Coinciding with this ocassion, the opening of the Diamond Inside film in Madrid, and their return from Brazil, they show us their work "Luz nas velas". The work is the result of taking the backpack and go to Sâo Paulo following the same project that started in South Africa, up paying out of pocket the trip and eating and sleeping in favelas, "we had to understand what it was, to intervene", told us yesterday, Arkoh and Pahg. (Pablo and Javi). Participative Urban Art Project in Vila Brasilândia, one of the favelas of Sao Paulo. The intervention focuses on vecos and vielas: winding streets that are the true articulating the internal life of the community. Sharing with the inhabitants the transformation of their environment.
Reuters sent a photographer and the project has started running everywhere, from the U.S. to China. Here you have some memory and images of work. CONGRATULATIONS!!
"The favela is a city-building model based on the occupation by broad sectors of the working classes with low incomes of the areas considered environmentally fragile (hill slopes or edges of rivers). Being illegal occupations do not pay taxes and therefore are not beneficiaries of basic urban infrastructure, sanitation, water, electricity, public transportation and equipment.
Favela is a cluster of low-quality housing that follow a model of "self made" and a process of spontaneous creation. Creating an spontaneous net that grows horizontally and vertically according to their needs.
Our intervention is located in Vila Brasilândia, one of the favelas that proliferate on the outskirts of Sao Paulo in the shadow of skyscrapers. An ocean of houses that extend beyond the limits of the horizon.
The strategy has been to settle in the slum, dissect it, smell it, live it and love it. Trying to understand the confluence of social, economic and urban development. And discover, as the main socio-cultural value, tolerance, hospitality and brotherhood within the community, regardless of skin color or religious belief.
Brasilândia is developed longitudinally in response to the topography of the hills in which it is located, assuming in this sense the main road infrastructure. Appear in second order the elements that facilitate transversal access to the houses. These cracks are known as vecos, when the street is plain, and Viels, when there are stairs, and they are the real articulators of the inner life of the community.
Morphologically, the vecos and vielas are winding streets that conect the houses with the bottom and the top of the hill. The perception is apparently disordered set of planes, textures, materials, lights, shadows, heights and stairs.
The project aims to answer this so characteristic spatial complexity. Smoothing the perspective from a point (anamorphic) with inspiring words. Framed in a continuum of flat colors, which covers all materials alike. A moment frozen in the way. In the rest of the steps everything is only an abstract landscape plans.
Participation and community involvement in each of the interventions has been the determining factor for its realization. Sharing, hand by hand, the transformation of their environment. Embellish it. And spontaneously, the habitants modified their relationship with the public space and their own houses. Generating new empathy with the place." (Txt by Boamistura)
