On November 29, 2025, the Faculty of Education at Unicamp (FE-Unicamp) promoted an immersive cultural itinerary in the city of São Paulo in celebration of Black Awareness Month, bringing together members of the FE-Unicamp internal community and students from different Unicamp courses. Throughout a full day of activities, the group visited leading cultural institutions and participated in artistic mediations and experiences that articulated memory, territory, body, and anti-racist struggle.
The initiative aimed to promote critical education and awareness of Afro-Brazilian, peripheral, and indigenous cultures, exploring the memory, resistance, and artistic productions of Black people in different spaces of the city. The proposal is aligned with the core values of the Faculty of Education, strengthening the commitment to diversity, inclusion, and the expansion of the cultural repertoire of future teachers.
The itinerary began at the Banco do Brasil Cultural Center (CCBB-SP) and continued to the Favela Museum, where the group visited the exhibitions “Poetic Flow – Sérgio Vaz: Poet of the Periphery” and “About Experiences,” as well as the exhibition “Radical Imagination: 100 Years of Frantz Fanon.” The visits highlighted the multiple narratives produced by artists and collectives from the periphery, addressing both the impacts of inequalities and the creative power of popular territories.
For Paulo Henrique, a student in the Integrated Chemistry and Physics degree program and a member of the Arvoredo Negro collective at Unicamp, the experience reinforced the role of museums as spaces for contesting narratives: “I think it’s important that we can move around in all environments of culture, archives, and memory. The museum is a place of memory, and access to memory is extremely important, especially for racialized people. It is fundamental to know that our memories from the favela are also important memories, a wisdom that needs to be explored and disseminated.”
After lunch in downtown São Paulo, the group went to the Emanoel Araújo Afro-Brazilian Museum in Ibirapuera Park, where they participated in a guided tour of the collection and the exhibitions “Collection in Perspective”, “Popular, Populares”, “Mulika” (Maisha Maene) and “How the Earth Breathes”, by Isa do Rosário. The guided tours discussed ancestry, popular art, spirituality, territory and African diasporas, bridging theory and sensory experience.
Larissa, a Pedagogy student at FE-Unicamp, highlighted how the experience directly relates to her teacher training: “For me, the most important thing in pedagogy is critical thinking about the work and what is being built. These experiences are as formative, or even more so, than a class. They help to connect theory and practice and broaden the teacher's repertoire, because training also takes place outside the classroom, through circulation in cultural spaces.”
She also emphasized the institutional responsibility of creating opportunities like this: “In an optional event, participation is voluntary and optional. Therefore, it is important that experiences like this are integrated into the disciplines. Unicamp, as a university that aims to offer an excellent education, needs to ensure that students have access to this type of experience.”
For Joyce, a dance student, the immersion highlighted the central role of the body in Afro-Brazilian and peripheral poetics: “When discussing Afro-Brazilian culture, dance was very present in all the spaces we visited. At the Favela Museum, the images of daily life – sweaty people dancing on the ground, on motorcycles – brought a real body, a real experience of the people. This changed my view of the favela: without romanticizing precariousness, but also revealing leisure, love, and diversity.” She summarizes the day as an integrated artistic experience: “I would consider this entire day as one great piece of art. Art, when contextualized with history, science, and criticism, transforms our view of the world.”
Experiences of reinterpreting Blackness also emerged strongly in the testimonies. Gabrielli, a Social Sciences student, recounted how the script helps build positive references about racial identity: “We are educated, from a young age, with many negative aspects linked to the racial experience. Having contact with positive experiences of Blackness allows you to see beyond the suffering, it humanizes you. You begin to give other meanings to the experience, not just the pain.”
Isabel, who is studying for a degree in Social Sciences, emphasized the importance of cultural mediation as an educational practice: “I see the people who mediated the exhibitions as educators. It would be a different visit if we simply arrived and just looked at the works. Mediation creates a thread, opens space for conversation, and helps us understand the works in the context in which they were produced and exhibited. This greatly inspires my future practice as an educator.” She also highlighted the impact of the exhibition “Radical Imagination: 100 Years of Frantz Fanon”: “It was very interesting to see Fanon's thinking, which I knew from books, reinterpreted through art. The exhibition shows how art and science can walk together. Often art is at the forefront, driving the debate, and we follow suit.”
The day concluded with the performance “Songs of the Black People,” held on the marquee of the Afro-Brazilian Museum by trumpeter, composer, and arranger Luan Charles and his band. The show traced a path through the socio-political history of the Black African diaspora in Brazil, using music as a tool for reflection, denunciation, and demands against structural racism. For the participants, the performance reinforced the idea that there is no rigid separation between art, politics, and knowledge – everything blends together in the construction of other ways of existing and educating.
Throughout the entire process, one of the points most highlighted by the students was precisely the role of the museum mediators, who were able to weave together history, art, science, and life experience. According to their testimonies, this formative dimension makes the activity go beyond the punctual nature of a visit and has the potential to resonate in professional practice, in subjectivity, and in how each participant perceives themselves in the world.
The immersive cultural itinerary was an initiative of the Institutional Communication, the Diversity and Inclusion Committee, and the Faculty of Education Directorate of Unicamp, with support from the Me Leva Dcult Grant, the Directorate of Culture (Dcult), and the Pro-Rectorate for Extension, Sports and Culture (PROEC) of Unicamp.
