On 24th September, the Shameless! Festival of Activism Against Sexual Violence will take place in its second year in Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro. Called Ecoar! the one-day festival will be created and presented by Redes da Maré, in partnership with SHaME and the WOW Foundation. This will be a space for education & health professionals, social assistance, researchers, and artists, to bring together academic research, art and activism in confronting and changing attitudes to sexual violence.
Shameless! represents an ongoing collaboration between The Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters Project (SHaME) and The WOW Foundation. Ecoar! is inspired by last year’s Shameless! London, which took place in November at the Battersea Arts Centre, with a diverse programme of high profile talks by survivors, researchers and medical professionals, alongside performances by artists, poets and musicians, as well as interactive, hands-on workshops, ‘how to’ clinics and wellness spaces.
The main aim of Shameless! is to create a platform for people to come together to share their professional expertise and lived experience in a collective effort to confront and dismantle the shame and stigma that are often attached to experiences of sexual violence. The festival seeks to challenge stigma and silencing, to empower survivors in their healing, and to press for urgent changes to professional practice and policy in identifying, prosecuting, and treating the aftermaths of abuse. One of the key priorities of Shameless! is to create a space for people who might not otherwise encounter each other’s work to share perspectives and build ongoing collaborations.
This year’s event is curated and produced by Redes da Maré, an organisation working in the 16 Maré favelas in Rio de Janeiro to ensure effective public policies that improve the lives of their 140,000 residents. Their projects emphasise ‘the social role of citizens, their collective actions and the respect for differences and diversity, as well as the criticism of social inequalities currently existing in the country and in Rio de Janeiro.’ Read more about the organisation and their work in Brazil here.
If you want to learn more about the Shameless! project, you can catch up with talks and panels from the London festival on YouTube here, listen to our ‘voices from the festival‘, or read our other Shameless! blog posts.
Updates on Ecoar! will be posted to our Twitter and blog and more information can be found on the Redes da Maré website in Portugese here.
