About
us
Christoph Hermann Seeger
Leutkirch im Allgäu Baden Württemberg/Germany
I grew up on a farm in the countryside, where I was always in contact with nature. I got a degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Applied Sciences in Konstanz and since then I've always worked with solar energy. I am interested in topics about sustentainability and I am a "do it yourself" kind of guy for everyday things. For the last four years I've been living in Brazil where I met many interesting people, which showed me many new perspectives of the World.
Aline Stéfanie Corrêa
Curitiba/PR - Brasil
I've always been interested in people, their trajectories and stories. The differences and inequalities made me intrigued at a young age. It was not a coincidence that I studied Social Sciences and International Relations. In the recent past years I studied for a Master's Degree in Sociology at the Fluminense Federal University in Niteroi/Rio de Janeiro. There I got in touch with many local and collective initiatives that have revolutionized the way I see the world and inspired me to start this new chapter of my life.
Foto: Lanna Lucchetti
the project
We believe stories have the power to change whoever listens to them or, if we give them a chance to, change the world. We're leaving on a bicycle journey through Latin America and we want to offer our space for engaged people we meet on our way to talk about their stories and projects.
So, we start with these proposals:
Overturning the logic of
travel reports
Latin American images are constantly reproduced by travelers, which help to create and strengthen clichés about the places they visit. By increasing the volume of their voices, considerations and experiences, they hide the local point of view (perhaps because they don't understand it). Latin America is facing a time of great changes, innovations, and local struggles. To understand this, rather than share our own impressions about people and the places we go, we want to offer our space for collective agents and local groups to talk about their experiences, respecting their experience and their place of speech.
Connecting groups
We seek to open a way for Latin American groups to meet other initiatives around Latin America and give them the chance to connect with each other. We hope this connection turns into a network of exchange and reflection about the different contexts, types of knowledge, activism, experiences and strategies of action.
Inspiring new social agents
Listening to stories and sharing them goes beyond reaching a greater audience to its protagonists. By sharing and connecting these voices to each other, we seek to strengthen and inspire others, contributing to the empowerment of all of us. We hope these stories reach not just those who already act, but those who have the will of acting, yet fear doing so. We want to spread these stories, hoping to see them multiplying, turning struggles into something visible, close and possible.
Enhancing the local point of view
We want to show and share stories of people that have thought and acted on their realities. They are those who live their daily difficulties and better understand which are the problems they face. We want provide a bridge between the skills of those who want to support and the possible needs of local groups. We want to instigate people to the development of a new way of looking at the Latin America reality, showing the strength, importance and potential of local projects. In these struggles, those who wish to help can be an important support, but must above all recognize and respect the local actions.
Challenging stereotypes
"The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.
Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity." (Chimamanda Adichie)
The danger of a single story
“if i am not in the world simply to adapt to it, but rather transform it, and if it is not possible to change the world without a certain dream or vision for it, i must make use of every possibility there is not only to speak about my utopia, but also to engage in practices consistent with it.”
Paulo Freire