JLAG Perspectives: Videography for Participatory Cartography in a Site of Wind Power Conflict in Coastal Ceará State, Brazil

Installed wind power capacity in Brazil expanded rapidly from 28.6 megawatts (MW) in 2005 to 10.6 gigawatts (GW) installed electrical capacity in 2016-roughly a 37,000 percent increase in just over a decade. Here, we discuss the process of creating a 20-minute video, "We Made Our Map: Territory, Participatory Cartography, and Wind Power in the West Coast of Ceará, Brazil" (LabocartUFC 2016), which shows results of a participatory mapping project that helped a traditional community secure land rights when threatened by a wind farm. After many complaints by Xavier residents, in 2013 the wind power firm donated R$540,000 (approximately US$130,000) to the Xavier community association for the construction of twenty-two brick houses, one per family, to mitigate the negative impacts of the wind farm. In 2014, project leaders Gorayeb and Meireles decided to make a documentary film about the problems caused by the wind farm in the Xavier community, and on the stages of cartography applied to community resistance, resource access, and traditional livelihoods.