The air is dry, the weather is hot and my back hurts as I carry 20kg in my backpack and walk an illuminated path full of mandarin speaking folks. I’m at the Beijing Capital International Airport boarding a flight to Brazil after two weeks of intense events and tracing back to how I got myself in China. Reckless actions and unpredicted outcomes mark the story of how I would meet a mentor, make a friend and part ways with a business partner I could not establish a productive work balance. This very report of those last years perceptions is result of an imperfect collaboration. What appears to be as clear as crystal now could’ve never been guessed two years ago. Even though South America and Asia seem to be a bit too far, we were linked by more connections than meets the eye.

By the end of 2013 I would find myself late to a saturday class which I had no clue what it was about in an already familiar place that I call home today. I was attending an open curriculum course on a variety of themes from entrepreneurship and liberal arts to quantum physics in a coworking space that also had an entrepeneurship education branch. This day I met a strange figure speaking in rude, yet sophisticated manner, showing art pieces in a screen and questioning a class of a dozen people about the identity of the artists behind the genitalia and industrial landscape paintings. With the patience of a teacher and the arrogance of an artist to whom discussing art pieces was common knowledge, he would challenge us to guess the personality and story of those artists lives. My lack of artistic education had me failing in every try to associate the artist with the right set of characteristics that would compose it’s personality. After a brief period of time, he explained that to understand an art piece, you have to catch a glimpse of the soul of the artist. All this exercise was about perception, eveything that followed was about perception and eventually I would come to the fact that it has had always been about perception, all my life.

Right after this words, the figure approached me in particular and in the same way he would look to the soul of an artist when in contact to his art piece, his eyes gazed my spirit and he perceived my inner conflicts, frustrations, desires but most of all, ambition. I still wonder if my very sight reflected an earlier version of himself. As I looked at his skills and crafts with curiosity and will to learn, he responded with opennes to my intentions

It was in the same way that Faust went after Mephistofeles in his search for power in Goethe’s poem that I asked the arts teacher about the source of it’s wisdom and it answered me back with overwhelming knowledge, revealing the path to his schools of thought and practice. Driven by my curiosity on my personal quest for power, I delved deeply into his material and read everything I could, coming back for more when I was finished. Then again, as the stray poodle that followed Faust around turned out to be a demon, the arts teacher revelead himself more than a painter. He shape-shifted as entrepreneur, artist, thinker, activist and mentor.

Our relationship then evolved to a master and apprentice one, where I would learn about the real wolrd narratives of the entrepreneurial life, business, science, art and the crafts of facilitation. The sinchronicity of events were following a trajectory of personal growh and self-awareness, there was opportunity in every lesson learned.

The trickster would eventually play it’s foul game on me, taking something in exchange for the doors opened and the powers given. Our paths would cross many times in the following years, but in that moment there was still no sign of his counterpart, his prize, nor his terms on the other side of the contract.

Born on October 1st, 1993 in a middle class family and grew up in a middle class neighborhood, attended standard schools and never developed any interests in running my own business, studying arts and self-educating myself. Life’s expectancies revolved around graduating in college and applying for a job in the public sphere, achieving financial safety and retiring when service was due. Unnecessary to mention that this very bias was parental influence and wouldn’t last long. After finishing high school, college played a major role in the course my life took, even though it happened through a non-linear fashion. The free time I had summed up with the unattractiveness of the business management major fostered a positive environment for experimentation that led me to the junior enterprise, the city’s entrepreneurial social scene and it’s players, the actors from the micro-economic play of business people, artists and their ego-driven mission statements.

I began to attend a variety of different events, wander through the so-called collaborative spaces and meet different people which a didn’t have access in the part of town I lived. This moment of experimentation was crucial for the deconstruction of the paradigm I was raised into and the reckless walk of a fool left myself open for unexpected findings along the way, such as the encounter with the arts teacher, later master, in the coworking slash alternative school slash my current job that I had met by chance in 2012.

As master and apprentice become friends and both practioners and students of different arts, our paths cross in each other’s projects, find synergies in opportunities of collaboration and a relationship of trust emerges from shared point of views and soft disagreements about the social context we’re enrolled in. The narratives and discussions of the social innovation and entrepreneurial sphere of Rio revolved around egoic challenges amongst players, competition on the scarce resources of a state towards bankruptcy and monopoly over cutting-edge social technologies rather than actual value generation through market activity.

The collective unconscious of the network of entrepreneurs, artists, activists and academics in Rio’s collaborative economy ecosystem supported and was supported by collaborative spaces in a symbiothic relationship. This community that held clusters of communities within it set the stage for Catete92, a self-organization experiment that relied on a house without any particular purpose as a platform for alternative value transactions for the community that grew with(in) it.

I started my own collaborative network initiative in my part of town as well. Felt all the political strife of developing a foreign social technology platform in my territory, unaware that the exposing myself as a cultural producer and entrepreneur in some sort of way would put me in conflict with local agents that disputed the throne of social innovation landlord. I found myself psychologically affected by evolving issues and reflected continuously on my whole as a social starter and the very boundaries of activism, entrepreneurship and politics altogether. This project would meet it’s end in the next year, being a milestone of personal growth along those years.

The Catete92 experiment would later come to an end as well, but it was in it’s last days that the painter, mentor and one of the co-founders of the artistic-start-up like experiment was invited to collaborate in an artistic residency because of it. Connections and links are now explicit. Former master and apprentice become collaborators in the following stages of the artistic residency, Brazil then China.

As our collaboration went on, I began to feel the struggle of handling simultaneously a full time job in the coworking space where I hacked my own education, a part time job with managerial work in a youth leadership development project in Rio’s suburbs and the latest invitation to work as a researcher in the artistic residence. Choosing an alternative path to live meant embracing every opportunity I could and the money-time-energy bottom line was to be wisely taken care of. The trade-off involved maintaining financial security while saving energy to engage myself in the invitation to the artistic project, but it was impossible to please all three friends, employers and projects with success.

Being born in a middle class family sustained by parents that work for the government represents stability in times where the government is stable, but social security can turn to desperation when the state and country begin to downhill in the worst crysis of the last two decades. With my parents wages halved, I had to put my energy and time in the short term rewarding projects, this meant that all the leftover from my energy and time would serve the artistic project. Commitment failures and expectancy disalignments harmed my relationship with my collaborators and the outcomes of the project themselves. What should be a horizontal, self-organized team, turned to be a conflictuous organization for me. It is as clear as crystal now, but it wasn’t only my monetary-drive and lack of energy and time to put efforts in the artistic collaboration that led me to sequencial failures.

During the Brazilian residence, we developed a facilitated workshop on goethean’s phenomenologic approach inspired by Goeth’s poem, Faust. We explored the phenomena of the relationships of merith, power and privilege in the micro-cosm of a diverse audience with conflictuous points of view during three days and immersed ourselves and our bias investigating how grass-roots movements turned into pyramidal empires. The soul of those interactions staged in Vila Itororó would reflect the same effects in the macro-cosm, from startups with libertarian dreams born from garages in citie’s suburbs that became profit-driven corporations to political revolutions that betrayed it’s mission when took power.

The facilitation experience helped me not only research the phenomena in investigation but also revealed critical insights about my struggle in collaborating with the team. Besides my failed attempts to deliver results, I had also become invisible and lacked autonomy when put together to my former mentor. I perceived that the mentor-student relationship had not dispappeared when shifted to coworker-coworker configuration, this meant that I would become a passive listener and task taker, rather than a autonomous collaborator when next to him, this acting from myself collapsed the horizontality of the team and I got myself following designs led by him in most of the research, even in this report.

As the fractal from Goethe’s holistic science, the practice in the workshop was contained in the whole process of collaboration in the artistic residence and the phenomena of sel-suppression when put next to a high skilled and dominant personality collaborator that previously occupied a top tier hierarchical relationship to me was revelead equally in the part (workshop) and whole (residence). After all, the contract with Mephistofeles took it’s toll on me when curiosity and thirsty for knowledge left me paralyzed by the master’s voice, the short term reward for power may have closed doors that would take long term effort and care, the trickster never leaves empty handed and the phenomena lives.

The fractal in the Catete92 experiment may true also, imprevisibility of random interactions with unexpected results in unmediated collaborative spaces can eventually create bonds between people and take strangers to China.

Erik Rodrigues is currently pioneering a neighborhood mobilization platform (Meier +) and cocreating development projects in North Zone Rio. He is also working as the facilitator of Ação project in Chácara do Céu Favela. All his projects deal with civic engagement and citizenship development, helping to form leadership amongst the youth of specific territories. He is a Fellow of Trasnational Dialogues 2015-16.