HERA is a project I created some years ago. Initially born as a movement dedicated to women all over the world, HERA actually is acting worldwide in the field of women dimension; always respecting the woman as a special sensitivity and as a bright dimension of intelligence. Soon it became clear to me that in fact it was a project for the good of Humanity.
In 2018 I invited Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta, whom I admire as a person, as a friend and as a professional, to create a planetary observatory, an entity in which new ideas from the most diverse disciplines, from the most different cultures, could come together, generating new dimensions of human knowledge. Emanuel Pimenta has been involved in this kind of projects since the 1980s.
Every year the Observatory
for the Future of Humanity will join at the magnificent city
of Cascais, in Portugal, some of the most amazing thinkers of
the world. Thanks to Covid-19 the OFH program was postponed to
2021 and beyond. But other events will happen! You are invited
to attend these magical moments! We are waiting for you!
Marianela Mirpuri HERA Project - President In 1987 I started working with René Berger, Rinaldo Bianda and his son the photographer Lorenzo Bianda at the first worldwide festival of video and electronic art, in Locarno, Switzerland. That festival included an international transdisciplinary meeting, which Berger callled a "planetary Observatory". There we had marvelous people, like Nam June Paik, Francis Ford Copolla, Tim Berners-Lee, Pierre Levy, Madeleine Gobeil, Philippe Queau, Edgar Morin, Joseph Brenner, Bsarab Nicolescu, Daniel Charles, Pierre Restany and many more. It was a place of discovery! René Berger was one of my best friends in life and I could never forget him. In the deepest of my soul, the Observatory for the Future of Humanity is, is a personal hommage to an unforgetable friend. All my thanks to Marianela Mirpuri for her so kind and sensitive invitation. I hope the Observatory will develop greatly over the years, and I sincerely thanks for everyone participation. In 2020, with the Covid-19 virus, we lived a true destruction of our lives - everything became forbidden: many travels, parties, exhibitions, concerts, kisses... the human became threatened. The only way to recover our economy (because economy is human) is to first recover our human dimension, our love for art, for knowledge, for culture - which, in last instance, is the knowledge of ourselves. Without that, our civilization will be lost. The Observatory has the function, within its limitations, to make each one of us into an observer, and through the wonder recall who we are, projecting a new Renaissance. Emanuel Pimenta
Observatory for the Future
of Humanity
Cascais 2020
HERA International
Premise
Every day we see the emergence
of new scientific discoveries, the emergence of complex economic,
geo-strategic, financial structures, changes in old social values,
new media, a dizzying acceleration of information, scientific
discoveries heralding new horizons for life, alarming discoveries
regarding the environment and biodiversity.
The dizzying wave of change, with signs of all nature, causes
people to wonder about the future, people, future generations
and the planet.
The future depends on us. It belongs to the new world that announces
itself every day.
The Observatory for the Future of Humanity is an integral part
of Hera-International, a non-profit institution created and directed
by Marianela Mirpuri, based in Lisbon, which legally incorporates
the Hera movement and future Hera cities.
The HERA movement started approximately twenty years ago, albeit
informally, with the aim of raising awareness on the importance
of women sensitivity.
Hera is a non-governmental cooperation development organization,
with no political, racial, religious or philosophical leaning,
aimed at promoting active global civic interventions in the areas
of the defence of peace, economic development, the environment
and an energetically sustainable human society, reciprocal knowledge
and tolerance between peoples and cultures, the pursuit of human
development, poverty reduction through good governance and research
and scientific development - as laid out in its statutes.
The HERA Movement materializes itself in a physical space: the
HERA city arises in honour of women and the future of humanity.
Although HERA is a vast project for the good of human beings in
general, the Observatory for the Future of Humanity is an independent
development, even though it is integrated, constituting a synergistic
force.
The Observatory for the Future of Humanity also aims to lay the
foundations for the creation of the HERA Institute for Advanced
Studies, which will be located outside Portugal.
Cascais
The Observatory for the
Future of Humanity has its main offices in Cascais.
With one of the best climates in the world, a highly valued cuisine,
a history of almost seven hundred years, Cascais has become one
of the main business tourism destinations in Portugal in the 21st
century, as well a meeting place for knowledge and cultural exchange,
enhancing the culture and spirit of discovery.
The Observatory
The word observatory
- closely linked to the observation of astronomical phenomena,
the cosmos - arises from the Latin observeare, to "observe"
in Portuguese, which in turn arises from the fusion of the Latin
particle ob - with the meaning of "towards" or
"upon something ", and from the old Indo-European root
*ser (a prehistoric linguistic ensemble that disappeared
about twenty thousand years ago) which indicated the idea of "protecting".
The ancient etymological meaning of the word observatory
literally tells us something "oriented towards protection".
Thus, in a way unexpected by many, the idea of the observatory
has, at its earliest roots, the principle of caring, of healing,
which inevitably implies the future.
But that does not mean that it is any kind of futurology. On the
contrary! One takes care of the future by understanding the present
more deeply - particularly what, at the present time, is change,
discovery and invention.
In this way, the idea of an Observatory for the Future of Humanity
indicates a precise concept: a place, group of people, who observe
and analyse the elements of the present that could have an impact
on future reality. It can also happens online, thorugh a cloud
of information for observation, as it happens in the AIW Project.
A multidisciplinary complex constitutes all reality.
Thus, the Observatory will be characterized not only by the meeting
of various disciplines, but also by thinkers from different cultures
and places of the world.
It is about International Meetings, open to the public, where
communicability, open interaction with the audience, the high
cultural level - not being pedantic - could establish a landmark
in Cascais.
At those International Meetings, texts and materials will be produced
with the purpose of being published and distributed internationally.
AIW Project
AIW is an Indo-European word, which generated the Greek aion - indicating vital force, a period of existence, a lifetime. It is the root of "eon". Part of the Observatory for the Future of Humanity, online, it happens as a virtual meeting point for observation.
AIW is now a Facebook Project and an online TV Channel.