Magic Eye – Audiovisual Educommunication in Mobile Media

The collective fosters new forms of social mobilization through educational activities, using communication tools easily accessible. The group aims to share technical/political knowledge, especially with peripheral youths, providing the individuals historically silenced with the record and audiovisual broadcast of collective memories and popular claims in Ceará.

The Magic Eye is composed of young militants for the democratization of communication committed to social activism against human rights violations. Moved by a common worldview and a desire to contribute to popular mobilizations, it has participated in social movements and NGOs with whom it has developed actions of popular education through the use of specific technical knowledge from the field of alternative communication and audiovisual, hardly accessed by youths from the suburbs.

The members of the Magic Eye have already trained dozens of young people through the foundation of audiovisual production centers in neighborhoods in Fortaleza like Serviluz, Trilhos and Ancuri. They have also contributed to the establishment of community-based radio stations linked to the MST(1), as well as participated in the project ‘School of Media’ and the Young Filmmakers in Audiovisual Festivals.

Context

Even with a housing deficit of 277,000 households and poor basic sanitation and health systems, the state government of Ceará and the capital’s City Hall plan to invest about 560 millions to receive a maximum of four games of the 2014 World Cup. The money will be spent on works of roads duplication and the construction of a VLT (light rail transit) that will privilege the connection between the hotel industry and the football stadium.

Using the World Cup as a justification, deep “social cleansing” will be carried out since popular sectors, mainly communities consisting of urban occupations, will be forcibly evicted to border regions without basic infrastructure, access to transportation, child care etc. The evictions will affect, according to official figures, 3,500 families, a number that gets to be duplicated according to social movements. The Magic Eye group is part of the People’s World Cup Committee, which has worked on strategies of resistance and publicization of human rights violations in this context.

The Project

The group’s goal is to guide 60 young people from Fortaleza to produce documentaries to disseminate and strengthen the fight for rights to land and housing. Videos’ production/distribution centers will be set up in partnership with NGOs and residents’ associations which work in the communities of Aldacir Barbosa, Trilhos and Barroso, threatened with eviction due to the works related to the 2014 World Cup.

The collective aims to mobilize youth for resistance to evictions, training them to produce videos that will disseminate the social segregation in progress. It also wants to valorize stories and collective memories and raise awareness of producers and other residents. Preparatory meetings followed by the establishment of video production centers and workshops with mobile media, like cell phones and cameras, will allow the continuity of actions after the completion of the project. The screening of the productions will promote discussions on the topic.

In addition to the 60 young participants of the project, the actions will reach 7,000 families that can be subjected to forced evictions.

(1) N.T.: ‘MST’ stands for ‘Landless Rural Worker’s Movement’ (‘Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra’).