Visibilidade

Panmela Castro
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
(Translated from Portuguese to English)

My name is Panmela Castro, I am 27 years old and I studied visual arts in the University of Rio de Janeiro. I graduated in painting and fine arts. I use graffiti as a form of cultural transformation. My work is based on my direct contact with my community’s problems and my reflections on how we can solve them. I work with ComCausa which undertakes youth organized projects and actions using contemporary arts and cultural expression. In my opinion art is the most important way to create change in our culture. I don't think that we have good people and bad ones. I just think that we have people with opportunities and other ones that just know the crime, poverty, prejudice and violence. We can use art as a way to touch people, express good values, and inspire them to make positive changes in our communities.

I think there is a lot of potential in unity because the problematic roots for all people are the same: the capitalist system. It just creates different and various problems in different places. Together we can see what the real problems in our society are and figure out what we can do to fix them. We don't have a new system to put in the place of the one we have now but together we can talk and think about these problems and unify our thinking. We need to organize groups of artists to address these issues. Each of us needs to organize in our regions, talk with people and identify what the main issues in our communities are. As artists we should be talking about how art can be used for social transformation. Once we have decided on priorities we can send leaders to bring these issues to international meetings. Every country has a lot of issues to deal with but the commonality that will bring us together is our struggle against the capitalist system.

When we come together, we need to realize that only a few people are speaking for all of us. There are a whole lot of people who don't get to speak and that's the main problem. We need to be conscious of that. When you speak you need to represent all of those people behind you. You need to be conscious that you are representing a lot of people not just yourself. It's a big problem that the youth are not participating. I have been fighting against this for a long time but many youth don't know how or don't want to participate. They'd just rather sit and wait but we have to speak for them. We need to come together and generate ideas for solutions that the youth will identify with so that we can bring those back to our communities and generate more interest in working towards change.

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