"This work of reclaiming memory is filled with a lot of affection, to look at where we've been walking, and what remains of our footprints."
They were from Brasília, Goiânia, Belo Horizonte, São Paulo and other towns across Brazil. More importantly, it was 2005 and they were all on email lists and IRC chatrooms. These particular spaces were focused on women and technology. And from those spaces sprang Birosca, a sparkling feminist movement in Brazil that ran from 2005 to 2012, and eventually had its own virtual server called Baderna, named after Marieta Baderna, the dancer from Rio. Baderna also means ‘disturbance’ in Portuguese, an allusion to how activists are often perceived.
Cristina ‘Kit’ Barretto de Menezes Lopes was part of Birosca from the beginning. Menezes remembered, “I learned a lot.” She laughed, “I had a car, so sometimes I would handle transportation for the many needs that came up.” Menezes deeply valued those six years of Birosca and retraces those years in her new documentary, Birosca: Care, Women and Technology.
She was among the first round of recipients of the APC Women’s Rights Programme’s Feminist #TechJoy small grants, which facilitated the production of this half-hour long documentary film in the first six months of 2024. “This work of reclaiming memory is filled with a lot of affection,” she said. “These are relationships that make us revisit personal processes, to look at where we've been walking, and what remains of our footprints.”
Building an internet of possibility
It was a particular moment in the history of the internet in 2005. In Brazil, the government supported digital inclusion and the adoption of FLOSS. In the documentary, Menezes interviews several members of the collective, one of whom reminisces how nobody needed a username or password to publish on the website. The internet was still an open space. It’s hard to remember now, but it wasn’t that long ago.
“It was a very important moment that marked the beginning of the popularisation of the internet,” Menezes wrote in the project report for APC. “This turning point of the web that enabled silenced voices to be amplified and facilitated new forms of organisation. The idea of a free and autonomous internet was put into practice by young and vibrant hearts that planted seeds.”
"The idea of a free and autonomous internet was put into practice by young and vibrant hearts that planted seeds."
Birosca began with a group of women who were involved in the Global Network of Independent Media Centres, better known as Indymedia, a website for citizen journalism and the world’s first open source software, according to one interviewee in the film. As the project grew, “we felt the need to create a space for women in technology,” says Isabela ‘Toya’ Fernandes in the film, who was one of the founders of Birosca.
As a transfeminist collective, they worked on several techno-political issues that still pique us today, including private monopolies, deploying open source software and the restrictions by big corporations. The collective provided its own email services – not just out of pride, but to make a political point. Similarly, it was a political choice to use OSS like Cinelerra for video editing (even if it crashed a lot) and Audacity to edit audio. They worked on hardware and the software and were autonomous.
As she was shooting the interviews, Menezes heard a phrase repeated that stayed with her. Several women mentioned how working in the collective, they “‘learned how to learn’ because we were supporting each other, but it was us for us. So much of it was about paving the way ourselves, writing tutorials that didn’t exist. We learned so we could teach. It was a process of great generosity – with ourselves, with others, and with the process itself.”
This phrase became a key touchpoint as it triggered further memories for Menezes, “I felt very welcomed in Birosca, in that moment of time, because I was the oldest in the group but the youngest when it came to technology.” Menezes was 35 then and most of the other members were a decade younger. “I didn’t have the boldness they had to take things apart; I was afraid of breaking them. And there, in the project, I started to lose that fear of making mistakes.”
Learning, teaching and breaking gender norms while doing it
Working on technology was, of course, going against the grain of gender expectations, but Menezes has an intriguing insight that goes further on how the work on technology intersected with the activists’ lives. “Through our time in Birosca, we started to understand the difficulty of accessing technology as a taboo – it was the same taboo that had prevented us from knowing our own bodies…Breaking away from that gave us a powerful sense of autonomy, and we thought it was important to share that, to document this experience.”
This point is echoed by almost every person interviewed in the film. “We talked about the body, about technology, about the fear of not knowing enough,” said Karine ‘Foz’ Batista. Ianni Luna read out from old notes for a metarecycling and sexuality workshop that they conducted, discussing the parallels about knowing your own body and a piece of hardware, in opposition to the more usual, detached discourse around technology. “We made a point of having people tell us about themselves. We talked about our private lives in connection with technology.”
“No other collective was discussing the same things as us – feminism, gender and technology,” said Fernandes. “We talked about how society wouldn’t enable us to get to know ourselves sexually, just like not knowing how to open a PC and find out if that motherboard worked, and how it worked.”
Menezes and other women from the collective thought it was crucial to share this aspect and to document this experience. “Making the film made me revisit the importance of this desire to learn,” she added. “Because at that moment it wasn't clear, but now, looking back at this process through the film, it’s much clearer how important it was to have been part of it all.”
A legacy of thinking and nurturing
It’s hard to find Birosca on today’s internet with its fragile archives and flickering amnesia, but Menezes says the memory of Birosca is significant and hence its documentation is significant. The film premiered in June this year at the Casarão da Cultura in the city of Rio Claro, a significant audiovisual hub in the interior of São Paulo.
Fernandes says in the film that “Birosca is like a dandelion, it’s flown and spread out there. Each of us holds a part of it, we’re still friends.” Menezes too remembers Birosca as “bold, beautiful and poetic ... [which] lives on not only in the memories of those who lived through that moment but now, documented, so that others can know that this moment existed.” She added that she wanted the film “to provoke a tension through these discussions. to continue thinking, revisiting the paths, the milestones, the points of arrival. It's really good to know the history, the paths that others have taken for us to be where we are today, whether to learn from mistakes or to create new possibilities."
There is much evidence in the film of the value of such revisiting. As Aline Freitas says in the film, the collective opened up conversations so much beyond just technology. “Birosca gave me a feeling of being sheltered. I’d say that feeling made my life so much easier.”
Gaurav Jain is Lead Editor at APC. He is a seasoned editor, writer and media entrepreneur who co-founded the feminist digital media site, The Ladies Finger, and the award-winning longform media house, Grist Media. He has also been a literary and investigative journalist, research manager and content and community consultant.