Setorial Panorama of Brazilian Culture - 2011|2012

seals and oceans
lead collaborators
It was the month of March, late summer. I was invited to participate in a project that,
at first, brought me a certain nostalgia. The theme was the Brazilian culture market, which led
me to college times when a dreamy friend and I thought of electing a cultural project of a city
located in the northeastern sertão as object of our book. The project did not work and this had
been my last contact with the cultural environment in a professional way.
More than ten years passed and I found myself sitting on the sofa of a house located
in a friendly and welcoming village. The kind that looks very Paulista, who invites you to live
in a desired and distant São Paulo. I do not know if I was that obvious, but I felt like a child
listening intently to some very fascinating conversation. Beside me, a friend and work partner,
and, in front of me, two professionals who told me about their market of action, about everyday
things of each one of them and about the desire to put on paper a beautiful and ambitious
project. I was in.
I, long immersed in the world of corporate communication, found myself facing the
opportunity to fulfill old wishes of a journalist. Searching, knowing and to writing in the way
that I imagined it would be, when I decided to turn words into my income source and my way
of living. Today I can say that this project made me rescue the reasons that led me to be a
journalist.
Just as the initial idea that working with culture is cool, writing about culture is also a
thing for fine, elegant and sincere people. Just as anyone working with culture discovers that
this is just hot air, I have discovered that the cultural market is a bit more complex and less
organized than it seems from the outside. And that was even more fascinating. Talking about
good things is very good, but crossing limits is even better. And that was the proposal of this
work.
Cross the barriers of a market that has not yet been explored in terms of numbers and
statistics. This, of course, was not my part. I got the easier one, I must admit. My task was to
coordinate a team that sought to illustrate with inspiring stories and testimonials filled with
"content", the map of a market that, like "The Brazilian Culture", is rich, diverse, full of nuances,
sounds and smells.
My task was to think together and share, but more than anything, discover. I went from
the role of reader to the one of visitor of culture pages. I already knew, but I came to understand
that culture coverage goes beyond programming scripts, but that it is not restricted to critical
reviews of cultural works either. I started to miss a press that speaks less OF culture and discuss
more about The Culture.
I left the role of spectator and began to feel like as another piece of this huge patchwork.
I am still a seal* in this world, but with a breath to swim in the oceans.
Kassìa Cáricol
(*) In Portuguese, the newly undergraduate journalist, beginner in the career and inexperience is called Foca (Seal).
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