Welcome,

Let me introduce myself. My name is Geraldine Belmont. I was born in New York. My father is French and my mother Austrian. I was brought up in Geneva and went to the art school in Lausanne which I finished in 2001. First of all, I would like to thank you all for being here. It has been 4 years that I have not returned to Switzerland and I am here today to share some of my experience with you; experience that I have made by having had the chance to leave Switzerland to go to Brazil. To begin with, let me go back to the year 2002, when I went to Brazil as a tourist for the second time, but for the first time I traveled to a state in the north-east (the poorest part of the country).

Countless beaches, a lot of sun and many beautiful and toned bodies, in short, everything to make a young Swiss girl happy. Because its the opposite of Switzerland. The men are hot and welcoming and ready to jump on you anytime, if you let them. One is not immediately aware of the fact, that this is part of a global economic cycle, the one of sex-tourism!

In my case it wasnt for the toned bodies that I felt the desire to stay in Brazil, but the practice of surfing that I discovered at a fishermen beach called Tirica in the little town Itacar (20 thousand inhabitants). It is a fishermen town that was transformed through the asphalt street at the end of the nineties. With this route tourism expanded attracting first the surfers from all over the world and lead then to the mass tourism of today.

I grew up among buddhas, tabkas and images or spirituality. I also traveled a lot, stayed at luxurious hotels in exotic countries all over the world. Club Med, resorts, tropical environments, sailing boatsbut never until I started to surf, I understood what meditation really means. To empty your mind and to not think. To not think is though impossible! My mind never stops! Not even when I sleep.

In Brazil I started to exchange going out, men hunting and drinking by going to bed early to get up early in order to go back to the sea and its waves at dawn before breakfast. At the beginning one gets a good mouthful. The water is coming out everywhere and you get the impression that your brain is getting rinsed; even your soul seems to be washed. It is a fight to get to the other side where the sea is calm and the waves are being formed.

The fist time I really surfed on a wave, I made a sudden and spontaneous meditation. All of a sudden I wasnt thinking. I caught velocity with the wave and it was not my mind that told me what to do anymore; I really wasnt thinking. There! I meditated. I cannot reproduce this act voluntarily, but at least I have experienced it in that moment. This experience of not-thinking together with the one of getting a mouthful of seawater (because its really not that easy to surf) have given me a new approach about life on dry land. Suddenly every time I got out of the water everything seemed easier and I said to myself If I can surf and get out of the ocean alive, on dry land I can do anything. It gave me a big dose of courage and ambition.

Back in Switzerland I initiated the first steps to put one foot into Brazil. That was in 2003. Consulate, social security number, the bureaucracy that always seems so complicated was suddenly easy. I am lucky. I wanted to open a new door to a new world, and the door had opened itself to me. Open sesame! For the first time in my life I had a clear perspective in my head: I wanted to acquire a cottage on that beach of Tiririca, on that beach only! Nothing else mattered. And I have achieved it. I purchased a cottage on a piece of land of 250 m2 in July 2003. I still wasnt speaking a word of Portuguese but I had a lot of luck and everything went very well. I have to ad, that I didnt see too much of a future as a young modern art professional. I felt constantly unsatisfied and frustrated. The art milieu wasnt made to gather great spirits in order to redefine the world. There is no sharing, no interchange, everybody together but each one on his own. An artist represents the victory of individualism; of the ego. I have never had a collective experience, other than a fancy kind of alcoholism. I finally felt I was just a simple producer of a consumer item and that was not my objective. I entered this environment because it was the closest possible to separate myself from the common society, but I realized very soon, that this was not the case anymore. An artist has become as well part of the globalized world. I realized that my very romantic idea of it didnt exist anymore. The insatiable thirst of the new, of conquering unknown land, which is given to the human being, was what I have felt but could not satisfy here in Europe. I was lucky, I am educated, cultured, from a good structured background and most importantly in possession of the resources to make this dream come true and the courage that was missing, I probably obtained through surfing. I decided to leave the mundane alcoholism behind and throw myself into the adventure and into a new world, not knowing where I was really going but a greener place, a younger place, a place more open and susceptible to change. I felt the urge of a change from an outer, as well as from an inner world.

In 2003 I spent half of the year in Switzerland, the other half in Brazil, where I started to work on my cottage with the help from a family community who possessed the equipment to lumber wood and who worked with inactive wood already since a long time. I was delighted to have met them because I was sure to be able to realize an ecological reform of the cottage, as the inactive wood is the one that has already fallen and is lying on the ground. The dead wood has either fallen naturally or was cut by the carpenters on their search for the so called precious wood. They superfluously cut 10 more in order to reach their goal. This wood consumes energy and generates a lot of gas due to the greenhouse effect in order to decompose. To remove this wood from the forest is beneficiary to nature. At the time I thought I was able to live like this, half way here, half way there, but to be honest it became impossible. I started to feel a slight schizophrenia inside of me. I said to myself that if I continued like this I would become crazy. A freak in a cashmere jumper, sitting in a street corner in Geneva or Zrich talking to herself. After having known the happiness of a contact with a virgin nature (it is not really virgin, but gives you that impression at least), to take from it what you need to eat or drink instead of consuming processed food, to go and find wood without harming the nature. I felt many big and simple kinds of happiness, alternative kinds of happiness, about which nobody has ever told me they existed. In Switzerland I felt only happy by buying, consuming; even after having read books like, No Logo, the uniform world, the

diplomatic world, that speak about cosmopolitanism, how could I buy a pair of Nikes for 200 Euros and feel good about myself? I believe strongly that the human being is a product of its environment. We are influenced by it and I needed a different kind of influence one of an environment still untouched from the uniform culture issued by globalization and in the north-east of Brazil despite the poverty, the ignorance and the lack of structure, they are living in a local culture, a unique culture. You might tell me that one can find this in many places, even in Switzerland, thats true! But my way was directed to Brazil. Maybe being European I could identify myself there, I felt like knowing it because its modern with its colonial and contemporary architecture. The tropical Corbusier is attractive, its sexy! But finally, we should not forget that we are upside down on the south hemisphere and that of course the perspective from there is completely different from ours. What does joy of life really mean? Certainly the one we feel during vacation. But can we only feel it a few weeks per year? I decided that I would be living it every day, but not that I was going to be on vacation all the time. With my money I could have bought a boat and navigate around the world searching for the perfect wave! What a nice plan. But no, that is not the joy of life either, I dont think so. It is to live in a tourist place without being a tourist, in a place like paradise where you dont need makeup to feel beautiful, where you dont need more than two minutes to get dressed, where the shoes dont hurt your feet. In short, honestly, my motives were all very egoistic. It was the search for happiness. But, when you install yourself permanently in a touristic city, you are very soon confronted with the occurring problems, which were not necessarily preoccupying once you spent only a few days there. As you are living there now every day, problems like garbage, start to affect you.

The other side of the tropical coin; what to do? Close your eyes and life properly on your own little land? That is what most people do, but for me and the family I started to work with in order to reform my cottage and turn it into a restaurant, it was impossible to think that way. With a minimum of consciousness one cannot feel good with a load of garbage on the beach. How to preserve hygiene in a place where you serve food, when rats are running around everywhere. That would be insincere. What I said to myself also, was that it should not think too much on what was going to happen. I would limit the future events to what I thought they would be and you cannot do that when you are looking for something new, something yet inedited

The year 2004 is one of forth and back between Europe and Brazil because I do not have a permanent visa yet and I am restricted to only six months per year. Further, I was going to share an atelier in Zrich together with some graphic artists and I had to move there. It was also the year of the first Yonic Expo in a little gallery in Zrich which gave the premises of what Yonic is going to become. With my friend, a graphic artist, who accompanied me on my travels, we created a Yonizine, a magazine that explains about Yonic.

It was also the year when a lot of people who work in the world of non governmental organizations start telling me to make an ONG; there is enough money here for that kind of work. There is no need to insist too much, when I pass this info on to Brazil. Already existing projects in need of help and structure flew in immediately. At the time, the Yonizine publishes the letter of a doctor who works on the survival of a snake that is in danger of extinction. His objective is to reproduce this snake by holding it captive and to so ensure its survival on a long term then reintroduce it into the protected areas of the forest. This was the first project we helped with. I say we because I always asked the father of the family to cover my inexperience. I didnt say no to a project just because it wasnt the moment, or that we had to found the ONG first, make a business plan, raise money and only then we will be able to help. Everything was already too urgent, too many mutilated snakes arrived at the center and to feed them was big problem. The first help we provided was to invest in a structure in order to receive different types of mice who could reproduce themselves and nourish the snakes in the center.

The project became a big success because in February 2007 the first snakes were born in the center, an inedited realization, the first in the world and published in the Bulletin of the Chicago Herpetological Society.

At that time I started to build up the ONG and at the same time I was working on the activities that became more and more important every day due to their urgency. This because I believe in direct action and I couldnt get myself to write a business plan about a work of which I didnt even know its amplitude. I always worked directly on the urgent cases. I actually dont have an education in ecology or biology. I just saw an adorable city that I fell in love with and that had already given me so much, to destroy itself rapidly, being drowned in garbage, dominated by ignorance and with inhabitants suffering from chronic malnutrition. If we dont do anything now, what future can it have? Do I have to show some shocking pictures? After all those magnificent images of paradise beaches come the ones of the nude reality, the less sexy ones.

MALNUTRITION

DEFORESTATION

UNCONTROLED URBAN GROWTH

OPEN DRAIN SYSTEMS

ABANDONED GARBAGE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE TROPICAL FOREST UNDERNEETH WATER SOURCES THAT MAINTAIN LIFE IN THE CITY

Are the major problems of this marvelous city in the middle of an environmental protection zone and as well one of the 7 hot spots remaining in the world (a hot spot is a place of very high biodiversity and at the same time in danger of extinction) and a reserve of the planetary biosphere declared by the UNESCO. So, how to manage this situation? How to live this dichotomy? By looking the other way and ignore? By continuing living in just a fragment of reality? Yonics proposition is a different one. We believe it is possible to inverse this situation by transforming the harmful into healthy, by transforming the passive citizen into a positive actor of the society, by transforming the garbage into a constructive element of the social organization.

In Itacar we have transformed all oil waste into bricks for civil construction without discriminating the plastic ones. We have built houses, septic tanks, walkways, associative buildings, manufactured trophies for various championships and sports in the city.

Later, we studied the plastic bag like a separate type of plastic. It has recently gained a very bad reputation, everyone wanting its prohibition, but who offers a solution for all the plastic bags that already exist? Already contaminate? Yes, it needs a solution for the future but it also needs a solution for the present. So, as it is much easier to create a product than to sell a project we have developed a collection of accessories made exclusively from plastic bags. It's called FOUND, found because wherever you go and walk around on this planet you will always find a plastic bag. It is so light that it flies, it floats on the water, it is carried to the seas and oceans by the rivers where it harms natures life more by every day. When it bursts in thousand pieces under the effect of temperature changes or the sunlight, it enters the earths surface instead of natural humus. What are the consequences? An earth that is packaged and plasticized?

Our recycling techniques are entirely handcrafted, why? Because its necessary to place the human being back into the center of action. The abandoned human, without identification or education, without qualifications, who we cannot just throw away like garbage. We have to integrate him in a work he can assimilate and develop. Our techniques are top but low fi, though always accessible and reproducible in every corner of this planet. Because if not, this human who suffers from hunger is certainly going to rebel and at that moment who can tell what will happen?

I end this presentation with a picture of a Brazilian banner which shows a sentence that always seemed an enigma to me until I started to work with garbage.

ORDER AND PROGRESS, because in order to achieve progress it is imperative to first have order!

This presentation was held in: L Uni Mail, Geneva, on the 16th of September 2008 Corner College, Zurich, on the 18 of September 2008 With the intention to share a life experience and to seek the sensibility of the public to draw attention to a work that needs financial support. Thank you for your attention and your support.