About the programs:

Resilience: Artistic Residency Is an immersion for research and artistic experimentation in an Atlantic Rainforest reserve, aimed at artists and curators, with the participation of scientists and rural communities. The residency offers a territorial experience which differs from urban living, via artistic creation, while creating narratives about the current rural/environmental universe by means of the Arts.

CaipiraTechLab The program works towards the strengthening of short chains of the local agrifood system and its cultural expression through mapping, courses and technological development co-designed with producers. It creates and broadens the possibilities for young country people to be able to live, work and reconnect with the countryside and be agents of change in their communities.

Innovation and Experimental Labs Are multidisciplinary spaces of collaborative prototyping aimed at developing projects with the participation of collaborators and mentors from different areas.  With a view to empowering and securing autonomy for the participants and territories, the labs offer training and give support to the proposals by means of a range of resources.

EncontrADA Feminist meetings focussed on the exchange of knowledge between different generations of feminists and their sociocultural, racial, economic, ethical and esthetic characteristics. Aimed at women, trans and non-binary people, the meeting may offer courses, training and support for projects, in addition to being a space for political awareness and micropolitical practices.

Silo School Is a crosswise line of action to our programs, inspired on popular education, which offers training and qualification in different formats, aligned with the organization’s  programs and with the issues and areas of knowledge we work with.

As a social organization, we started out in 2017, building on previous experience in collaborative community projects with lab models of civil experimentation and innovation in management, art, science and technology.

The initiative was the artist Cinthia Mendonça’s, who is the daughter and granddaughter of farmers, and who brings with her 14 years of professional experience creating Collaborative Laboratory and Artistic Residencies in Latin-American communities. Cinthia brought together artists, developers and activists to set up Silo’s associative base. Soon afterwards came the audit, advisory and administrative committees  which are currently made up of people that feel, think and make things in different areas of knowledge: the arts, science, law, communication, the economy, the environment, activism and humanitarian help.

The convergence of the association was possible due to the synergy between people that live, work, research and recognize the value of the countryside and of the environment. We know that we are not alone, that we share this world with people, animals, plants, rocks and all types of beings and entities.

Silo works in the elaboration of good questions pertinent to the issues of our time and in the creation of new visions, because, above all, it is necessary to imagine the future we want.  Silo is born of the desire to promote the movement of knowledges between the country and the city, showing that in the extreme fringes there is production of knowledge, culture and technology. Silo reflects, on the one hand, the generational experience of farmers’ children and grandchildren, country, sea, river and forest peoples who relate to new technologies. On the other, Silo reflects the experience of an urban generation that desires to be in the country. With its programs and methodologies, it wants to foster autonomy and cooperation in rural areas. Silo exists to stimulate, create, embrace and spread sociocultural development in the countryside.

When we chose the name Silo, we wanted to evoke the communal symbol present in silos as ancestral structures, manifesting their collective potential and the importance of the common good.

A silo acts as a recipient to store grains and products at the right temperature. Dug into the ground, ancient silos were round and wavelike, located either in the centre of indigenous structures called ocas, in yards, or in communal spaces that even served large populations like those of Ancient Egypt. In Brazil, the Yawalapiti people, like other alto-xinguans living off agriculture and fishing, still store cassava flour and dough in silos in the centre of ocas.

Nowadays, opposite to the ancestral form, most of these structures are vertical. In Brazil, the spread of these vertical buildings is directly linked to the superproduction of agrobusiness grains in a technological twist to the landowning and export-oriented matrix that marks our colonial history. Today, silos are - imposing - agrobusiness symbols, no longer subsistence structures, having become a means of accumulation and exploitation.

For us, the name Silo is also designed to dispute the vision of the countryside, which has been devastated by large economic and industrial structures. It is to recover, in a way, the symbol of country life, autonomy over food production and thinking. It militates for the reconnection between the countryside and nature, because the knowledge and way of life of the countryside and of the people who live in nature need to be respected, cared for and preserved. Their stories need to be told and their practices, continued.