CAPS ITAIM

The partnership between Caps Itaim Bibi and Educativo MCB started in 2012

In 2012, starting from the possible relationships between art, education and mental health, the Educativo MCB team starts a partnership with Caps Itaim Bibi through a dynamic of workshops, meetings and collective experiments.

Over the years, the project gains body and strength; indicates the need to intensify the frequency of meetings; the actions start to take place also in the city’s public spaces and not just inside Caps and MCB, and the group begins to recognize itself as an artistic collective.

Actions thus accumulate and point to next directions. Each part of this great work, which adds elements of art, performance and urban action in an anti-asylum perspective, point to the possibility of each subject becoming an agent of their own history, making the struggle for life and freedom a collective, educational act, inventive and poetic.

In 2018, under the guidance of educators Beth Ziani and Flavia Mielnik, Coletivo Cazumbá was created, a group of artistic and performance actions mobilized by the Anti-Asylum Fight and the affirmation of Human Rights. The works of Coletivo Cazumbá do not have a single language, nor a single direction. Creative processes often start with an open proposal, accompanied by some material. “Carrying out an urban route with cloth and crayons”, for example. On the way, things happen, and the fabric impregnated with fleeting becomes a vestige of where we go and what we look at, a clue to that wide field of events, something we return to later, adding new inscriptions, other threads. Actions thus accumulate and point us in the next directions. Each part of this great work – an engraved texture, a drawing, an embroidery, a question, a sound – carries the whole and tells our story in a free and non-linear way.

Cazumbá Collective Processes:

Caps Itaim 10th Anniversary Celebration:

In 2020 and 2021, under the guidance of educators Flavia Mielnik and Mariana Serri, given the impossibility of holding face-to-face meetings during the Covid-19 Pandemic, we spent a long period investigating ways to support the work with professionals and users of Caps Itaim Bibi . We found ourselves inside a labyrinth and being lost, with more doubts than certainties, we proposed the joint elaboration of questions about what we were and are living in this pandemic context:

What is this barrier?
What maze is this?
How to fly over the maze?
What sounds imprison us?
What sounds set us free?
How to make the invisible visible?
How to make our gardens visible?
How to cultivate our gardens?
A maze that is a garden!
I never saw myself or found myself!
I am my own landscape, I watch my passage.
Life is made up of phases. Either you do it or you don’t.
Take everyone’s hand and go like that, under a tunnel.
The Syriema is a protective bird.

Questions that led us to words: Labyrinth; Garden; Head; Sound; Wing; Door. Words that lead us to a series of visual and sound narratives, which bring together statements, images, musical themes and literary references, shaping situations that pulse in the daily lives of professionals and users of Caps Itaim. They are poetic acts, they are life jackets, they are attempts to capture the invisible that cross our routine, it is assuming that we are lost in the labyrinth but we continue in search of our gardens.

Part of this investigation is systematized and posted on Educativo MCB’s Instagram.

Maze: https://www.instagram.com/p/CI86XttgNKC/

Garden: https://www.instagram.com/p/CKoXLDWHL2I/

Head: https://www.instagram.com/p/CMC91EIA75-/

Sound: https://www.instagram.com/p/COvipUjn55V/

Fight: https://www.instagram.com/p/CPA_YduLPUm/

Wing: https://www.instagram.com/p/CRPaMC8Hl2v/

Below, we present some images of our process during these years of work: the Bonecão Cazumbá, a living sculpture built from the body of everyone and by everyone, guardian that gave the collective its name; the signs Almenajens and Jardins head at the exits of the Coletivo in the demonstrations that mark the day of the Anti-Asylum Fight; the actions that take place in public spaces in São Paulo and the investigations that pulse in the daily life of Caps Itaim.