In partnership with the research group NEPAC (Nucleus for Research in Participation, Social Movements and Collective Action), from Unicamp, public manifestos written by different sectors of civil society in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic were collected. Public manifests are documents collectively constructed and signed, which express and publicize the official position of a group of subjects in relation to a certain theme or issue. In this way, notes, reports, letters of repudiation, campaigns and other documents were collected, which expressed disagreement with the directions of policies to face the pandemic and its social and economic consequences and, in many cases, also suggested alternatives. The criteria used in the selection of documents were: 1. “National” or “regional” documents (texts produced at the state, municipal or community/neighborhood levels, as well as texts produced by a single regional or municipal institution were discarded); 2. Documents that are proposed or rejected aimed at State bodies or society in general. 3. Social media posts by a single individual were not included, but documents signed by collectives and/or collectively organized individuals; 4. The collection was not restricted to the most well-known social movements, initiatives were included even outside the field of social movements to perceive proximities and differences; 5. Exclusive solidarity campaigns and guidance booklets were not included. 6. Notes from physicians or specialists were discarded. The report, “Public Manifestos in Times of Covid-19”, by Ana Cláudia Teixeira and Adriana Pismel, from the NEPAC team is available here.
Children of housemaids launched the letter “For the lives of our mothers”, addressed not only to the authorities, but to the entire civil society: “when we see that our family members who are domestic workers and day laborers continue to work normally, we emphasize the emergency of complying with the stipulated quarantine by the authorities and we demand paid dismissal”.
Discover the Manifesto Letter .
In March 2021, Brazil reached the number of 300 thousand deaths caused by covid-19 and its complications. Thus, the Linhas do Rio collective had the idea of inviting other collectives of political embroiderers from different places to embroider in honor of these victims. First, an embroidered flag was made containing the names of 286 of these victims, but as more embroiderers joined the cause, they carried out more and more embroideries, in addition to the fact that the number of victims continued to grow.
The idea was to take the embroidery to public places, to give visibility and honor the memory of each of these dead. Among the collectives involved were: Linhas do Rio (Rio de Janeiro), Linhas do Horizonte (Belo Horizonte), Linhas de Sampa (São Paulo), Linhas do Mar (Caraguatatuba), Linhas de Santos (Santos), Bordaluta (Brasília), Points of Fight (Belo Horizonte) and Women of the Resistance Abroad (New York).
Linhas do Horizonte, known for being the first political embroidery collective in Brazil, proved to be politically active during the Covid-19 pandemic in several ways. One of them was from what they call pamphleteer embroidery, which consists of embroidering around the causes they defend, thus, they were present at demonstrations for the vaccine and against the policies of Jair Bolsonaro's government. Unlike simply handing out paper pamphlets, the embroiderers argue that embroidering around a cause ends up attracting greater interest from the population, because when people come across something artistic that reminds them of ancestry, a connection of affection and closeness is created, which which facilitates the establishment of dialogue and makes them more open to learning about different causes.
