Some projects begin with a product. This one begins with a territory. Montanha Encantada, the Enchanted Mountain, sits above the beach town of Garopaba in southern Brazil, and it is where Shama has spent years growing something slower and stranger than a startup: a living network of artists, land stewards, and neighbors who gather by the moon.
“Since 2001 I organized cultural events,” Shama says in the video interview recorded for this report. “But for 16 years I'm committed to just do impact projects.” That commitment has a lineage. From 2010 to 2019 it was called Novaterra, a decade of gatherings on this land that the pandemic finally paused. What regrew from that pause carries a bigger name: G.A.I.A, the Grand Alliance of Integrity and Autonomy, an attempt to weave regenerative projects, territories, and people into one connected system. The alliance's own field guide describes it as “not a company, an organization, a religion, or an ideology” but a living system, and asks a question that could double as its design brief: how might our governance function like a mycelial network?
The G.A.I.A Caravan is that philosophy on wheels. The plan is a traveling journey of thirteen gatherings, one each month and each tuned to the moon cycle, unfolding until the total solar eclipse of 2027. The caravan is literal: the crew already has two motorhomes, painted and draped and lived-in, and the intention to take what has taken root in Garopaba out to other territories. “Understanding the challenge of each territory and what's working over there,” as Shama puts it. Not a tour that extracts an audience from each stop, but a pollination route: arrive, listen, map, connect, move on.
Shama recorded the interview at home on the mountain, and the warmth is hard to miss. This is someone describing a garden, not pitching a company.
Shama on the caravan, in his own words.
A planting log
The season's progress reads like a planting log. Before the big journey began, the crew ran five smaller events to find their rhythm: silent disco nights where a candle-lit room full of dancers glows with red headphones, immersive sound journeys, guided meditations on the beach at sunset with a DJ mixing behind the speaker.
Twice they made land art on the sand, enormous mandalas and a raked map of the world, built precisely so that people walking the beach would stop, step inside, and ask what this was. “To call people to get involved in G.A.I.A EcoSystem,” Shama writes in the report, “the mother project that it is attached.”
Thirteen moons
Then the journey proper began. The first of the thirteen gatherings happened on July 25, the second on August 28, and the cadence continues month by month toward the eclipse. Around the events, the network is thickening in ways Shama counts carefully, the way a gardener counts what actually came up: about 200 people who now know and understand the project, roughly 15 holding its governance, and 40 to 50 more who show up active and often. “A lot of amazing artists already played with us,” Shama says. “Some spiritual leaders, ecosystemic leaders. And we want to gather them on different territories that we go.”
The crew around the caravan has grown too. Crystal Evans handles executive production; Jacob Huehn holds the role the project calls netweaver, which may be the most G.A.I.A job title imaginable: the person whose work is the connections themselves.
Thirty-five seconds inside a caravan gathering.
Where the resources go
Through Artizen, G.A.I.A Caravan has raised more than $50,000 to date across seasons, beginning with $4,000 in Season 6 ($2,000 in artifact sales matched by $2,000 in unlocked match funding) and growing many times over in Season 7. Against an original goal of $4,040, the project has already grown more than tenfold past what it first asked for. The resources go where the caravan goes: fuel and upkeep for the motorhomes, production for the monthly gatherings, and the slow work of mapping territories and the people tending them. “With the resource of Artizen we're going to keep evolving on this,” Shama says. “We're already on Season 7. Understanding the game, and bringing more people to play with us.”
Understanding the game, and bringing more people to play with us.
There is an old tension in regenerative work between staying and going. Roots need you to stay; networks need you to move. The G.A.I.A Caravan's answer is to do both: keep the mountain as home soil, and let the caravan carry seeds. Thirteen moons from now, when the sky goes dark for a few minutes in 2027, the crew intends to be somewhere on that route, surrounded by the people they gathered along the way.
“If you guys would like to be part of some of these events,” Shama says at the end of the interview, “it would be a pleasure.”
The invitation is open. The van is running.
Watch the caravan crew's events reel on Instagram.