Transforming Atmospheric Authority: Experimental Embodiments in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro

我们的项目与生活在遭受高度耻辱、贫困、暴力和侵犯人权的非正式城市社区(贫民窟)的妇女合作，探索贫民窟居民在挑战和改变城市有时令人窒息的情感氛围方面所发挥的作用。该项目探索了具体化的、非代表性的创造性实践如何使痛苦的经历能够被交流、分享和创造性地转化。开发旨在培养尊严和解决孤立和疏离感的参与式研究方法，我们专注于妇女与贫民窟各种氛围的接触：有时紧张、令人窒息或可怕；往往同时充满温暖、安全和幽默。我们的研究致力于承认、肯定和放大社区妇女已经在寻求克服压力和孤立感的创造性实践，探索具体化的文化实践如何帮助妇女对她们面临的问题发展新的理解和见解，并减少参与社区领导和倡导的障碍。我们的研究实践旨在使新出现的理解能够被清楚地表达、分享，并转化为努力减少暴力、促进尊严和社区权威的实践。

Working with women living in an informal urban community ('favela') that suffers high levels of stigma, poverty, violence, and human rights abuses, our project explores the role played by favela dwellers in challenging and transforming the sometimes stifling emotional atmospheres of the city. The project explores how embodied, non-representational creative practices can enable distressing experiences to be communicated, shared, and creatively transformed. Developing participatory research methods that aim to foster dignity and tackle feelings of isolation and alienation, we focus on women's encounters with the varied atmospheres of the favela: sometimes tense, stifling, or terrifying; often, simultaneously, full of warmth, security, and humour. Working to recognise, affirm, and amplify creative practices through which women in the community are already seeking to overcome feelings of stress and isolation, our research explores how embodied cultural practices can help women develop new understandings and insights into the issues facing them, and reduce barriers to participation in community leadership and advocacy. Our research practices aim to enable emerging understandings to be articulated, shared, and translated into practices that work to reduce violence and promote dignity and community authority.