According to Paulo Freire, “[…] a revolution is achieved with neither verbalism nor activism, but rather with praxis, that is, with reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed.” (2005, pp 125-6). The exercise of performing the posters and pamphlets of the collection where revolutionary because exactly reflection and action were required from each of the participants. What we see in this year’s exhibition is not only posters but exercises of dialogue that require the authors to question their worldview, express their interpretations, and propose also questions to the audience.

Students didn’t receive a ‘script’ about what they should or not explore in their interpretations of the material. As we intend to experiment with a revolutionary approach to education, we were very aware of Freire’s recommendation: “Manipulation, sloganizing, ‘depositing’, regimentation, and prescription cannot be components of revolutionary praxis, precisely because they are components of the praxis of domination.” (2005, p126). Dealing with pamphlets and posters with a clear political orientation and communication objectives, students engaged critically with their chosen artifact, not merely ‘accepting’ their messages, but scrutinizing their revolutionary content.

We believe that this experience of ‘thinking inside the box’ provokes in everyone involved in the project - including you, our reader – the sense of being part of a revolutionary dialogue, because “sooner or later, a true revolution must initiate a courageous dialogue with the people. Its very legitimacy lies in that dialogue.” (Freire, 2005, p128)

This project would be not possible without the participation and contribution of several actors and sponsors, all of them acknowledged on these pages. But the most important of them are the students engaged in the project this year. They dedicated an immense amount of work to making this dialogue a reality. They have been truly revolutionaries. They went beyond their boundaries, exploring a world – Latin America – not familiar to many of them, and experiencing the difficult combination of reflection and action. I don’t have enough words to thank them, to congratulate them, to express how much I am proud of them, and to measure how much they have taught me during the exercise of reenacting these posters. They remind me of the power of dialogue for humanization.

I finish with another Freire’s quotation that summarizes well the reasons why we engage in projects like Thinking Inside the box, a project of dialogue and transformation: “The dialogue which is radically necessary to revolution corresponds to another radical need: that of women and men as beings who cannot be truly human apart from communication, for they are essentially communicative creatures. To impede communication is to reduce men to the status of “things” – and this is a job for oppressor, not for revolutionaries.” (2005, p 129)

Vinicius Mariano de Carvalho

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of Oppressed. (Trad. Myra Bergman Ramos). Continuum: New York, 2005.