SASA is an encounter. A cooperation. A table of communion. An amalgam of stories, voices, and new as well as different paths—of possibilities and connections. It is also vocation and affection: a journey that asks us how to reinvent alliances from the ruins and fertilities of the present. SASA is, above all, listening—listening to the waters, to struggles, to territories, and to ourselves.

A river, said Nêgo Bispo, converges with many waters, in many directions, without ceasing to be a river. Our own river flows meet in the generous curves of the Indian and Pacific Oceans of Malaysia, and then continue, vast, toward the opulent waters of the Brazilian Atlantic. These are waters that carry deep memories, ancestral encounters, long-bleeding yearnings, and promises sprouting through the cracks of time. SASA is this river in motion: made of confluences, yet with its own body. It stitches together riverbanks, brings geographies closer, and intertwines lives. In doing so, it proposes a path of return to a possible humanity—a humanity that is moved by the beauty of life and committed to the knowledges that truly matter.

SASA has gathered—and continues to gather—ideas about what it means to live a simple, wonderful life. Not in the sense of consumption or idealism, but in the ethics of the commons, in the poetics of sharing. A life built together, that welcomes uncomfortable voices, listens to absences, and recognizes silences. SASA is also a space of denunciation: of colonial violence, of slavery and exile, of the scars that still mark bodies and territories. But above all, it is a space of affirmation: of insurgent knowledges, of voices that persist, of communities that heal.

“SASA” is a nickname for a larger name: South America and Southeast Asia. It is a project, but also a process. It brought together diverse people—from different parts of the world, with different knowledges, cultures, and languages—working in Brazil, Malaysia, and the United Kingdom. It was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), a British government agency dedicated to supporting research in the arts and humanities. But more than funding, SASA was a wager: a wager on the power of encounter, on collective intelligence, and on the real possibility of redesigning forms of partnership that do not replicate colonial hierarchies or extractivist dynamics.

The Brazilian team was diverse in both background and trajectory: coming from law, the arts, social sciences in health, and environmental and cultural activism. We carried with us stories, bonds of affection, and commitments to the territories where we work, research, and live. During the workshop, we developed our own methodologies, created sensitive tools for listening, and proposed dialogues that avoided rigid formats. Research—with a mixed approach and a carefully approved ethical design—was both instrument and language: a means for listening and for producing robust scientific evidence.

We invited representatives from civil society, community leaders, cultural organizations, grassroots collectives, artists of diverse practices, public and private agents, researchers, and representatives of funding agencies. Invitations were extended through different channels, seeking to achieve genuine diversity. What emerged was an affective and political mapping of the voices that, today in Brazil, think and practice the arts and humanities in transformative ways.