Contextualization of human experience in a built-up environment
This part of the chapter brings the experience lived in the 17th Congress of Meth-odology holding in Hämeenlinna, Finland in 2018 with the theme Human and Na-ture. The section “Relationship between human beings and nature in the Amazon area” was organized by a Brazilian researcher, Carolina Correa de Carvalho, who presented her personal impressions from experience at Amazon, Brazil. She showed the landscape of the Amazon rainforest and talked about the native’s relationship with nature, animals and the environment. As a complementary experience, the researcher with the teachers from Gira Mundo program, built up an environment called “Amazon Room”. The main point was to design a tropical experience room that allows the participants to experience the Amazon rainforest during wintertime in Finland. The idea was to create circumstances totally different from the circum-stances that the visitors get to use, characterized as a continental subarctic or boreal climate. What were the necessary elements for that? Creativity and collaboration between the Brazilian group.
The “Amazon room” provided an experience of immersion and interaction with the Amazon rainforest and its mysticism allowed visitors to experience the warmth, col-ors, sounds, aromas, legends, people, culture and life of the Amazon rainforest.
Building up the Amazon Room
The Amazon rainforest is the world’s largest rainforest located in the north of South America covering the Brazilian states as Amazonas, Acre, Amapá, Rondônia, Pará and Roraima, and also other countries; Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador,
Boliv-ia, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana (Magalhães, 2019). In the Brazilian side, there are more than 30 thousand species of plants, 1.8 thousand of continental fish, 1.3 thousand of birds, 311 of mammals and 163 of amphibians. Amazonia also has a huge socio-cultural diversity with 1.6 million indigenous people (Carneiro Filho, 2009).
Thinking in this wide diversity and in the Amazon climate, the “Amazon room” was built using technology, live plants, controlled atmosphere, and people dressed as na-tive Indians to represent the enormous biodiversity of the Amazon rainforest. Attri-butes as temperature, humidity, water, soil, the “voices” of the forest, the animals, as well as the songs of the indigenous peoples brought to the participant a reality quite different from the Finnish forest.
The Six Islands
The starting point of building up the “Amazon room” was the idealization of the room. We organized and designed the room into six small islands, in order to repre-sent the main characteristic of the Amazon rainforest. They are reprerepre-sented in Image
Image 3 – Layout of Amazon Room Experience – Drawing by the authors
3, the layout of the Amazon room, showing each planned island: soil’s island, water’s island, plant’s island, fire’s island, animal’s island and forest’s island.
The soil’s island was thought in order to represent the soil of the Amazon rainforest.
Indeed, the Amazon soil is considered poor of nutrients but has a unique feature com-ing from the humus formed by the decomposition of organic matter, i.e. leaves, flowers, animals and fruits (Magalhães, 2019). To represent this soil, the Brazilian group col-lected soil from outside HAMK University of Applied Sciences, where the conference was held. This soil is covered by gravel and humidified, becoming a soft and fluffy soil.
The water’s island was designed to represent the abundance of water and also to bring one of the most well-known species of plants from the forests of igapó, one of the characteristic forests of Amazonia, the vitória-régia (Linhares & Gewandsznaj-der, 1998). Also, on that island, the Brazilian group made use of a vertical television to show a video from a waterfall with natural sounds during the visitor’s tour. In ad-dition, we represent with fabric and origami paper the Amazon flour vitória-régia.
The plant’s island was designed to represent the dense tropical forest as well as the equatorial climate characterized by high temperatures (from 22 to 28 °C) and high humidity that can exceed 80% (Magalhães, 2019; Linhares & Gewandsznajder, 1998). To represent that we have used around 10 palms from the HAMK campus, an ambient humidifier in order to simulate this moistly environment and the tem-perature of the room was raised.
The fire’s island was thought in order to bring the presence of life in the jungle by the native Indians, firewood and Indian Hollow (knowing in Brazil as Oca). To repre-sent the native Indians living in the jungle, a pair of Brazilian teachers painted their bodies using indigenous drawings and dressed using colorful clouds, articles such as feathers and seed collars. Also, the couple was singing an indigenous song during the tour involving the visitors into a native dance, inviting them to taste coconut wa-ter and participate in the dance ritual. The couple also sat down around an artificial bonfire made by wood in which a strong red light was used, and speakers brought more reality with a bonfire sound.
The animal’s island was set up using two televisions at the eye level to bring the visi-tor the idea of being close to the animals. Two videos gave animation for this expe-rience. The first screen was set up with a video from jaguar hunting in the Amazon rainforest showing your strong body and how this kind of animal is at the top of the
food chain in the jungle. According to Dillinger (2018), the jaguar is an important animal in the Amazon rainforest and has the strongest bite force of all the predatory felines. The second video brings the Amazonian wild monkeys in the high tropical trees representing the fauna biodiversity.
The forest’s island was representing from two data-show using a fabric of approxi-mately five meters to project an Amazon forest image, showing the density and the height of the trees. This island was covered by many leaves collected from the sur-roundings of the university (Finnish late winter leaves). These leaves with humidity bring the perfect environment for our artificial environment.
The atmosphere and environment
The atmosphere and environment were designed to represent the typical tropical rainforest. The group set up the air conditioner temperature to the highest tempera-ture of the air conditioner, around 22 ºC. The humidity was set up as mentioned before and we have covered the windows to provide a dark environment represented by the tops of the dense trees that gather at the top of the forest, making the entrance of sunlight when in the middle of the forest. Finally, we have set up a main sound in the room using Amazon rainforest with a diversity of birds singing and with the sound of rain and thunderstorms, typical of tropical forests.
Five Human Senses
In order to motivate the visitors to interact with the environment, we use the native In-dian to guide the tour. Also, we encourage them to try new experiences and feelings.
During the construction of the Amazon, we try to build opportunities so that the visitors could use their five human senses: touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste during the tour.
Touch everything on the room, sight all visual stimuli, listening to the loud and diverse sound from the nature, animals and climatic conditions of the Amazon rainforest, smell the wet leaves and most environmental and taste coconut water and tropical fruits.
Participants’ experiences
The room visit took place in groups of 10 people guided by Brazilians dressed as in-digenous peoples in order to strengthen the reference and reaffirm the importance of these peoples. The visitor, upon entering the room, was invited to stand barefoot in order to be exposed to the soil, water, leaves and mostly to experience the entire
process of immersion. During the tour, the participants were invited to experience the whole experience: Stepping on the wet ground covered with dry leaves, feeling the scents of the plants, the flowers of the fruits, the fluidity of the water, the heat of the fire, the sharing of indigenous songs and dances. Also, the visitors were invited to dance with the natives that were walking around and singing natives songs. The tour lasted approximately 20 minutes.
After the tour, the visitors report their personal experiences and feelings, writing on a virtual wall with photos and words about the experience and others just comment-ed on their personal experiences. In general, the reports show that the participants really enjoy the experience, and they have had different feelings during the tour. Cu-rious comments about the sounds like “feels like a concert of sounds and singing”
and “voice and sounds as a peaceful atmosphere” show that the environment brings unique feelings for each human being. Other comments were about the richness, real and deep experience that the Amazon room provokes in the visitor suggesting that even though the experience came from a built-up environment, the humans can be related with it and have diverse and real feelings.
The experience of the Amazonian room gave new opportunities to Finns and other foreigners. But at the same time, it brought to the Brazilians group, who built up the environment, new possibilities to know their own culture, to be close to their own roots since only one member of the group had the opportunity to get to know the Amazonia in loco. This experience made this event a mimetic and cathartic experi-ence. Even if it differs from that one lived by foreigners, it culminated in an epiphany experience since it gave us new knowledge about ourselves and our cultural tradi-tions, now lived in a built environment not just known theoretically. We do believe that using the living environment constructed with technologies and tools bring the section emotion in the Brazilian culture and diversity very deeply.
The process of creating the room can also be translated as a moment of learning and singular professional growth, because at all times we were required the ability to work collectively, solve problems, find solutions, adapt materials, become a learning subject when accepting a challenge of this magnitude. These challenges are essential to our development. It is interesting to notice this double relationship while trying to offer a subjective experience, sensorial to the visitors of the room; we ourselves are stimulated to undergo a personal experience of growth and self-knowledge, which for us is very important. Also, we realize that a living environment provided
differ-ent relationships, experiences, and self-knowledge from that experience, natural and cultural ones even though the experience is made by an artificial environment. The technology connected to human creativity can enable the construction of a rich, real and lively environment in which man could relate to nature bring up unique feelings and experiences.
Conclusion
In this chapter, we seek to report in two perspectives the coexistence with climat-ic diversity, through the observation and experience of Brazilians who had the op-portunity to make an international exchange in the academic field. The first report brings the case of humans facing a natural environment resulting in a unique ex-perience, showing that interaction with environment depends on the subjectivity of each one as an individual, as Cabral (2000) mentions in his humanist perspective.
This perspective suggests the idea that climatic conditions change the way a human lives. The second report brings the case of human facing a built environment using technologies and tools, showing that despite the experience of built up the envi-ronmental or to experience it is possible to affirm that each person had a personal interaction with it. Therefore, when it comes to coexistence in a “natural” or an “ar-tificial” environment, in the case of our exchanges, each of us faces this experience from our perspectives, yearnings, expectations and emotional and intellectual ma-turity, as Chen et al. (2015) affirm that the individuality of each experience is about the physical perceptions of each being in dealing with natural diversity not only in the subjective aspect.
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