Recycling stories: Lessons from community arts-based process and exhibition in Brazil

Introduction

It’s 10:00 in the morning, 22 June 2012 in a metropolis where rush hour is every hour. There are people everywhere rushing to get to places and being shoved into public transportation. The air traffic with its helicopters is chaotic as cars and motorcycles honk their way onto the pavement. Street venders try to sell anything they can to make a living. An audience contemplates a preacher who loudly announces: ‘Jesus is coming’. Sirens of police cars and ambulances are heard from kilometres away. Although it is not summer in this city, the heat is unbearable, the air pollution is heavy, it lacks green space. The heat accentuates the stench of garbage that has not yet been collected. A group of executive men sweating inside their suit jackets ignore a panhandler begging for food.

This could be just an ordinary day in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, except that at this moment, a van drives through the crowd onto the main public square and parks in front of City Hall. Five people alight and begin unloading art supplies. A set of 12 easels is unfolded and artworks are carefully hung on them. On the other side of the square, an old bus is parking. Its door opens and a young crowd jumps out and blasts hip–hop music. Each one grabs a can of spray paint and starts to graffiti the bus. In between two light poles, a big banner has been strung, titled in bold letters: Recycling Stories – A community created art gallery. At that moment, the chaos in that public square seems to stop, transformed now into an open air art exhibit.

In this article, we share the stories of two workers from the recycling industry (i.e. recyclers) affiliated to the National Recycling Social Movement (MNCR) in São Paulo. Through workshops, these recyclers, along with 48 others, produced artworks and curated a mobile art exhibit. Through these stories, we explore how arts-based workshops and exhibits act as spaces for environmental adult education (EAE) and how these temporary exhibits work to empower people such as the recyclers; we draw on arts-based adult education and consider how it understands the potential of using the arts and we explore these alternative exhibitions as spaces of knowledge mobilisation (KMb) and dialogic engagement.

Although recyclers contribute to overall environmental health by collecting, separating and selling materials that otherwise would end in a landfill, their work is associated with ‘dirtiness’ because they work directly with waste. This reproduces stigmatisation from the general public, leading to social and economic marginalisation and recyclers’ dis-empowerment (Gutberlet, 2011). In this context, the objective of this study was to explore the potential of using the arts and a community created art exhibit to generate dialogue between recyclers and the public around the prejudice suffered by the recyclers.

We begin this article by describing and articulating the National Recycling Social Movement (MNCR) and recycling cooperatives as EAE organisations that promote recyclers’ empowerment. In so doing, we introduce the research context and participants. We then explore the role of community created art exhibitions, primary tools used by traditional art galleries, as politico-pedagogical spaces. Following this, we present two stories that emerged during the art workshops/exhibits. These stories highlight the continuum of experiences and learning that emerged from the community created art exhibit, while offering an alternative to traditional art galleries and exhibits by inviting the viewer to question who can produce art and who has the power to exhibit them. Artworks produced in this project represented recyclers’ experiences of discrimination, harsh working conditions, and hope for a better future. Our findings showed that alternative exhibits acted as mediators of dialogue and reflection amongst participants, thus individual transformation, as well as the construction of their visual thought, a process in which, through the arts making, people make sense of their environment. Finally, our findings showed that the art-making process enables recyclers’ income generation.

Environmental adult education

One of the important theoretical lenses of this study was EAE. This theory and practice emerged from the work of the International Council for Adult Education (ICAE) in the 1990s in response to the Earth Summit that was held in Rio de Janeiro (1992) and a deficit in ecological understandings overall in the field of adult education (Clover, 1999). Twenty years later, EAE was again a focus of the Rio+20 Summit in Rio de Janeiro (2012), which aimed at poverty reduction, advancing social equity and ensuring environmental protection. Since its inception, EAE has operated as a deeply political and intentional educational process that creates opportunities to question, and render visible, hegemonic ideologies as a means to promote knowledge and action for change (e.g. Clover, de Oliveira Jayme, Hall, & Follen, 2013). It makes connections between social, cultural and ecological issues in order to render visible dominant and ‘normalised’ ideologies that bring about inequalities and injustices that cannot be truly understood in isolation. In other words, the ideological apparatus behind environmental destruction – and for this paper the stigmatisation and marginalisation of ‘recyclers’ – is exposed when it is made visible – through art – in relation to the broader socio-politico-economic and cultural contexts in which it operates. Such hegemonic ideology, then, which justifies unfair realities for those who are exploited, can be exposed pedagogically (Clover, de Oliveira Jayme, Hall, & Follen, 2013).

Challenging marginalisation requires that EAE be a participatory, collective process of learning that goes beyond individual behavioural change and transmission of scientific information but rather is an organisation that engages with the politics of environmental destruction and broad discussions about how it operates and its impact on people’s daily lives and the entire planet (Clover, 1999). Thus the process begins with people’s knowledge and experiences with recyclers and recycling as one means to create new understandings about their world(s), but it adds, as Freire and Horton (1990) suggested, new knowledge through arts-based dialogic and dialectic engagement with the complexities and contradictions of our lives. Freire also believed that new understandings and dialogue could be enhanced through the power of art and its ability to render visible these often hidden hegemonic ideologies that govern our lives. Critical to EAE since its inception has been the use of creative interventions and arts-based practices. These creative devices, used also by social movements worldwide, employ the imagination, metaphor, visuality or performance to open up the gap between ‘appearance’ and ‘reality’ to expose the structures and ideologies of ecological inequality and injustice (Clover, de Oliveira Jayme, Hall, & Follen, 2013; Milbrant, 2010).

Community art, art exhibits and KMb

In many parts of the Western world, the arts have been historically defined by European standards, and professional trained artists – that is, predominantly produced and judged by elitist, ‘white’, and masculine measures, aimed at or supported by the wealthiest and the most powerful institutions (Benjamin, 2008; Dewey, 1938). From this perspective, the arts are individualistic in both process and product, that is, ‘artist-centred’, and are largely inaccessible to marginalised communities financially, culturally and physically. When it comes to the exhibition of artworks, most are confined in Euro-centric art galleries and museums that follow specific elitist standards and categorisations that decide which art and knowledge count and which do not (Borg & Mayo, 2010). This is problematic because this elitist perspective perpetuates traditions that may not portray communities’ artistic realities, and disconnects them from history and culture. This is certainly true in Brazil where traditional art galleries, through their exhibits, perpetuate European canons of knowledge which can be disconnected from the Brazilian reality. In São Paulo, art exhibits are situated both ideologically and physically far from marginalised communities and the cost of admission to galleries can be high.

However, the second half of the 20th-century has seen the arts in a different light. Contributions from the Black art, feminist, environmental and community arts movements since the 1960s have reconnected individuals to the use of the arts to mobilise and tell new stories in favour of human rights, justice and change. These movements have challenged the elitism and standardisation of art while inviting the public to use the arts to perceive their own cultural and historical lives. Once people are culturally and historically situated, they can reimagine new realities for themselves and their communities (e.g. Clover, de Oliveira Jayme, Hall, & Follen, 2013). In this context, the arts become ‘community-centred’, collaborative and socially concerned (Clover, 2011; Raven, 1993). Adult educators call this practice arts-based adult education. While scholars note that this socially concerned arts-based practice has no specific definition, Clover et al. (2013) characterise it as ‘an imaginative, participatory aesthetic approach to individual and social transformation, and emancipation. It is about people using collective artistic processes to understand a particular social, cultural, or environmental issue’ (p. 29; see also Lawrence, 2005). Arts-based adult education has the potential to enhance transformative and emancipatory objectives of feminist and radical adult education by providing aesthetic spaces to bring about what Freire (1978) called ‘conscientização’.

Building on the above, adult educators have come to see the value of exhibitionary practices as used by art galleries, and in particular, alternative types of exhibits as means to generate and mobilise knowledge about injustices in society but also as means to empower the creators and allow them to speak out in creative ways (e.g. Clover, 2015; Styles, 2011). In other words, community art exhibits act and speak with the individual viewer, representing very different types of discourses around social and political problems as well as who has the right to create art and exhibit their works (Clover, 2011; Rothmüller, 2014), thus challenging norms by inviting people to perceive different realities for themselves and the world around them. In particular, as alluded to, public or alternative exhibitions are understood to be a powerful form of KMb, defined by Bennet and Bennet (2007) as a complex, inclusive process of collaboration where all partners are considered equal and where output reflects community voice and contributes to meaningful change in concerned communities. For Cole and McIntyre (2003), the arts, when shared in public, are powerful because of their innate ability ‘to evoke relational, emotional, cultural, social, and political complexities [as knowledge]’ (p. 18). Frequently in community arts-based pedagogical processes, professional artists work collaboratively with community partners in grassroots settings to create both the art as well as curate the exhibition. These alternative forms of exhibitionary practice are not only more accessible to a wider public, but create, as noted above, a space for dialogue that can engage an ‘audience in meaning making and knowledge construction [and mobilisation]’ (Cole & McIntyre, 2003, pp. 60–61). The more stimulating or engaging this process, the more likely it is to have a holistic and deeply felt personal or social impact (Clover, 2011). Further, scholars such as Styles (2011) argue that the type of knowledge co-creation and mobilisation that unfolds through dialogue around and through exhibition setting is, in fact, dialogical learning. In Freirian dialectical pedagogy, dialogical learning is the core of people’s liberation and emancipation because it helps people to critically think about the cultural, historical and social positions they take upon in their world(s).

Brazilian Recycling cooperatives and the National Recycling Social Movement (MNCR): EAE organisations

Along with Earth Summit and Rio+20 conference in 1992 and 2012 respectively, in Brazil, EAE has been strengthened over the decades by capacity-building projects, community meetings and engagement, as well as research with NGOs and social movements (Baeder, 2009). Such initiatives have created pedagogical openings for sharing experiences, public dialogue and KMb. Like all EAE, in Brazil it is predicated upon the ideas of ‘conscientização’ (Freire, 1978), which refers to individuals being educated and learning to recognise hegemonic social, political, cultural and economic constraints and the power of collective action to help loosen these constraints. Before one can act, one must see and understand. But environmental issues and actors, particularly people such as ‘recyclers’ have been all but invisible to the larger society and therefore ignored as both people and, we would argue, as environmentalists. Freire, however, believed ‘conscientização’ could work as a ‘truly liberating education’ (p. 35) for those who are oppressed and ignored, as well as the oppressors. EAE in Brazil is therefore about opening windows for new ideas, for individuals to be part of the process of building of their communities as visible, responsible and active subjects. That is, history is not deterministic and the future is for everyone to make. This belief in the power of EAE across sectors forms the foundation of the National Recycling Social Movement (MNCR) and recycling cooperatives. These two EAE and advocacy organisations work most closely with recyclers to challenge power structures that are non-democratic and empower recyclers as actors on the stage of Brazil (Gonçalves, 2005).

The MNCR works along with the recycling cooperatives. Through capacity building initiatives, the members improve recyclers’ working conditions and increase environmental education in different districts from the metropolitan region of São Paulo. The MNCR is one of the largest social movements in Brazil with approximately 60,000 associated recyclers all over the country (Gutberlet, 2011). In the recycling cooperatives, the recyclers are responsible for collecting recyclable materials from the streets, separating, classifying and selling these materials. Such activity is their main source of income and the only survival strategy for thousands of impoverish families.

To overcome marginalisation suffered by recyclers, the MNCR and recycling cooperatives engage them and the general public in dialogue around social and environmental issues that affect recyclers’ livelihoods. These conversations help to create networks with government and non-governmental sections, creating inclusive solutions to recycling management and recyclers’ social inclusion (Tremblay, 2013). In addition, in the last decades, these dialogues have been mediated by community arts projects that open new spaces for KMb. We explore this in the next section, illustrating how these arts-based practices help others to recognise the importance of recyclers’ work and their strong political and leadership roles in this sector.

Arts-based research

Our research study is arts-based, that is, using art as a critical and creative means to ‘uncover or create new knowledge, highlight experiences, pose questions, or tackle problems’ (Clover, 2011, p. 13). Like feminist research, arts-based research is also about generating trust, building community, and inspiring individual and collective imagination for empowerment. Artistic approaches to research are important means to mediate communication amongst participants to help them to say things in new ways, things that might be difficult to articulate verbally (Silverman, 2000). Clover (2011) also reminds us about the importance of arts-based practices in KMb. Additionally, Clover, Stalker, and McGauley (2004) argue that the arts in community research ‘uncovers biases, power relations and ideological obfuscation that people cannot or may not even want to see’ (p. 282). What this means is that at the heart of arts-based research is empowerment, and this was very important to our study (Gallo, 2001; Wang & Burris, 1994). Empowerment in our arts-based research context meant creating opportunities for the recyclers to reflect critically and creatively upon the power structures and practices that perpetuate their oppression.

A question that guided the study and the art creation projects was: What does it mean to be a recycler and what are the challenges faced by recyclers? Our aim in particular was to use the stories and artwork shared by the recyclers by curating them into an alternative exhibition as a dialogic space for recyclers and the general public to talk about the work performed by recyclers, and make visible the importance of their work to the public. In other words, we wanted to attract the public’s attention to what goes on in recycler’s life, to their daily struggles working on the streets and in the recycling cooperatives with the ultimate goal of decreasing the prejudice they suffer.

Data collection and analysis strategies

All the recyclers who participated in this research were self-selected when the project was presented to them at the MNCR headquarters. Once a week, from March to September of 2012, the first author of this paper facilitated three art workshops with 50 recyclers affiliated with the MNCR. The duration of each workshop depended on their nature, location and date, ranging from one to two days. The goals of these workshops was to teach three art techniques to those interested in learning how to express themselves through an artistic form, and to create a mobile art exhibition of their works.

The first workshop taught abstract painting. Incorporating an assemblage of recyclable materials, modelling paste and acrylic paint, recyclers created unique images that illustrated their experiences working in the cooperatives. Throughout the workshop, participants were asked: ‘What does this object represent to you? Why did you decide to assemble those objects in that way? What do those images mean to you?’ These questions kept the conversation flowing and mediated recyclers’ thinking about what they were creating. The final artworks embodied their stories of poverty and oppression, but above all, stories of their fight for social inclusion. Finally, recyclers described their artworks and reflected on their creative process.

The second workshop focussed on impressionism painting. For this workshop, participants brought photographs from magazines, newspapers or personal family photo albums that they felt emotionally connected to. These images were spread onto a table, and they chose one image as reference for their artwork, explaining why they chose that specific image. Their artworks were powerful and visually voiced their stories.

The third workshop focussed on mosaics. For this workshop, each recycler received one square of canvas and painted symbols or words that responded to the overall theme ‘what it means to be a recycler and what are the challenges you face?’ Once painted, the squares were assembled together forming a unified image. Later, during the art exhibits, the recyclers reproduced the mosaic technique with gallery visitors by asking attendees to paint their impressions about the art shows.

The workshops described above were video and audio recorded and were used as our primary data source. Our secondary data source was formed by our observations recorded in our field notes. These written observations explain and/or highlight any pertinent event, conversation amongst participants, and public reactions and voices during the exhibits. These observations were written during and after the workshops and exhibits. In so doing, our memories were still ‘fresh’ about the events that had happened during the data collection. Photographs of all the artworks produced in this study are also part of our data corpus.

Although our data corpus is formed by hours of conversation amongst participants during the workshops and exhibits, we explore just two segments in this article that clearly illustrate the exhibits as mediators of individuals’ transformation and the construction of their visual thought, which enabled individual empowerment. These segments also illustrate community art exhibits representing alternative sites for income-generation for the recyclers. In other words, these two episodes were not chosen randomly. They are very important because they are the best examples of real situations that real people may find themselves immersed in when they are collaboratively engaged in arts-based adult education practices. In this light, the stories we present in the next section can inform future arts-based workshops and help us to further understand the role of community art in creating and mobilising new knowledge, thus constituting important teaching and researching tools. Additionally, they challenge the hegemonic and exclusive practices of conventional art exhibits by inviting the viewer to question who can create art and who has the power to exhibit them.

Recorded sections that illustrated the claims we make were further fully translated and transcribed. We used discourse analysis (Edwards & Potter, 1992; Roth & Alexander, 1997) as an analytical tool for interpreting the transcripts. Discourse analysis is the study of language in use, in the sense that language, in the same manner of EAE and arts-based adult education, cannot be understood apart from the context in which it is used, thus the researcher must be able to understand the context in which discourses are performed.

Over 100 paintings were created in this project. Participants chose one of their paintings to be part of the mobile art exhibit. Choosing the artworks was a very personal process. We, the researchers, did not establish any criteria for the curatorship so as to avoid competition in terms of the aesthetics of their work. This also helped us to avoid forcing participants to share in public stories they did not feel comfortable sharing. For instance, one of the participants chose a painting that responded to his community needs over a painting that reflected his past struggle with drug addiction, simply because he did not feel comfortable in sharing this second story in public. Fifty paintings representing 50 participants composed the exhibit titled Recycling Stories. Next, we explore these art shows through two stories that emerged during the workshops and exhibit. These stories illustrate what can be learned from this arts-based research engagement experience.

Recycling Stories – What it means to be a recycler?

Seven art exhibits were set up outside the boundaries of traditional art galleries and institution and travelled to three cities: São Paulo (one public library, two City Halls in two municipalities, one public square, and one public elementary school); Rio de Janeiro (one exhibit during Rio + 20 Conference); Londrina (one exhibit during the MNCR Conference). At the exhibits, the paintings were hung onto easels or carefully laid on the floor, enabling visitors to mingle amongst them. A mosaic-making station was set up on the side with paint and brushes so visitors could visually express their impressions about the artworks. At least one recycler was present during the exhibit to engage visitors in conversation around the themes presented in their paintings. The recyclers also facilitated mosaic workshops during the art shows. In total, seven mosaics were created representing the seven cities visited by the exhibits. Music, food and performers contributed in making the Recycling Stories a lively space.

During the art exhibits, visitors were able to interact with the recyclers in person. Most of the conversation regarded the politics around recyclers’ work. From these dialogues, new recycling networks for cooperation were established and many stories emerged. In the next section, we present two of these stories to illustrate the numerous potential of community-created art exhibits as spaces of dialogical learning and income-generation for marginalised communities.

Story 1: Community art exhibits mediating people’s transformation and construction of visual thought

In this first story, we introduce Luzia, a 55-year old recycler associated with the MNCR. According to Luzia, the MNCR, through capacity building initiatives, empowers her to be a strong and active community leader as well as a skilful environmental agent because she helps this social movement to organise community events and promote environmental education programmes in the city.

The following episode unfolded upon Luzia’s return from the cities of Rio de Janeiro and Londrina in Brazil, where she participated at the Rio + 20 and the MNCR conferences respectively. At these events, Luzia hosted the Recycling Stories and facilitated mosaic workshops with visitors. This is how she began:

Today, I perceive that there are different ways of seeing things. My views have expanded after we went to Rio + 20 and to Londrina. It was cool. Now, let’s create our mosaic, I said. And then we called everybody to paint. So, we started to perceive that there are other universes that we can work together to help those who are trying to discover their own values. And that makes me feel with a more open mind.

As evident in the previous episode, the workshops and exhibits are indeed process in which, through dialogue and reflection, a person transforms, becoming a critical adult able to recognise social, political, and economic constrains and to (re)act upon these constrains. Transformative learning mediates peoples’ ‘conscientização’ and emancipation. As Scott (2001) suggests, something needs to change in order for transformation occur. More specifically, the process of transformation involves some kind of significant energy (ex)change, in which, those involved may experience the occurrence of a series of events so meaningful that old ways of thinking no longer apply (Scott, 2001). In Luzia’s episode, her engagement with gallery visitors was a tool for her transformation, because such engagement mediated her critical reflection so deeply that her point of views has changed. In Luzia’s case, the energy exchange refers to her dialogical engagement with gallery visitors enabled by the art-making process. The series of events that mediated Luzia’s transformation or what she poetically identifies as ‘perceiv[ing] other universes’ refers to her participation in those two events.

Luzia affirms that her participation in those events was impressive (‘it was cool’). Then, she revisited what she said to visitors: ‘Now, let’s create a mosaic’. Luzia has never facilitated an arts workshop before. She gained greater skill through a previous mosaic workshop in which she participated that helped her confidently offer her own workshop. The fact that Luzia facilitated the workshop on her own is evidence of her learning process about mosaic construction and how it can be used as methodology to share people’s stories, since visitors’ perceptions about the exhibit were illustrated on the mosaics. What happened cognitively with Luzia is what Brooks (2005), informed by Vygotisky (1962), identifies as visual thought, that is, the combination of meaning-making and art-making processes. In other words, visual thought refers to the process in which the individual makes sense of their surrounding through an artistic process (Brooks, 2003). The fact that Luzia was able to facilitate mosaics workshop is evidence of her visual thought construction mediated during the workshops she participated in as a learner as well as a facilitator. Additionally, Luzia’s visual thought empowered her to facilitate mosaic workshops in the future, so much so, that she participated in two conferences. For Vygotisky (1962), such visual thought awakens a higher level of human consciousness, or what Freire (1978) calls ‘conscientização’, where people can reimagine alternative realities for themselves.

Another important aspect in Luzia’s speech is how she scaffolds her sentences by describing three events that happened at the exhibits. First, she validates her participation in the conference as well as hostess of the exhibits by saying that it was cool. Second, she says she invited visitors to participate in the mosaic activity. Later, she initiates her next sentence by using the conjunction ‘so’, meaning that whatever she is going to say next is a consequence of what it was said or done before. That is, perceiving another universe happened because everybody started to paint. This is a strong evidence of how art making processes mediated, according to her, visitors’ and her own transformation, as well as how the collective art making process fostered people’s construction of new knowledge, or what Luzia calls ‘discovering their own values’. Conceptualising Luzia’s speech within a KMb framework, producing and exhibiting the mosaic collaboratively with visitors, empowered them to perceive that there are indeed other universes of possibilities to explore their own values. She does not fully articulate what those values are, but we gather that she refers to visitors’ perceptions about the work recyclers perform, since that was the theme of their artworks. Luzia concludes by stating that her experience of hosting the Recycling Stories and facilitating mosaic workshops made her feel ‘more open minded’, which is also a reassurance of how this experience has empowered her to perceive differently her surroundings.

Luzia’s story is important because it highlights three potentials of community created art exhibits. Firstly, the potential that alternative galleries have to empower participants to move out of their comfort zones by experiencing art in an authentic way, meaning they created their own artwork without previous formal art training. Secondly, since recyclers created their art and curated their art show, they had ownership of the stories they wanted to tell, not leaving it to someone else to share them, thus not taking the risk of misrepresenting these stories. Thirdly, Luzia’s story illustrates the potential of alternative exhibits in mediating individual transformation while helping visitors to construct new knowledge, through dialogue, aiming to decrease stigma around marginalised communities.

Story 2: Community created mobile art exhibit – Alternative sites for income generation

The second story comes from Selma, a 56-year old recycler and a community leader in a low-income neighbourhood. In addition to being a recycler, she is an active MNCR spokesperson. Her following discourse emerged during one of the exhibits in São Paulo when she hosted one of the Recycling Stories. Here she is talking to the public who attended the exhibition:

We didn’t think about it [public art as income]. We just thought about sustainability. I collect, separate and sell. So this has become such an absurd vicious cycle that we couldn’t see other horizons. We couldn’t imagine that our mobile art gallery could be an event that would generate income for the recyclers.

When we, the authors, designed this project collaboratively with recyclers, our intention was to explore the potential that visual arts could have in sharing their stories, with the ultimate goal of decreasing the prejudice they suffer. However, once the Recycling Stories started to travel to different communities, visitors showed interested in the artworks themselves and shared their desire to purchase some of the pieces. This was a remarkable moment for the recyclers because it added valued to their work not just as environmental agents, but also as artists. ¹ When recyclers started receiving monetary offers for their artwork, it enhanced their confidence in their art-making process, as well as in their final products. In the beginning of the project, they were unsure about producing art because they did not have previous formal art training. However, such lack of confidence shifted throughout the project as one recycler said at the end: ‘I did not know I could do this’. Most of the artworks were sold during the exhibits and the price depended on the negotiations amongst recyclers and their clients, but the average cost of each artwork was CAD$100.00. Having monetary value added to their artwork empowered them to break through what Selma refers as a vicious cycle. That is, instead of just working in the recycling cooperative, the mobile art exhibit represented an alternative site for income-generation for those recyclers interested in visually exploring their personal stories.

The fact that the recyclers received monetary reward for their artworks contributed to the debate about arts-based research that refers to the process (the act of making) and product (the resulting work) in community art. These two dimensions, drawing from Jones (1999) and Butterwick and Dawson (2006), embody different values, which was evident in our study. For instance, while the process of art making and exhibiting encompassed the construction of participants’ visual thought, invited viewers to change their values, and mediated recyclers’ transformation, the final product empowered participants to visually express themselves. Selma, in an informal conversation during one of the exhibits, kept calling herself an artist, adopting the pseudonymous ‘Selma da Vinci’, a reference to the Italian painter Leonardo da Vinci. We asked her at the end of one of the art shows what she thought about her painting and she answered: ‘I didn’t know I could do it’. From Selma’s response, we can infer that she has developed a new skill that she was not aware was possible. This is evidence of how the process and product operate in inseparable ways in the context of arts-based research.

Importance of community arts and exhibitions

An important aspect of community art and community exhibits is the way they can highlight values and ideological messages that are opposed to hegemonic standpoints and bystanders, crossing boundaries of age, gender, class and geography. A community art exhibit is what Deleuze and Guittari (1987) describe as a ‘minor’ art form. For them, the term ‘minor’ refers to arts created and exhibited by minorities or marginalised people, and is characterised by ‘deterritorialisations’, that is, art that disrupts territories once exclusively occupied by traditional art institutions. In this case, minor arts are also political. For instance, when an art exhibit takes place within marginalised communities, away from elitist areas, it indeed challenges socio-geographical spaces because, as noted above, traditional art is ‘artist-centred’ and confined in Euro-centric institutions while community art is not (Mandell, 2014). This aspect of community art was evident in this study because the Recycling Stories indeed ‘deterritorialised’ traditional art standpoints by challenging peoples’ views of who can produce art and where art can be displayed. This was accomplished because recyclers created all the artwork in this study with no professional training in arts, making art more democratic by entering into a territory once occupied by formally trained artists only. Such democracy of the arts welcomed recyclers from different backgrounds to express themselves through artistic forms. This is not to say that after the arts-based workshops all the recyclers suddenly became professional artists, but it reinforced the idea that we all have the ability and the right to produce and exhibit works of art as a form of protest, community engagement and social justice.

Additionally, due to its mobility, the Recycling Stories created alternative and effective spaces within everyday life. This was evident when our gallery disrupted a public space in front of São Paulo City Hall, gaining the attention of politicians, media and the public. At that moment, at that public square, conventional public spaces were challenged, power questioned, alternative social dynamics established, and a hopeful atmosphere was created.

Conclusions

In this study, we challenged the more traditional practices of art exhibits and formal art training as the only means to produce art. This project also reinforced the idea of community art exhibits as being spaces for dialogical learning and EAE. The Recycling Stories indeed made visible the injustice and indignity faced by recyclers while also (re)conceptualising what constitutes legitimate knowledge and art practices. With the occupation of public spaces, the recyclers confronted the public, challenged hegemonic use of the arts, and empowered the voice and stories of participants. Since the Recycling Stories was mobile, it was able to travel to unexpected places, inviting people to engage in dialogical learning about recyclers’ well-being.

Due to the playfulness of the art-making environment described in this study, safe places were created where participants felt comfortable in sharing their deepest fears, frustrations and hopes for a different reality. This impact was possible because of the arts-engaged approaches of doing qualitative research. Even though the art workshops we presented here did not require any previous art experience from participants and facilitators, these workshops still moved people out of their comfort zones and helped them to situate themselves into historical contexts and dream and fight for different realities.

We hope that these stories encourage social movement organisers to include community art and exhibits as strategic spaces of contestation and empowerment and also inspire traditional art galleries to explore ways to challenge social injustices reinforced in their own exhibits.