It is 3pm, and one of the greatest Brazilian photographers of all time is reaching out to me asking for help. I am ready for the challenge. Sebastião Salgado is looking for a way to fix the audio in his presentation. He had a viewing booked for 4pm, when he would present his new exhibition called “Amazonas”: a pressing issue back in October 2019, period in which the Amazon forest started being devastated by insanely large fires.
The verdict: I managed to help him with the sounds, and ended up having a meaningful, exclusive, one-hour conversation with one of my role models in art and activism. Only to end up watching the entire exhibition movie with an epicly loud soundtrack right next to the man himself, with the .mov file being played right from my laptop.
That’s what trust feels like. He had only met me, and yet he had trusted me with the rawest, highest resolution version of his entire unreleased collection. And that’s probably one of the greatest feelings of interning at MOTI in late 2019.
This moment manifested what I believe to be the purest manifestation of a calling: a community of like-minded people gathering for one single cause: to treat the planet well. Many other moments like such have manifested during the making of our conference called FORMS, in which we invited museum leaders from all over the world to co-create narratives and strategies to tackle the problem of lacking sustainability knowledge in the general public.
I could describe my individual tasks, my individual position and achievements within my role, but what happened here was different than anything else I have ever experienced. It was suddenly not about me, not about my career. It was about building a community, building trust and care for each other, as well as for the environment. Because, at the end of the day, we can not get anywhere by ourselves. Individual efforts might seem meaningful to some, but show to have extremely low impacts.
That is because, as I believe, we have been called to act together. Gigantic challenges such as climate change exist only for one reason: so that we can align ourselves, find agreement in disagreement, love in differences, truth in errors, hope in despair, light in darkness. And suddenly, there is no me and you. There is only human. Species. A sensitive one. A loving one. A meaningful one.
What can be achieved through science is only possible through the red. The red, as I call this tingling sensation in one’s chest. This willingness to reach to something greater than us, the willingness to rid the world of all unnecessary suffering. The willingness… to love, and share a cake