semente Lab is our space of experimentation and reflection. In this page you’ll find our research notes, thought experiments, musings and fast-paced reporting.
See also the wiki pages about semente (in Portuguese), and this repository with documentation of its development.
On a Saturday of perfect tropical summer weather, semente returned to Instituto Neos, on the northern coast of Ubatuba, in Brazil. As a sort of meta-spiral, we were starting another turn of semente’s own cycle of seeding, tending and regenerating itself. After all, semente was created in partnership with Neos, and its first drafts were refined on workshops during Tropixel Sementes 2022, on that very place. Having gone through some years of occasional development - especially having just finished our residency with GAIATO -, we had quite fresh ideas to put to test. We invited people interested on potential projects of science, culture, society and future to join us for an exploratory session, using the name ubatuba.cc. That name and URL were never associated with a particular project, except for a wiki website that I used in the past to organise and document many projects and initiatives. The idea for the day was to see whether semente could be used to visualise potential cooperation between people, collectives and organisations that were not yet collaborating. ...
For two weeks in February, the semente team was in a residency in Ubatuba, where the Brazilian coast is crossed by the Tropic of Capricorn. During the period, we were able to significantly evolve a streamlined version of the semente method, put it to test, and collect feedback. The residency was hosted by GAIATO, a nonprofit located in Ipiranguinha, a neighborhood with one of the highest rates of social vulnerability in Ubatuba. Active since the late nineties, GAIATO is deeply commited to the surrounding community, particularly working with children and teenagers. The organisation is responsible for the Social Service for Coexistence and Strengthening of Bonds in the neighbourhood. GAIATO is recognized for its work in promoting local art and culture, income generation, solidarity economy, and youth protagonism. ...
Some weeks ago, I used my current working version of semente for an initial conversation / brainstorming session about a new project with fellow members of GIG. I was glad to have two participants with a long experience on collaborative settings and community projects. That admittedly made me spend more time promoting a meta-discussion about shapes of project-making than properly shaping the new project. Though very fruitful in that context, I realised such an introduction would be too long for the current purposes of making semente leaner and more flexible. So as not to lose the reflection, though, I made a video with the full presentation of that part - a sort of critical conceptual exploration of spiral- vs. straight-arrow-shaped projects. As usual, the video is available from the Internet Archive and Youtube (watch it below). ...
Going further on developing semente, we are now experimenting with different shapes for the canvas, as well as more consistent views of community dynamics. We expect to have new developments to show in the coming months. Open processual documentation is being published to this GitHub repository. As any good Lab, though, live documentation of experimental processes is arguably too messy to navigate for those not involved in the processes. Parts of it make it to public posts like this one on communities and to a wiki page (in Portuguese). But we also have meeting notes, sketches, design boards, videos in Portuguese and other elements, most of which won’t likely be incorporated at the end of the process. ...
True to its roots on decades of experience with collaborative initiatives, semente is fundamentally focused on communities. We do acknowledge, however, the ambiguity of that word. Communities can, after all, be considered places of safety as much as sites of homogeneity and constraint. Inclusion and care, as well as exclusion and prejudice. Of course, there is no precise and universal definition of what communities are. To clarify its meaning to us, we share some practice-based reflections. ...
Felipe (semente) and Ed King (University of Bristol) were invited by the Knowle West Media Centre to participate in the first of a new series of events. It was titled “What if…? Seeds of Tomorrow Growing Today”. Knowle West is a media centre with a long history of community-oriented projects. The event was “a collective exploration of community tech plus arts. A place to grow connections and be inspired by the seeds of possible tomorrows happening today.” ...