Unicamp, through the Directorate of Culture (DCult), linked to the Dean of Extension and Culture (ProEC), has just signed a new Cooperation Agreement with Ecospeaker, a Civil Society Organization (OSC) that has a rich audiovisual collection with around 200 films and documentaries marked by cultural diversity and environmental issues. The catalog is available for teaching, research and extension activities.
According to the deputy coordinator of DCult, professor Carolina Cantarino Rodrigues, the agreement will also allow the holding of cultural events, including the Unicamp Ecospeaker Exhibition. “We also have actions promoted by the Directorate of Culture itself, such as the Cine DCult project and its developments, such as the Cinema Room at Casa do Lago and the holding of outdoor screenings. DCult's actions related to cinema, therefore, can now count on the richness of Ecospeaker's audiovisual collection”, says the coordinator. According to Cantarino, this is not the first time that Ecospeaker has partnered with Unicamp. DCult is responsible for executing the new contract, which lasts four years.
The agreement is also not restricted to the availability of the collection on the streaming Play echospeaker. Ecospeaker offers curatorial support, through which it supports the teacher or researcher in a possible curation. “The teacher can propose an activity based on a topic they want to work on in the classroom”, says the coordinator. Based on the request, Ecospeaker offers support with suggestions within the collection for the topic and proposes a methodology. One of them is the exhibition followed by a debate.
“I already had the opportunity to use this platform in teaching activities, showing a documentary, and it worked very well”, recalls Cantarino, who sees this agreement as an important possibility of expanding horizons in the relationship with images, both in undergraduate and postgraduate studies.
Transversal culture
“Culture has a transversal character and is present in the fields of teaching, research and extension. The partnership adds up in this sense. Ecospeaker's audiovisual collection, within the scope of what is called environmental cinema, presents us with different ways of life and relationships with nature and the environment. There are, for example, different cinematography with filmmakers from different countries and cultures, in addition to films by indigenous filmmakers, in which they are not 'object-theme', but are creative subjects and producers of art, of cinema. Access to this catalogue, therefore, enables contact with different ways of producing images, with different visualities”, argues the coordinator.
For José Mateus Pereira Rodrigues, coordinator of Ecospeaker's Educational Program, the main function of the agreement is to enrich the educational process, “enhancing the training and civic awareness of each one”, both students and teachers who carry out the activities: “We want complement the class that the teacher organizes”. Ecospeaker, says Rodrigues, also has cooperation agreements with other educational institutions, such as Senac, Unesp (Universidade Estadual Paulista) and USP (University of São Paulo).
“We also aim to get closer to the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) of the UN (United Nations) 2030 Agenda, which promotes reflections, for example, on gender, water and climate issues”, says Rodrigues.
Ecospeaker holds one of the most important audiovisual exhibitions in the country, the Ecospeaker Environmental Cinema Exhibition. Its collection is predominantly made up of films that are outside the conventional cinema circuit. “A good part of them comes from cinema exhibitions promoted by Ecospeaker, another part comes from agreements with national cinema distributors. We also have other films made by Ecospeaker itself, as, since 2012, we stopped producing and started focusing on exhibitions and educational programs”, describes the coordinator of Ecospeaker's Educational Program.
To gain access to streaming, the community must register on the platform Play Echo Speaker. “It is important, in this contemporary world where we tend to be reduced to a certain regime of images from a certain culture of streaming, we have access to diversity. So, this collection and these different work possibilities, in a classroom, in a research project or in an extension action, allow us to broaden our audiovisual and cinematographic horizons. I think this is the main asset of this agreement: enabling different actions at the University for the Unicamp community, enriching and expanding our horizons, with regard to image, which is so present in our lives”, concludes Cantarino.
