The contributions that make up this book are quite different from each other. There are articles, essays, a report, testimonies, a poem and photo essays. The tone is sometimes formal, sometimes the opposite. They range from the most academic to the most objective ones. There are also essential texts by representatives of the native peoples, a strong breeze through the woods of reading, with non-Western, non-Cartesian points of view.
But there is a lot in common between these works. The so-called green turning point spreads through all of them, all with immense tones, as well as deep interest for indigenous and quilombola wisdom, and the collective, decentralized spirit. One way or another, each of the contributors to this book search through the forest for solutions to the clamorous malaise of our civilization.
And they do find solutions. Whether in indigenous literature, as shown by Julie Dorrico, of the Macuxi people, or in Tukano mythology, as João Paulo Lima Barreto tells us with magical diction, or in the fiction of Clarice Lispector, one of the authors who deal with the green universe, in a thriving analysis by Evando Nascimento.
Ana Martins Marques inhabits the book with an instigating unpublished poem, a reminder of how knowledge literally emerges from the forest. Hermano Vianna, with his multifaceted intelligence, unites poetic anthropophagy with the new green philosophy, and Pedro Meira Monteiro elegantly summarizes the discoveries about the awareness of plants in recent years. Mateus Campos goes to the former slave community Campinho Quilombo and reveals the communion between a jongo group and a rap group, a crossword puzzle of lasting tradition and modernity.
Paraty and its exchange layers also populate the essay by Mauro Munhoz, Flip artistic director, who goes back in the past to propose a possible future, inspired by the concept of the open city and the forest’s collective and decentralized collaboration.
Finally, two photo essays on major characters of the green turning point movement. Anna Dantes spoke with indigenous leader, filmmaker and storyteller Carlos Papá, and revealed a moment of epiphany during the conversation. Photographer Gabriela Portilho, with her essay, got to know Zé Ferreira’s agroforest, in Paraty, and left with breathtaking images and writings by the grower himself.
Diverse and equal: leaves that shine on the pages of this forest that once was.