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He was five years old, a little more or a little less. Sérgio Luciano ran to hide behind a curtain, his bare little feet giving away his location, right there in the living room. Sérgio lived in Barbacena, Minas Gerais. This was long before he took part in GSA 2014. When he was a child, he recalls, the news announced something like this:
“A person escaped today from the Municipal Asylum. We recommend caution.” Or something along those lines.
That was when young Sérgio became truly alert. So alert that he quickly realized the person wandering around town had entered his own kitchen. His mother was there. They met at the doorway. That was the moment he ran behind a curtain that covered almost his entire body, only his little feet sticking out; children are like that, they cover their eyes and think they have hidden their entire existence.
This is the memory Sérgio summons whenever he tries to stitch together the reasons and motivations for doing what he does, for living the life he lives. Alongside Laura Claessens, his partner in life and purpose, he founded Colab Colibri, which seeks to support the world in developing conscious communication. But that part of the story comes later. The dots are connected by looking back.
His mother stood in the kitchen, looking into the eyes of that person still wearing a loose white outfit, holding a mug. Little Sérgio was there too, hidden, attentive to everything as if that encounter were a movie on TV and he were watching it.
The mother’s first move was a hand on the man’s shoulder, inviting him to step into the backyard. He refused. On the second attempt, he agreed, and they walked out together. That moment shaped Sérgio’s way of seeing the world up to this day. He believes it shaped him for life.
“My mother tried a different approach. She got a cookie and some milk and offered them to him. They began to talk. She genuinely wanted to know how he was feeling and what he was looking for. They walked, sat outside the house, and waited for my father, who was nearby,” he said.
That was how Sérgio understood, in practice, that changing the way we look at places, things, and people transforms everything around us—externally and internally. The world insisted on seeing that person in one way; his mother saw him in another. Welcome, respect, attention, and intention defined that encounter.
“Since then”—something he only reflected on years later—“I have looked at society as a place where everyone wants to put a straitjacket on someone else instead of offering listening, instead of being truly inclusive,” he argues.
“Rather than seeing people as part of a constant polarization, I began to see each person with their own challenges and issues, different from mine. That’s precisely what makes each individual unique and interesting.”
One way to explain his work today is this: it is necessary to create safe spaces where people can meet, build, and support one another. Such spaces require people willing to renegotiate old ways of seeing the world.
Sérgio learned—and advocates—that we must read people and places beyond judgments, beyond what the eye immediately captures from reality.
“Violence does not begin with action, but with the way of thinking,” he said during the conversation.
There is a series of prejudices within us ready to leap ahead of our mouths before the first word is spoken, saying things like: there is only poverty here; there is no hope or talent here. There is nothing here.
“The Gaze comes from this place: perceiving what lies beyond judgment, beyond the surface, beyond the obvious. Because in the field of the obvious, I quickly divide between right and wrong.”
“Entering conversations, relationships, and places with a willingness to change glasses whenever necessary is what allows us to see things where many people have already given up.” The glasses, Sérgio explains, are our beliefs, what shapes each person’s identity. There are countless ways to see the same thing.
On Colibri’s website, there is a practical summary not only of Sérgio and Laura’s beliefs and values, but also of the theses he advocates. Notice the course titles: Deep Democracy: the art of listening to all voices; Deconstructing Images of the Enemy; Conflict: From Polarization to Dialogue, and so on.
Everything he offers the world revolves around changing the way we see what society has already crystallized as truth: not everyone truly has something to contribute; enemies are to be fought, not engaged in dialogue; I do not sit at the table with those who think differently, and so on.
When we enter situations with certain lenses, we are already captured by them—that was the first insight he offered. We have more lenses than the ones we use every day—that was the second. The third was a concise summary, a fitting way to end the conversation: I need to learn to read things beyond my own judgments.