RAFFAELLA FRYER-MOREIRA
FABIANA ASSIS FERNANDES
JEROME LEWIS
SUPPORTED BY THE UCL GLOBAL ENGAGEMENT FUND
The Origins of the Project
The Guarani and Kaiowá indigenous communities in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil live in a context of extreme precarity, often described as the most severe humanitarian crisis faced by indigenous people in Brazil. Recent reports confirm that these communities suffer more gender-based and sexual violence than any other indigenous group in the country. In the face of negligent government responses and the increase in domestic and gender-based violence brought by the Covid-19 pandemic, Guarani and Kaiowá women are developing their own strategies to combat this endemic issue.
The project builds on a voluntary collaboration between the Guarani & Kaiowá Women’s Council, the Institute for the Development of Art and Culture (under the presidency of Fabiana Assis Fernandes), Raffaella Fryer-Moreira and the UCL Multimedia Anthropology Lab, which took place remotely between October and November 2020. This collaboration sought to strengthen the digital communications infrastructure available to Guarani & Kaiowá women and support the Guarani & Kaiowá Women’s Council as they coordinated their annual assembly in an online format for the first time. This event sought to enable them to autonomously represent their own interests, speaking out against gender-based violence and other violations of their human rights.
Photographs by Fabiana Assis Fernandes
In making this violence visible, this project aims to support community-led efforts to monitor gender-based violence, supporting local data analysis, and the development of effective mitigation measures to combat gender inequalities and violence.
Project Aims
This project aims to create an interactive map showing the incidence and geographical distribution of violence against women in Guarani and Kaiowá indigenous communities in Brazil. This partnership seeks to support indigenous women’s strategies to combat gender inequalities by providing a digital infrastructure which allows gender-based violence to be monitored and made visible.
In making this violence visible, this project aims to support community-led efforts to monitor gender-based violence, supporting local data analysis, and the development of effective mitigation measures to combat gender inequalities and violence. Furthermore, the project will also provide key technical training for all eight Council members, enabling them to utilise and update the platform themselves. By making visible the scale and spread of violence against women, and consequently facilitating strategies for increasing social justice - the digital platform and technical training that this partnership provides will also contribute towards strengthening the community's capacity to respond to other challenges.
Through training indigenous women to archive and maintain this interactive resource and use the necessary equipment, they will acquire skills to collectively and autonomously manage an innovative form of digital infrastructure. By amplifying the voice of resilient indigenous women, this project will contribute to tackling poverty, institutional inequality and help address the daily and pervasive issues of hunger, poor water sanitation and lack of healthcare resources that indigenous communities in Brazil face.
Visit the Kuñangue Aty Guasu website
