wisdom of the Earth-Sum aggregate that connects us to the Common Fund of Life - a way of naming the Interbeing of which we are both part and whole.

Fernanda Eugenio's hypothesis associates helplessness with a curse that is both singular and collective, which produces the individual point of view and creates its verisimilitude, realising it as a symbolic and sensitive efficacy, as an unavoidable subjective reality. The efficiency of helplessness makes it impossible to feel the sufficiency of the abundance that the sensitive experience of inseparability allows us to continually access. If helplessness chases away the possibility of rest and imposes infinite mobilisation and endless discomfort, the magic of re-establishing Alight/Support involves breaking the curse that founds each individual point of view as a separate fragment, retelling one's own story in a gesture of self-repair that implies renouncing the attachment of habitual self-narratives in order to be able to re-enunciate (tell another story, re-acknowledging the inseparability of) one's own story.

POLICIES

• Cancellation: up to 20 days before the start of the activity, full refund. From 20 days before the start of the activity, no full refund. The cost of accommodation/food will be deducted from the amount already paid, and the remainder can be used as a credit for future enrolment in another AND Lab activity.
• Image capture: enrolment presupposes agreement to the collection of images during the event for the purposes of registering, documenting and publicising the research.