From the Festival to the Constitution

FALAN and the LATAM Constitutional NeuroChallenge

The final performance ends.

The artists leave the stage.

The audience crosses the corridors, encounters other people, and returns to the city.

But the questions awakened by dance do not remain inside the theater.

Who was able to enter?

Who had access to transportation?

Who had time to watch?

Who could understand the available information?

Who was able to move safely?

Who found accessibility?

Who had to work while others participated?

Whose body, culture, and way of existing were recognized?

Dance reveals that no movement is purely individual.

For a body to dance, watch, rest, create, and participate, a network of material, cultural, political, and environmental conditions is necessary.

Every visible choreography rests upon an invisible Constitution of possibilities.

The Constitution is not found only in courts.

It appears in the ground upon which we may walk, in the water we may drink, in the time we have to rest, in the school that teaches, in the public square that welcomes, and in the right to express the body without fear.

The Dance Festival may therefore become an existential laboratory.

Not to decide by itself which laws should exist, but to reveal which conditions allow different Body-Territories to flourish together.

When Powers Lose Their Independence

The separation of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches was created to prevent a single force from making the rules, enforcing them, and judging the results according to its own interests.

Their independence is never absolute. The branches need to communicate.

But they must also limit one another.

The problem becomes deeper when we observe other powers that organize society:

science;

politics;

religion;

the financial system;

the media;

and, today, digital platforms.

These fields do not possess a separation equivalent to that established among the formal branches of the State.

They may correct one another.

They may also form alliances and feedback circuits.

An economic interest finances a particular line of scientific production.

Selected scientific findings give an appearance of neutrality to a political decision.

Politics transforms that interpretation into a rule.

Religious leadership offers moral legitimacy.

The media repeats the narrative.

Digital platforms amplify whatever generates the greatest reaction.

Public reaction is then presented as proof that the narrative was true.

The circuit begins again.

When one power produces the justification for another, society may lose the ability to distinguish where evidence ended and interest began.

This does not mean that every scientist, politician, religious leader, businessperson, or journalist participates in a single conspiracy.

Capture may emerge without a coordinated center.

Each institution seeks funding, influence, audience, votes, authority, or survival. When their incentives align, a positive feedback loop may strengthen the same direction without a single ruler controlling the entire system.

This is a systemic risk.

It does not depend only on individual wrongdoing.

It depends on the architecture of relationships.

The Old Colonial Machine

Colonialism was not merely the arrival of foreign people in a territory.

It was the construction of a machine capable of deciding:

who could speak;

which knowledge would be called truth;

which spirituality would be considered legitimate;

which body could circulate;

which land could be exploited;

and which forms of suffering would be treated as the inevitable cost of progress.

This machine does not necessarily disappear when colonies become republics.

It may continue within laws, universities, economic systems, media institutions, and the categories used to define development.

The colonial model separates what life keeps connected.

It separates body from territory.

Economy from biome.

Science from the community being studied.

Politics from the physiological consequences of its decisions.

Religion from the freedom of those who do not share its faith.

Data from the person who produced it.

Profit from the damage left to future generations.

Within the BrainLatam proposal, this separation forms a colonial local optimum: a system capable of producing wealth, rules, technology, and authority while remaining unable to recognize everything it must destroy in order to continue operating.

A system may be efficient at accumulation and profoundly incompetent at sustaining life.

Decolonial criticism does not require the abandonment of every modern institution.

It asks which institutions continue to organize Latin America as a territory available for the extraction of matter, attention, data, labor, and hope.

The Capture of Feeling

Colonial control does not operate only through force.

It also operates through the organization of feeling.

Politics offers fear.

Advertising offers desire.

Financial markets offer urgency.

Religion may offer guilt or salvation.

The media selects what receives visibility.

Platforms select what remains before our eyes.

When these stimuli confirm one another, the Body-Territory may begin to live inside a single narrative.

A person feels afraid because they continuously receive signals of danger.

The repetition of fear produces audience engagement.

Audience engagement produces profit and influence.

Profit finances new messages.

Public reaction is used to justify new political decisions.

In this way, a feedback loop is formed that captures attention, emotion, and belonging.

UNESCO warns that platforms organized to maximize engagement may favor misinformation, hate speech, and extreme content. Its guidelines therefore advocate systemic governance, transparency, and the protection of human rights.

In Latin America, the concentration of media ownership is also a democratic concern. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has stated that monopolies and oligopolies reduce the plurality of information and opinions available to society.

Those who control which inner movements are repeatedly activated may influence which futures a population is able to imagine.

For this reason, the protection of attention is not merely an individual concern.

It may become a constitutional issue.

Science Is Not the New Sovereign

Neuroscience may investigate how insecurity, inequality, noise, pollution, isolation, accessibility, contact with nature, sleep, and cultural participation affect the organism.

It may measure heart rate, cortisol, sleep, attention, memory, EEG, fNIRS, and other indicators.

It may reveal that certain conditions are associated with suffering, development, or recovery.

But it should not decide constitutional values by itself.

A brain scan does not determine what justice is.

A biomarker does not decide who deserves rights.

A physiological correlation does not replace the experience of affected communities.

Science informs democracy.

It must not become its queen.

Neuroscience can show what certain conditions do to the body.
Society must still decide democratically which bodies it intends to protect and which world it intends to sustain.

This distinction also protects science itself.

When science moves too close to political, economic, or religious power, it may select questions that do not threaten its funders and offer answers that legitimize decisions already made.

Scientific independence requires diversified funding, methodological transparency, auditable data, academic freedom, and the participation of studied populations.

FALAN, the Federation of Latin American and Caribbean Neuroscience Societies, exists as a regional network for scientific societies, collaboration, and training. Its 2026 Congress in Santiago seeks to gather researchers from across the region for scientific exchange.

The LATAM Constitutional NeuroChallenge, however, is presented here as a BrainLatam proposal for dialogue, not as an officially approved FALAN program.

This distinction matters.

A scientific federation may open spaces.

It should not be used as an advance seal of approval for a proposal that still needs to be discussed, criticized, and collectively transformed.

The LATAM Constitutional NeuroChallenge

The LATAM Constitutional NeuroChallenge is not intended to deliver a finished Constitution.

It is intended to organize questions that may travel through schools, universities, laboratories, festivals, neighborhoods, Indigenous communities, Quilombola communities, disability movements, artistic groups, and public institutions.

The first question would not be:

“Which brain region explains democracy?”

It would be:

“Which conditions allow different Body-Territories to participate in democratic construction without abandoning their worlds?”

From there, dance reveals a constitutional agenda.

The Right to Movement

Movement is not merely muscular displacement.

It is the ability to circulate through the city, play, dance, work, rest, and occupy public spaces without physical, economic, or symbolic barriers.

The Right to Culture

Culture is not decoration added after basic needs.

It is one of the ways through which people build memory, belonging, expression, and continuity.

The Right to Rest and Recovery

A State that protects production while ignoring sleep, pause, leisure, and recovery turns exhaustion into a civic obligation.

Freedom of Bodily Expression

No person should be forced to hide their body, dance, disability, identity, or way of existing in order to be recognized as a citizen.

Inclusion and Accessibility

Participation cannot depend on a body considered standard.

Environments must be transformed by the differences they welcome.

Protection of Attention

Human attention should not be treated merely as free raw material for advertising, political propaganda, and data extraction.

Data Sovereignty

Health, behavior, movement, and attention data should not leave Body-Territories and return only as surveillance, classification, or private profit.

Community Health

Health does not begin only at the hospital.

It begins with food, water, housing, education, safety, relationships, culture, and the possibility of participation.

Public Spaces

Squares, theaters, schools, forests, rivers, and streets are structures of coexistence, not merely assets available for monetization.

Plural Belonging

The State must protect the possibility of many cultures, spiritualities, and ways of life coexisting without one of them capturing public institutions.

Continuity of Biomes

No human right can endure for long when water, soil, climate, and biodiversity no longer sustain life.

The Escazú Agreement offers an important Latin American foundation by connecting the environment, access to information, public participation, and access to justice.

It recognizes that protecting the environment also requires protecting people’s ability to participate in decisions that affect their territories.

DANA and the Continuity of Life

In BrainLatam language, DANA functions as a conceptual window for thinking about the intelligence of life’s continuity.

This does not mean that DNA possesses a conscious mind, creates laws, or holds political intentions.

DNA participates in biological processes of inheritance, expression, and adaptation. DANA expands this image to ask which conditions allow living systems to continue existing, varying, and relating to their environments.

DANA should not be presented as a scientifically validated neuroscientific mechanism.

It is a BrainLatam philosophical and ecological hypothesis.

Its constitutional question would be simple:

Does a decision that produces wealth now preserve the possibility of life later?

An economic system that destroys rivers, forests, and communities in order to generate growth may increase financial indicators while reducing the territory’s capacity for continuity.

A Constitution grounded in the Body-Territory would not ask only how much was produced.

It would ask:

What remained alive?

Who received the benefits?

Who was left with the damage?

Which choices will remain available to future generations?

The Responsible State

A responsible State is not a State that controls every gesture.

It is one that guarantees the conditions necessary for people to develop agency.

It does not choose the citizen’s religion.

It protects religious freedom and the freedom not to have a religion.

It does not choose the meaning of an artwork.

It protects the conditions in which the work may exist and be debated.

It does not impose a single way of life.

It prevents powerful groups from destroying the conditions necessary for the existence of others.

The responsibility of the State is not to replace personal authorship.
It is to prevent freedom from becoming a privilege available only to those who can buy it.

The responsible State must also be metacognitive.

It must create rules.

Act.

Observe consequences.

Review its own decisions.

This is the collective application of the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches.

But checks and balances must also reach science, religion, finance, media, and technology.

We may ask:

Who funded this study?

Who profits from this law?

Who controls this media outlet?

Who defines the algorithm?

Who will be able to use the data?

Which religious group influences a decision that will become mandatory for people of other faiths?

Who can challenge the dominant interpretation?

Transparency in these relationships is part of democratic health.

Relational Prosperity

The colonial model presents prosperity as the capacity to accumulate.

Relational prosperity asks whether the wealth of one part strengthens or destroys the conditions of existence of others.

Does a company prosper when its community becomes ill?

Does a city prosper when its rivers disappear?

Does a market prosper when it transforms insecurity into interest payments?

Does a platform prosper when it captures children’s attention?

Does science prosper when it collects data from a population that never receives the benefits of the research?

Does a religion prosper when its expansion depends on fear and exclusion?

Prosperity that requires the impoverishment of relationships is not collective prosperity.
It is the transfer of life.

Relational prosperity means that the development of one Body-Territory expands, or at least does not destroy, the possibilities of others and of the shared biome.

It does not require the absence of conflict.

It requires that conflict can be expressed, examined, and transformed without one party holding absolute power over another.

From Jiwasa to the Constitution

True Jiwasa is not a single collective mind.

Nor is it a State ordering everyone to feel the same thing.

It is a relational field capable of protecting belonging and difference.

A Constitution inspired by this principle would not attempt to eliminate the Weichö.

It would create conditions in which many ways of world could participate in common life.

The artist could express themselves.

The audience could disagree.

A person with a disability could transform the space.

An Indigenous community could defend its territory without translating its entire existence into economic language.

The scientist could investigate without becoming the owner of constitutional truth.

The religious person could live their faith without turning it into a public obligation.

The market could produce without acquiring the right to destroy what it did not create.

The media could inform without concentrating all reality in a few hands.

Technology could expand capacities without turning attention and data into private colonies.

A living Constitution does not force everyone to follow the same choreography.
It protects the ground on which different movements may coexist.

From the Question to the Continent

The Festival ends.

But perhaps its most important work is only beginning.

FALAN may bring Latin American researchers closer together.

The LATAM Constitutional NeuroChallenge may carry questions into schools, laboratories, and communities.

Dance may reveal what indicators fail to perceive.

Neuroscience may investigate bodily consequences.

Anthropology may reveal historical and territorial relationships.

Ecology may demonstrate the limits of the biome.

Law may transform collective commitments into institutional guarantees.

Ancestral knowledge may remind us that no Constitution created the rivers, forests, or life it intends to govern.

No field should dominate all the others.

Each must offer its perception and accept counterweights.

Perhaps this is the independence of powers we still need to construct.

Not only among the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches.

But among all the forces capable of producing truth, belief, money, visibility, and obedience.

Democracy begins to become ill when institutions stop observing one another and begin only confirming one another.

The LATAM Constitutional NeuroChallenge is intended to interrupt this automatic confirmation.

Not with a final truth.

With public questions.

Questions that can be criticized.

Questions that return to communities.

Questions that are not afraid to modify their own rules.

The question that closes this series is:

Which constitutional conditions allow every Body-Territory to move, develop, participate in Jiwasa, and prosper without destroying the biomes that sustain its existence?

Perhaps a Constitution should not tell everyone which dance to perform.

It must ensure that living bodies, habitable territories, free attention, protected data, accessible spaces, and many rhythms remain capable of creating the next movement.

References and Contributions

ECLAC. Regional Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Justice in Environmental Matters in Latin America and the Caribbean — Escazú Agreement. In force since 2021; implementation guidance updated in 2024.
Contribution: connects environmental protection, information, participation, and justice, offering a regional architecture for environmental democracy.

ECLAC. Guide to Public Participation in the Institutional Architecture of the Escazú Agreement. 2026.
Contribution: shows that environmental protection requires concrete mechanisms for public participation and institutional oversight.

UNESCO. Guidelines for the Governance of Digital Platforms. 2023.
Contribution: proposes a systemic, human-rights-based approach to transparency, freedom of expression, access to information, and platform accountability.

INTER-AMERICAN COMMISSION ON HUMAN RIGHTS. Standards for Free, Open, Diverse, Plural, and Inclusive Digital Television.
Contribution: warns that media concentration limits plurality and may weaken democracy.

SUÁREZ, Marcela. Terrestrial Politics and Body-Territory: Two Concepts to Make Sense of Digital Colonialism in Latin America. 2022.
Contribution: connects body, territory, and digital colonialism, showing that data and technological exploitation remain tied to material power relations.

KRENAK, Ailton. Ancestral Future. 2022.
Contribution: invites us to understand the future through the continuity of life, rivers, and territories rather than treating nature as an external setting for politics.

FALAN — Federation of Latin American and Caribbean Neuroscience Societies. Scientific network and IV FALAN Congress, Santiago, 2026.
Contribution: provides a regional infrastructure for collaboration, exchange, and the development of Latin American neuroscience. This does not imply official endorsement of BrainLatam proposals.

BRAINLATAM; CIONEK, Jackson. LATAM NeuroChallenge — Questions for a New World. 2026.
Contribution: proposes transforming questions into research, knowledge, and regional cooperation.

BRAINLATAM; CIONEK, Jackson. Body-Territory Constitution. 2026.
Contribution: proposes connecting law, body, territory, participation, biomes, and intergenerational responsibility.

BRAINLATAM; CIONEK, Jackson. Responsible, Secular, Democratic State Under the Rule of Law.
Contribution: proposes that the State protect conditions of existence and development without capturing citizens’ subjectivity.

BRAINLATAM; CIONEK, Jackson. DANA — DNA Intelligence and the Continuity of Life.
Contribution: offers a conceptual window for thinking about ecological prosperity and the continuity of living systems. DANA should not be presented as literal DNA consciousness or as a validated scientific mechanism.

Conceptual note: The LATAM Constitutional NeuroChallenge, the Body-Territory Constitution, DANA, the responsible State, and relational prosperity are BrainLatam formulations under development. They may guide public and scientific questions, but they do not constitute established legal, political, or neuroscientific consensus.

The sentence that closes the series in English is:

A just Constitution does not choose a single dance for the people. It protects bodies, territories, and biomes so that many movements remain possible.