Forest as Cosmopolis

Florestania is a neologism that brings together the concept of citizenship and forest rights created by the rubber tapper social movement in the 1980s, led by Brazilian union organizer and activist Chico Mendes. In his essay In The Forest Ruins, author, educator and curator Paulo Tavares returns to  the work of Débora Danowiski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro to question the idea of “environment” in the western cultural imagination replacing with what the peoples of Amazonia consider “a society of societies, an international arena, a cosmopoliteia.” Danowiski and Viveiros de Castro argue that such a conception of the forest as a cosmopolis implies that every being that inhabits the forest—rivers, trees, jaguars, peoples—are “citizens”; agents or subjects within an enlarged political arena to whom even rights ought to be granted.  According to Tavares, the forest is a product of long-term and complex interactions between human collectives, environmental forces, and the agency of other species, themselves actors in the historical process of “designing the forest.” 

What does an idea of Amazonia not shaped by the Western and colonial project of pristine and undomesticated nature, a pre-civilizational space, can teach TD ‘designers’? Tavares says Amazonia tells a different, dissident story [about designing] suggesting an image of Design that is less about planning and more about planting the planet. For him, we also need to imagine a different myth of the foundation of the city as the primordial space of the political, where the original design-act does not rest on clearing the forest but rather on the continued practice of its cultivation”. Wellington Cançado, who teaches and writes about urban metamorphoses and indigenous cinemas, building on the work of the anthropologist Tim Ingold, claims that a potential forest exists under the pavement of each city, ​​as if city dwellers simply skimmed the surface of the world previously constructed for this purpose, rather than contribute with their steps to its formation.