A Escola da Mata Atlântica: agroecologia e cultura livre na Casa das Sementes Livres, Aldeia Velha, Silva Jardim, RJ

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of the collective School of the Atlantic (EMA) House Seed Free, experience that combines actions in agroecology and free culture since 2007 in Aldeia Velha, Rural District Silva Jardim, Baixadas Litorâneas the municipality of Rio de Janeiro. The House Seeds Free is an initiative of the group EMA, which develops activities in education and popular culture and worked as a possibility to work in the field for young people from different academic backgrounds, contributing to a process of urban exodus.This study investigates the perceptions and motivations of this group found the EMA and subsequently to undertake the construction of the House Seed Free, conceived as a place to do the dialogue of knowledge arising from information technology and agriculture. For this, the research focuses on the history and the theoretical and practical initiative, which both come from the area of digital culture, as agroecology and their specific struggles for the dissemination of free software and native seeds. The case study examines the synergy generated between the fields of agroecology and free culture at flowering and maintenance of the project. There are also special interest in the relationship between the House and the public school Vila Silva Jardim, ground works where its headquarters and where most of its activities are directed, involving students, teachers and cooks in favor of a contextual education. Seeking to define and characterize the magma cultural enabled the formation of the house and its link with social movements and wider networks of contestation of the current economic model, the research sets the experience within a model subalternia, connected to matters of a local-global as the change of the paradigm of modern industrial society for alternative models founded on diversity. Are also taken into account the internal and external complexities that are contributing to the formation of group identity there, including its organizational structure, division of labor and decision - making processes. In this perspective, the research demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of the House of Free Seeds, which seeks to strengthen their autonomy dealing with cases of permanent tension between funding sources and self-management in an environment of limited opportunities to resource for small groups, especially in the area of formed by young and agroecology. These issues are demonstrated in different socio-political settings that the group went through since its creation as informal project, through its institutionalization as a cultural association to the days when searching the definition of " collective" its critical position in the world.