To find your way to Blooming in Rio, connect with Muda Outras Economias! A booster network that encourages cultural, educational, and socio-environmental projects, by experimenting with other economies based on joy and abundance. We are a virtual community initiated by a group of artists, teachers, cultural makers, social entrepreneurs, surfers, hackers, producers, and dreamers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. We’ve created our own non-convertible currency (MUDAs), on a blockchain platform hosted by Cambiatus, where we exchange goods, products, and services. Creating a chain of mutual collaboration and strengthening, and each transaction becomes a political act for monetary reform. Our community works through trust, care, justice, and freedom.
Muda is a social currency project that launched in December 2019 a digital platform where we allow our members to claim our currency for their socioenvironmental actions and trade it for products and services in our marketplace. It's a non-convertible currency designed to stimulate the local economy and support cultural, educational, and environmental initiatives.
For the 4th year, we celebrated our work and existence with a festival called 'Celebra Muda' in which we invite our partners and network members to celebrate life, connect with peers, expand our understanding of alternative economies, share our riches, cultivate new forms of cooperation, and renew our energy to keep moving forward. In this spirit, we are pleased to share the outcomes of the fourth edition of the Celebra MUDA Festival – Rio de Janeiro 2025.
Celebra MUDA is a collective endeavor, built through the confluence of artists, agroforesters, educators, naturopaths, social economists, surfers, and so many other people who make art and life a celebration. An encounter of arts linked to playful and festive ways of living. A political and affective act.
“To celebrate is to exist. And to exist is to resist.”
On our penultimate day of the festival, we spread across different places in Rio city to bring joy and culture to our network members.
We were honored to welcome Francisco Gomide in a double dose! The artist shared his talent with us through the Stilt-Walking Workshop and the show “Alecrim no Olho da Rua” (Rosemary in the Eye of the Street). Francisco Gomide is a percussionist, clown, puppeteer, and set designer. He has always been an excellent craftsman and a born inventor, capable of telling a thousand stories with the contraptions that come from his hands. With things he finds here and there, in the backyard of the world, he mends lamps, creates instruments, and improvises screens to project shadows in his shows.
The show “Alecrim no Olho da Rua” is inspired by Brazilian street folk culture—magical, simple, and beautiful. It brings together folk songs, juggling, magic, fire, clowning, and stilt-walking scenes. Clown Alecrim sets up his tentless circus anywhere to present his funny and affectionate performance, with his unusual costumes and his simple, clumsy, and charming antics.
On the other side of the town, our partners from Companhia Boca do Lixo, came all the way from Goiás State to bring the show Inventando Moda (Inventing Fashion) to the end-of-year cultural exhibition of friends from Instituto Educar+. The show, narrated by three clowns: Siriema, Mutamba, and Marelo, celebrated the Company's 17th anniversary and explored with lightness and humor the diversity of artistic and cultural expressions in Brazil.
The Inventando Moda show explores the fusion of circus, theater, music, and dance, creating an engaging and authentic experience. The central theme celebrates our cultural traditions through the reuse of materials, which brings a unique and sustainable identity. Amidst laughter and enchantment, the clowns reveal the beauties and challenges of a life dedicated to art. Through games and music, they take the audience on a vibrant and exciting journey, inviting complicity and interaction.
During the afternoon, at another venue, we celebrated the Book Club project — Black Women Writers, a space where reading is a ritual, an encounter, and a re-enchantment. A space created to open paths for voices that have historically been silenced, to recognize knowledge that springs from Black experience, and to celebrate literature as a gesture of freedom. We meet with the writer and creator of the Book Club project, Magna, to talk about the club, and with our colleague Zilda Chaves, a Black woman, mother and grandmother, resident of Complexo do Alemão (Ramos, RJ), member and one of the founders of Escola Dandara, created in 2017.
Zilda will be launching her second book, “A Casa das Letras” (The House of Letters), which reflects on political proposals for the self-determination of Black people in their territories, on the construction and pedagogical practice of Black themes for children and adolescents in the community, and on the challenges of maintaining a Quilombista School. The work presents fundamental theoretical and practical reflections on Pan-Africanism from a Quilombista perspective, going against the prevailing colonialist structures. “I believe that life only flows fully for everyone through an education committed to affection.”
Afterwards, it was time for more performance! Our festival presented Larissa Siqueira in REINCARNATION. With text, direction, and performance by Larissa Siqueira, Reincarnation presents itself as a unique proposal in the contemporary panorama of performing arts, where the artist exposes her traces and materials in a state of investigation.
REINCARNATION investigates the possibility of reincarnating without dying, based on our aesthetic experiences. The artist shares a personal catalog of appearances that mix works by other artists and intimate accounts, such as when she lived in a motel with her family. Between the performative and the essayistic, we reflect on the multiple lives we inhabit, inside and outside ourselves. This reversed relationship challenges the very notion of a work of art and brings the public into contact with the behind-the-scenes aspects of creation, inviting them to reflect on art not only as a final product, but as a journey, a gesture, and a memory.
It was a day of incredible attractions. We came to celebrate life with shows, discussion panels, and many activities to create the impossible and bring joy and arts to our partners' events.
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