Sensitive Territories
Creating resilience with performance art in Brazilian fishing communities
Posted: 5 January 2025

Created as a research platform in 2014 by Brazilian artist Walmeri Ribeiro, Sensitive Territories investigates the impact of climate change and industrial pollution on traditional communities that live on the shores of Guanabara Bay in Rio de Janeiro. Throughout the project, artists, scientists and local communities immersed themselves in the environment of water and mangroves to investigate possible solutions to water pollution. Sensitive Territories aims to rethink the creation of artistic practices, exploring ethical, political and aesthetic modes of producing art to address environmental challenges. Believing in the political dimension as much as the sensory experience of art practices, the project encourages ways of imagining a new coexistence among humans and non-humans.
‘Sensitive Territories invites us to think about what kind of relationship we can create with territories in ruins. In the relationship of art, fishing and life, we found a way together to initiate dreams and to connect our bodies with the territory that we inhabit.’
Walmeri Ribeiro
Contents:
Project description
Every second, Guanabara Bay receives 18 thousand litres of untreated domestic sewage and 90 tons of floating waste daily, as well as unaccounted amounts of chemical sewage and petroleum and oil released by industries. Oil and gas production spills that come from over 6000 naval, chemical and petroleum industrial facilities have contributed to the slow death of the territory of Guanabara Bay. The increased temperature of the oceans with climate change and noise pollution generated by the ships, are other important factors for the loss of marine life.
The environmental degradation of Guanabara Bay affects the local population living in the area, especially the fishing communities whose lives depend on the waters, and so these conditions impose a necessity to change the life of the communities that can no longer survive on fishing. Together with the communities, Sensitive Territories discover possibilities for the reuse of waste, asking what we can learn from these ruins and how we can imagine new futures for them.
Guanabara Bay encompasses 16 districts and is home to 8.6 million people. Environmental destruction forces them to find a new relationship with the territory and build resilience. Covering an area of 412 square kilometres and listed as a UN World Heritage site since 2012, the area is important not only for the local communities but for the entire ecosystem in Brazil.
From the loft of a fishing community
‘This is a very personal story. I moved from São Paulo to Fortaleza, a city in the Northeast of Brazil. I lived in a loft in front of a fishing community. From my window, on the 16th floor, I could see all the fishermen’s activity and their lives’ precariousness. This reality made me leave my apartment and start a project with this community.’
Walmeri Ribeiro’s daily experience with the fishing community led her to map the Ceará coast, talking to fishermen who lived in areas further away from the urban centre. In this mapping, she met a fishing community that lived on lobster fishing in Guanabara Bay. One of the older fishermen told her about the end of the lobster, which, on the one hand, is caused by a rise in the temperature of the oceans and, on the other, by trawling. Trawling is an industrial fishing method involving dragging heavily weighted nets across the sea floor, sweeping everything up, causing a decline in species and damaging the seabed.
These conversations took place in 2010. Since then, she has started several projects in sensitive territories in Brazil, all sharing a story of colonisation and extractivism. This is how Sensitive Territories was born as a community-focused research platform – like all her projects, it began embedded within communities that are exposed to environmental degradation in their territory.
A platform of research
Sensitive Territories as a platform houses several projects and is linked to the research lab that Walmeri Ribeiro co-ordinates between Federal Fluminense University and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. It is an autonomous platform for research and creation in arts, science and environmental issues. The platform operates not as an organisation of effective members but as a collaborative network.
Projects usually arise from an environmental issue in dialogue with a specific territory. By territory, the project refers to the relationship between people and the environment, and the politics and rights of the land. For each project, Ribeiro invites artists, scientists and people from the communities they will work in to participate. She usually initiates contact and gathers a group of artists and scientists, but sometimes she also gets invited to projects by communities. The development of the actions happens organically from dialogues, workshops, meetings and being physically embedded in the area.
Profit and exploitation of natural environments
Brazil is a country rich in minerals and fossil fuels. The problems in Guanabara Bay are a part of a greater issue in Brazil of exploitation of natural resources for profit, often by foreign companies. Sensitive Territories emerged in the context of the exploitation of natural resources and the climate crisis, establishing a dialogue between the arts, society and environmental issues.
Worldwide, the current debate is often centred on preserving the Amazon forest, which multinational companies are destroying. Still, many other important environmental zones like Guanabara Bay are experiencing extractivism and exploitation in Brazil by petrol and gas industries like Shell, Chevron, Exxoll, Petrobras, and Petrol AD, who leave toxic waste and exploit natural environments for profit until they are beyond repair.
‘Environmental crimes in Brazil are countless, and this devastation is directly linked to climate change.’
Walmeri Ribeiro
Laboratories of research-creation
The Guanabara Bay project was initiated in 2016. After receiving funding in 2019, the team behind it conducted a deep dive into the Guanabara waters, where they set up four laboratories of research-creation between 2019 and 2020, each lasting from five to ten days, involving a group of twelve artists and ten collaborators from two communities. Most central was the community of Colônia Z-10 (one of the first fishing villages in Brazil), located on the river banks and mangroves of the Jequiá River, where the water pollution has resulted in only 400 out of the 5000 inhabitants being able to make a living out of fishing. This heavy pollution is part of the community’s everyday life, causing severe health issues.
Based on the methodology of performance as research, the laboratories consisted of workshops in listening, performance, photography and drawing all around the rivers and mangroves of Guanabara Bay. Performance as research, is a field of artistic research that uses the body and its system of senses to change our current way of thinking and acting. It is a process that seeks to create a connection with the territory that the communities live in, allowing people new ways to discuss and discover environmental issues. In the Guanabara Bay project, this is done by connecting the residents with the surrounding rivers, mangroves, and forests.
The laboratories aimed to produce a form of embodied and situated knowledge by deepening participants’ relationship with the environment and guiding them towards action. Taking an ethnography-based approach, Walmeri Ribeiro and the group lived in the territory for the first three laboratories. For the final one, artists and collaborators collected materials to make an exhibition and an open seminar for the public.
Lab 1 – Performative Mapping, May 2019
Starting from a performative practice based on active meditation (meditation in movement), allowing for an expansion of the entire senses of the body, the group of artists and researchers travelled across Guanabara Bay. Over 10 days, they engaged in dialogue with local communities and artists to discover local environmental issues. A trip with local fishermen presented the realities of the changing waters: landfills, silting, pollution, rising temperatures and loss of marine fauna and flora. With each day, new environmental and social issues emerged. Based on this mapping of environmental issues, they designed artistic workshops, performances and seminars for future laboratories.
Lab 2 – Co-existing with the mangrove, October 2019
When Ribeiro first met the inhabitants of the communities of Guanabara Bay, they were unaware of how important the mangrove is for the ecosystem or its impact on their daily lives.
The mangrove is crucial for preserving marine life and purifying water. Still, some parts of the communities were not aware of the importance of it, and used the mangrove to dispose of domestic waste.
Mangroves are the only tree species in the world that tolerate salt water. They are important not only for marine life and seawater quality – many other organisms depend on them for their life cycle. Mangroves, through their canopies, sequester carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, mitigating the greenhouse effect.
Through performative practice, artists and locals engaged with the mangrove and connected to its existence and their memory through time, awakening their embodied knowledge of loss and displacement. Ribeiro and artist Ruy Cézar Campos arranged a series of actions to connect with nature, including breathing, listening and dreaming while in the mangrove.
‘With their eyes fixed on a certain point of a mangrove, they were given the following instructions: Remain still. Turn to the right. Keep the rhythm of your breathing. Look at a point on the wall. Remain still. Turn to the left. Turn your eyes back towards the mangrove.’
These performative gestures served as a sensory and political action connecting the flying roots of the mangrove with people’s breath and movement. Inhabitants had an opportunity to engage with the strength and porosity of the environment.
‘From this performative experience, we unfolded not only breathing as a political gesture but also a learning process capable of impelling us to rethink our small gestures and habits,’ says Ribeiro.
Another key activity was recording the fishermen’s intergenerational voices. Luiz Antônio, one of the few young fishermen, joined in a conversation with older fishermen, Mr Geraldo and Mr Zuca, to share stories and memories of the place. Some of the moments they reflected upon were when the bay got swamped by an Iraqi ship’s oil spill in 1975 and when a pipeline rupture in 2000 caused a dramatic oil spill. One month after this conversation, there was another oil spill and the fishermen went on television to demand the authorities’ attention focus on the health of the Guanabara waters.
‘I believe that with arts, we can sensitise the bodies, opening the mind to imagine the new ways to live, to get involved with the territories creating a real sense of coexistence. We work in this way. And, of course, sometimes our actions incentivise practical actions into the communities.
Walmeri Ribeiro

Engaging with the mangrove.
Lab 3 – Living in an Anthropocene landscape November 2019
The third part of the project focused on constructing new ways of living in the middle of a destroyed and polluted landscape. It focused on questions such as how do you keep a sense of belonging in times of disaster?
One of the activities included the inhabitants taking photos of their areas to understand the politics of the landscape and the story of the people living there. Artists Paquetá, Cesar Baio and Nathalie Fari also invited the inhabitants for a walk along the beach to open their senses to the sand and the sights of ships, oil and garbage on the beach. During the walk, everyone was invited to search for lost objects and consider what we hide and show in society.
‘What is shown, and what is hidden, within these landscapes? In which ways are the beaches and the sea intertwined with the discarded objects present on the sands and with the ships, platforms, and infrastructures installed in these Anthropocene landscapes?’
Cesar Baio
Walmeri Ribeiro believes in the political dimension of art, given its potential to activate the senses. Therefore, she proposes that a body in performance – as a practice of artistic research – can produce embodied knowledge that occurs in the body-territory relationship, thus being able to generate solutions.
‘How, then, to re-sensitise our bodies? How to create ways of living (not just surviving), to imagine and dream amidst the open veins of the Anthropocene? How to render our bodies “porous bodies”, activating all their potency to act facing contemporary crises?’
Walmeri Ribeiro
Lab 4 – Showcasing work and creating a network, 2022
After a year of immersions, workshops and discussions in Guanabara Bay, the partners gathered at Galery Z42 in Rio in January 2020.
Here they discussed their experiences and showcased the work to a wider audience. The purpose of this lab was to facilitate a broader dialogue between scientists, environmentalists, fishermen, communities and cultural policymakers while creating a larger network of understanding and concern for Guanabara Bay and generating societal engagement.
Actions include immersive experiences, meditative walks, listening, drawing and photography workshops. Through these activities, Ribeiro seeks to awaken and empower communities. The projects involve site-specific interventions that are turned into artworks and publications, and the project team stays connected with the communities. The artistic actions help residents to better connect with the territories where they live.
‘For some years, our research and creation have been focused on operating in territories that are in ruins, intensely devastated, polluted, and impacted by the modern “civilisation” project, centred on extractivism and progress, which blinds all vital sensorial organs and creates insensitive bodies, accustomed to violence.’
Aráoz, artist in Sensitive Territories

Sustainability issues
- Environmental extractivism and marine pollution: The projects create awareness both within and outside the community of Guanabara Bay of the environmental degradation due to the impact of global industries and climate change.
- Climate justice – giving vulnerable communities a voice: The platform gives voice to the most vulnerable communities to speak about the environmental challenges in Brazil. They have not caused the damage yet face the biggest impact, and should therefore be included in decision making. Sensitive Territories help communities find their voice and share it with a broader audience.
- Increasing local knowledge on environmental issues: A key aspect of giving people a voice is creating a better local understanding of what is happening in their environment. The workshops began a process where socio-political and environmental issues became clearer and the communities experienced a greater awareness of their embodied relationship to the place they were situated in. This improved understanding led to Increased public awareness about the ecological crisis in Guanabara Bay. Fishermen went on television to demand the authorities’ attention to the health of the Guanabara waters.
- Indigenous peoples as environmental guards: ‘These local peoples are holding up the sky. We need to understand this. And I believe artistic practices are a good way to activate the imaginary and generate critical consciousness.’ Walmeri Ribeiro.
- Building local resilience: Resilience is built by helping communities understand their environmental issues and embodying their connection to the land through performance. ‘In our projects, we are not interested in developing solutions, but rather imagination through the arts to develop new ways of relating to the territories. This imagination is also a political act of resistance to experiences of extractivism and exploitation. How, then, can we imagine more sustainable ways of living?’ says Walmeri Ribeiro.
- A school of environmental arts: In August 2023, the team is opening a school of environmental arts as social practices named Floresta de Marés, which has been inspired by the common desire between the artists and the community of the Z-10 colony for more continuous work.
Outcomes from the project
- A website to share knowledge, experiences and artworks developed in all of the Sensitive Territories’ projects.
- Three exhibitions: Take Me To The River Platform (2021), Take Me To The River at Hamburger Bahnhof Museum|Berlin (2022) and Sensitive Territories-Guanabara Bay – Z42 Gallery, Rio de Janeiro (2020).
- Video exhibitions: Guanabará-Sea Arms (documentary) – Sensitive Laboratory Goethe Institut- Rio de Janeiro (2021).
- Articles: several articles have been published on the project in Brazilian and foreign journals.
- Two books published: Sensitive Territories|Guanabara Bay (2021) and Territorios Sensíveis: Práticas artisticas social e ambientalmente engajadas em tempos de crise (2023), both by Circuito Press.
- School of Environmental Art as a Social Practice: in August 2023 Sensitive Territories will launch Floresta de Marés (Forest of Tides), a school born out of a common desire between artists and the community of the Z-10 colony for more continuous work. A website will be public soon.
- Local environmental action: By connecting with the territories where the residents were motivated into actions and developments, such as in the Z-10 colony, fishermen have organised local action for the removal, separation and sale to recycling companies of garbage which is brought in the fishing nets. Some residents collected old refrigerators, often discarded in rivers, and turned them into librariesm which they installed in the community. On the island of Paquetá, the desire to make tourism more ecological and sustainable emerged and has been developed by two project participants.

Lessons, tips and advice
- Art helps build relationships: The project facilitated dialogue between artists, scientists and communities. The arts allowed for open-ended long-term collaboration, the results of which cannot be known in advance. This is useful for bringing people from different backgrounds together, providing an open space for collective sharing from which new ideas and approaches can emerge.
- Artistic situated practices can highlight environmental racism and inspire climate justice: The project opened an understanding that the communities living in Guanabara Bay are extremely vulnerable to environmental degradation, which can cause poverty and physical and mental health issues.
- Art as a space for activist action: Walmeri Ribeiro experienced that the shared laboratories fostered a common ground for connecting the inhabitants with the environmental and petropolitical issues in Guanabara Bay. The artistic workshops were central to learning, listening and connecting with their memory and embodied connection to the territory of waters, becoming ’emplaced’. To her, these practices are crucial in creating new narratives and future imaginaries to survive and create new modes of living into the ruíns, but also working to regenerate the environment. Artistic practices connected the embodied, social and environmental issues and fostered a rethinking of a potential political future.
- Embed yourself in the context: For the development of each project, Ribeiro first lives in the communities for a long period of time. In the case of Guanabara Bay, she lived there for more than six months to understand the issues the community were facing. By establishing relationships, she discovers the problems that need to be addressed and the artistic actions they will develop as a response.
- Dialogue: Involving communities is not easy, but the project taught Ribeiro that you must be open to listening in order to build trust. Unfortunately in the arts, she often finds that artists arrive with ready-made projects to be installed in the communities. In Sensitive Territories, they prefer to listen first.

Partners and stakeholders
Sensitive Territories work as a platform for research and creation in arts, science and environmental issues. The platform is independent but has Brazilian and foreign financial support for the development of projects. Walmeri Ribeiro is the founder and coordinates the platform. She also manages the temporary collectives of artists, scientists and communities involved. However, throughout the projects, other people become directly and indirectly involved.
Overview of partners involved:
- Walmeri Ribeiro works as a platform creator, coordinator, producer and artist-researcher within the field of performance research in arts and environmental issues. She is a professor of contemporary art at the Universidade Federal do Ceará in Brazil. Her work is focused on the relationship between performance, audiovisuals, politics and nature. She has published several articles in national and international magazines, such as ‘From Embodiment to Emplacement: Artistic Research in Insular Territories of the Guanabara Bay’ published in Global Performance Studies (see at the end of this article). She has exhibited performances like the video installation Performance Deserts (2013), Expanded Territories (Fortaleza, 2014) and ‘Invisible Horizons’ (2010) with Cesar Baio and Fernanda Gomes.
- BrisaLAB – Laboratory of Research in Performance, Media Art and Environmental Issues: As a research project, Sensitive Territories is developed by BrisaLAB, connected to two public universities in Rio de Janeiro, Federal Fluminense University and Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
- Brazilian agencies of research: The platform is supported by partnerships from other Brazilian and foreign universities and agencies of research, such as the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development and the Research Support Foundation of the State of Rio de Janeiro.
- Artist-researcher collaborators: The collaborative network in the platform involves artist-researchers from different universities in Brazil – Cesar Baio (ACTLAB – UNICAMP), Guto Nóbrega (NANO-EBA|UFRJ), Paola Barreto (BALAIO FANTASMA-UFBA), Nathalie Fari, (University of Gothenburg), Eloisa Brantes (Ateliê de Performance – UERJ), Ana Emerich (Ateliê da Esculta-UERJ) and master’s and doctoral student-researchers Marcela Cavallini, Sofia Mussolin, Alessandro Paiva, Patricia Gouvêa, Camila Huhn, Patricia Freire, Gabi Bandeira and others.
- Community partners: The projects developed by the platform rely on partnerships with associations and communities to establish the research. For the Guanabara Bay, this has involved the Fisherman Association of Côlonia Z-10, Thiago Caiçara, Luiz Antonio, Pãozinho, Sr. Geraldo, Fisherman Z-10 Community, Paquetá Residents Association, Casa de Artes Paquetá, Arapium indigenous community, Tereza Arapium, Conceição Arapium, Thiago Arapium, Carlos Arapium and other communities.
- University bodies: Federal Fluminense University and Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Sensitive Platform is a research platform the universities support with researchers.
- Temporary partners: The Prince Claus Fund and Goethe Institut, awards for Cultural and Artistic Responses to Environmental Change (2019-2021) helped with funding and support throughout.

Funding
Sensitive Territories relies on funding from scientific and artistic research institutions as a platform for creation and research. The main financing of the Guanabara Bay project comes from:
Prince Claus Fund and Goethe Institut: In 2019, Sensitive Territories received the Cultural and Artistic Response to Environmental Change award from the Prince Claus Fund and Goethe Institut.
FAPERJ fellowship: Awarded in 2019 to develop a Baía de Guanabara project.
Federal Fluminense University and Federal University of Rio de Janeiro provide research support.
‘Relationships with funders such as the Prince Claus Fund and the Goethe Institute have been fundamental to developing our actions in the communities, allowing us to build a socially and environmentally committed artistic project.’
Walmeri Ribeiro

Relevant links
Sensitive Territories – Guanabara Bay project
Article: ‘From Embodiment to Emplacement: Artistic Research in Insular Territories of the Guanabara Bays‘, Walmeri Ribeiro, Nathalie S. Fari, Cesar Baio, and Ruy Cezar Campos
All images provided courtesy of Sensitive Territories and Walmeri Ribeiro.