Biography
Raised in the music Choro tradition by his grandfather, Abel Luiz works a composer, arranger, musical director, and multi-instrumentalist. He is a student of the Music Master Program of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. In his career, he has performed alongside artists such as Délcio Carvalho, Dona Ivone Lara, Almir Guineto, among others. He is the music director of the Bloco Carnavalesco Loucura Suburbana, a carnival group located at the Instituto Municipal Nise da Silveira. This is the first group in Brazil, and in the world, that brings together culture, carnival, territory, and mental health, throughout its 23 years of activity. Abel is also one of the founders of Samba do Trabalhador, participating as musician, arranger, and composer of its first CD and DVD. Currently, he is part of the Terreiro de Crioulo Project, Roda de Samba and Feira Cultural, Trio Choro Novo, and Duo Onze Cordas. The groups are dedicated to different expressions of popular, instrumental, and regional music in Brazil, where music, culture, health, education, and knowledge construction are worked in an integrated and transversal way.
Title:
Sharing experiences and sound experiments in psychosocial care in Rio
Abstract
This presentation will articulate some reflections based on experiences as a musician working in the field of mental health. It will describe the development of two professional projects that bring together the fields of culture and mental health: The Free Music Workshop (‘Oficina Livre de Música’ - OLM), created in 2007 held in a Community Mental Health Service (Centro de Atenção Psicossocial- CAPS) and the Carnival Group “Bloco Carnavalesco Loucura Suburbana”, created in 2001, both in the city of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). From this account, the debate aims at expanding towards the possible contributions of music to mental health actions, including the anti-asylum and psychiatric reform, in line with a proposal for an emancipatory health promotion. As a theoretical basis, the concepts of social determinants of health, deinstitutionalization, cultural mediation and territory are deepened.
The Free Music Workshop is open to the public, it works at the entrance of the mental health service and attracts people from different places, who have never attended any service related to mental health, to exchange experiences and experiment with sound. In the meetings promoted by the Workshop, the participants have the opportunity to broaden their concept of mental health and of the mentally deranged person. The parade of the Loucura Suburbana carnival group is the annual culmination of the Workshop in Rio. It receives people from all over Brazil as well as from other parts of the world for a city party produced, assembled, directed and offered with affection and joy by users, family members and workers of the Community Mental Health Service. These musical experiences have shown to be an innovative and powerful tool for the production of new daily lives that enable more solidary and generous social exchanges with the city, having diversity as a potency in the production of new socio-cultural approaches in the field of mental health.