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Greg Grandin reviews ‘Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War’ by Tanya Harmer · LRB 19 July 2012
"Harmer dispatches two myths favoured by those who blame the coup on Allende himself. The first is that his commitment to democracy was opportunistic and would soon have been abandoned. ‘One might even,’ Falcoff writes, ‘credit the Nixon administration with preventing the consolidation of Allende’s “totalitarian project”’. The second is that even if Allende wasn’t a fraud he was a fool, unleashing forces he could not control – for example, the left wing of Popular Unity, and the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, which was further to the left of Allende’s coalition and drew inspiration from the Cuban Revolution, Cuba conceived here as a proxy for Moscow.

Harmer shows that Allende was a pacifist, a democrat and a socialist by conviction not convenience. He had an ‘unbending commitment to constitutional government’ and refused in the face of an ‘externally funded’ opposition ‘to take a different non-democratic or violent road’. He invoked history to insist that democracy and socialism were compatible, yet he knew that Chile’s experience was exceptional. During the two decades before his election, military coups had overthrown governments in 12 countries: Cuba in 1952; Guatemala and Paraguay in 1954; Argentina and Peru in 1962; Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, Honduras and again Guatemala in 1963; Brazil and Bolivia in 1964; and Argentina once more in 1966. Many of these coups were encouraged and sanctioned by Washington and involved subverting exactly the kind of civil-society pluralism – of the press, political parties and unions – that Allende promoted. So he was sympathetic to the Cuban Revolution and respected Castro, especially after he survived the CIA’s Bay of Pigs exploit in 1961. And when Allende won the presidency, he relied on Cuban advisers for personal security and intelligence operations.

But Cuba’s turn to one-party authoritarianism only deepened Allende’s faith in the durability of Chilean democracy. Socialism could be won, he insisted, through procedures and institutions – the ballot, the legislature, the courts and the media – that historically had been dominated by those classes most opposed to it. Castro warned him that the military wouldn’t abide by the constitution. Until at least early 1973 Allende believed otherwise. His revolution would not be confronted with the choice that had been forced on Castro: suspend democracy or perish. But by mid-1973, events were escaping Allende’s command. On 11 September he took his own life, probably with a gun Castro gave him as a gift. The left in the years after the coup developed its own critique of Allende: that, as the crisis hurtled toward its conclusion, he proved indecisive, failing to arm his supporters and train resistance militias, failing to shut down congress and failing to defend the revolution the way Castro defended his. Harmer presents these as conscious decisions, stemming from Allende’s insistence that neither one-party rule nor civil war was an acceptable alternative to defeat.

A photograph of Allende taken during his last hours shows him leaving the presidential palace, pistol in hand and helmet on head, flanked by bodyguards and looking up at the sky, watching for the bombs. The image is powerful yet deceptive, giving the impression that Allende had been at the palace when the coup started, and was beginning to organise resistance to it. But Allende wasn’t trapped in his office. He’d gone there earlier that morning, despite being advised not to, when he heard that his generals had rebelled. The Cubans were ready to arm and train a Chilean resistance and, Harmer writes, ‘to fight and die alongside Allende and Chilean left-wing forces in a prolonged struggle to defend the country’s revolutionary process’. But Allende ordered them not to put their plans into operation, and they listened: ‘The Chilean president,’ Harmer says, ‘was therefore far more in control of Cuba’s involvement in his country than previously thought.’ He also rejected the idea of retreating to the outskirts of Santiago and leading an armed resistance: in Harmer’s assessment, he committed suicide rather than give up his commitment to non-violent revolution.

Many, in Chile and elsewhere, refused to believe that Allende had killed himself. The story had to be that he was executed, like Zapata, Sandino, Guevara and others who died at the hands of traitors. Che fought to the end and had no illusions about the bourgeoisie and its democratic credentials. Allende’s legacy is more ambiguous, especially for today’s revived Latin American left, which despite its remarkable electoral success in recent decades still struggles to tame the market forces set free after the Chilean coup. In 2009 in Honduras, for instance, and last month in Paraguay, democratically elected presidents were unseated by ‘constitutional coups’. In both countries, their opponents dressed up what were classic putsches in the garb of democratic proceduralism, taking advantage of vague impeachment mechanisms to restore the status quo ante.

For Brazil’s Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), founded in 1980 by militant trade unionists including the future president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the coup in Chile reinforced the need to work with centrist parties to restore constitutional rule. Social issues weren’t completely sidelined, but attaining stability took precedence over class struggle; for the first time in Latin American history, a major left-wing party found itself fighting for political democracy as a value in itself, not as part of a broader campaign for social rights. ‘I thought a lot about what happened with Allende in Chile,’ Lula once said, referring to the polarisation that followed the 1970 election, when the Popular Unity coalition won with only a bit more than a third of the vote. That’s why he agreed to set the bar high for a PT win. During the Constituent Assembly debates leading up to the promulgation of Brazil’s 1988 post-dictatorship constitution, Lula insisted that if no one candidate received a majority in the first round of a presidential election, a run-off had to be held between the top two contenders, which would both give the winner more legitimacy and force him or her to reach out beyond the party base. Like Allende, Lula stood for president three times before winning at his fourth attempt. Unlike Allende, though, each time Lula ran and lost and ran again, he gave up a little bit more of the PT’s founding principles, so that the party went from pledging to overturn neoliberalism to promising to administer it more effectively.

In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez drew a different lesson from the defeat of the Popular Unity government. Soon after he was elected president in 1998, before coming out as a confrontationalist, indeed before he even identified himself as a socialist, Chávez began to compare himself to Allende. Wealthy Venezuelans were mobilising against even the mildest economic reforms, as their Chilean predecessors had done, taking to the streets, banging their pots and pans, attacking the government through their family-owned TV stations and newspapers, beating a path to the US embassy to complain, and taking money from Washington to fund their anti-government activities. In response, Chávez began to talk about 1973. ‘Like Allende, we are pacifists,’ he said of his supporters, including those in the military. ‘And like Allende, we are democrats. Unlike Allende, we are armed.’ The situation got worse and worse, culminating in the coup of April 2002 which, though unsuccessful, looked very like the coup against Allende. Chávez found himself trapped in the national palace speaking to Castro on the phone, telling him he was ready to die for the cause. Ever the pragmatist, Castro urged him to live to fight another day: ‘Don’t do what Allende did!’"
greggrandin  salvadorallende  history  marxism  socialism  democracy  2012  tanyaharmer  venezuela  economics  inequality  class  pacifism  cuba  fidelcastro  brazil  brasil  lula  luladasilva  latinamerica  us  richardnixon  intervention  revolution  government  argentina  honduras  guatemala  paraguay  perú  bolivia  hugochávez  pinochet  chile  henrykissinger  tanyharmer  coldwar  markfalcoff  dilmarousseff  authoritarianism  dictatorship 
april 2019 by robertogreco
Tarsila do Amaral: Translating Modernism in Brazil - Words Without Borders
It seems the role of the translator is not so different from that of a curator. Just as a translator will often introduce a new text, a curator of an exhibition might present something entirely new, which is certainly the case with the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition of work by Tarsila do Amaral. Entitled “Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil,” it is the first US show devoted exclusively to the Brazilian artist.

A curator, like a translator, acts not only as a mediator but also as an interpreter—another curator, another translator, would tell a slightly different story. When I asked MoMA curator Stephanie D’Alessandro what narrative she and her colleague Luis Pérez-Oramas set out to tell, she admitted it was “a hard story to write.” Their ultimate goal was to engage audiences who were both familiar and completely unfamiliar with Tarsila; to do justice to her legacy while also making her story accessible.
tarsiladoamaral  translation  brazil  brasil  modernism  art  curation  2018  elisaoukalmino  srg 
january 2019 by robertogreco
Elza Soares - Deus é Mulher (Álbum Oficial - 2018) - YouTube
"00:00 | O Que Se Cala
03:49 | Exú nas Escolas – Part. Especial Edgar
07:34 | Banho – Part. Ilú Obá de Min
11:03 | Eu Quero Comer Você
15:32 | Língua Solta
21:00 | Hienas na TV
24:51 | Clareza
28:58 | Um Olho Aberto
32:35 | Credo
35:45 | Dentro de Cada Um
39:44 | Deus Há de Ser

“Deus É Mulher” foi gravado entre os estúdios Red Bull (São Paulo) e Tambor (Rio de Janeiro), com produção de Guilherme Kastrup e coprodução de Romulo Fróes, Marcelo Cabral (baixo e Bass Synth), Rodrigo Campos (cavaquinho e guitarra) e Kiko Dinucci (guitarra, sintetizador e sampler). Reforçando a energia feminina do álbum, participaram das gravações Mariá Portugal (Bateria, percussão e MPC) e Maria Beraldo (Clarinete e Clarone).

O disco traz 11 faixas inéditas, assinadas por nomes como Tulipa Ruiz, Pedro Luís, Alice Coutinho e Rodrigo Campos, entre outros. Elza contou com a participação especial do cantor Edgar, em “Exú nas Escolas” (Kiko Dinucci/ Edgar), e do grupo Ilú Obá de Min na percussão e vozes de “Dentro de Cada Um” (Luciano Mello/ Pedro Loureiro) e “Banho” (Tulipa Ruiz)."
elzasoares  music  brasil  brazil  2018 
may 2018 by robertogreco
The Challenge of a Straight Line - YouTube
"Explore key methods Concrete Artists in Brazil and Argentina used to create perfectly straight edges in paint. This video is one of three that accompanied the “Making Art Concrete: Works from Argentina and Brazil in the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros” (September 16, 2017 – February 11, 2018) at the Getty Museum. For more information visit "
art  drawing  technique  lines  classideas  arthistory  brasil  brazil  argentina  patriciaphelpsdecisneros  hermelindofiaminghi  raúllozza  juanmelé  rhodrothfuss  willysdecastro  craft  howto  tutorials  research  tape  2017 
february 2018 by robertogreco
Reasons To Be Cheerful
"I’m starting an online project here that is an continuation and extension of some writing and talks I’ve done recently.

The project will be cross-platform—some elements may appear on social media, some on a website and some might manifest as a recording or performance… much of the published material will be collected here.

What is Reasons To Be Cheerful?

I imagine, like a lot of you who look back over the past year, it seems like the world is going to Hell. I wake up in the morning, look at the paper, and go, "Oh no!" Often I’m depressed for half the day. It doesn’t matter how you voted on Brexit, the French elections or the U.S. election—many of us of all persuasions and party affiliations feel remarkably similar.

As a kind of remedy and possibly as a kind of therapy, I started collecting good news that reminded me, "Hey, there's actually some positive stuff going on!" Almost all of these initiatives are local, they come from cities or small regions who have taken it upon themselves to try something that might offer a better alternative than what exits. Hope is often local. Change begins in communities.

I will post thoughts, images and audio relating to this initiative on whichever platform seems suitable and I’ll welcome contributions from others, if they follow the guidelines I’ve set for myself.

These bits of good news tend to fall into a few categories:

Civic Engagement

Culture, music and the arts might include, optimistically, some of my own work and projects, but just as much I hope to promote the work of others that has a proven track record.

Why do I do this? Why take the time? Therapy, I guess, though once in awhile I meet someone who has the connections and skills but might not be aware of some of these initiatives and innovations, so I can pass the information on. I sense that not all of this is widely known.

Emulation of successful models- 4 guidelines

I laid out 4 guidelines as I collected these examples:

1. Most of the good stuff is local. It’s more bottom up, community and individually driven. There are exceptions.

2. Many examples come from all over the world, but despite the geographical and cultural distances in many cases others can adopt these ideas—these initiatives can be utilized by cultures other than where they originated.

3. Very important. All of these examples have been tried and proven to be successful. These are not merely good IDEAS; they’ve been put into practice and have produced results.

4. The examples are not one-off, isolated or human interest, feel-good stories. They’re not stories of one amazing teacher, doctor, musician or activist- they’re about initiatives that can be copied and scaled up.

If it works, copy it

For example, in an area I know something about, there was an innovative bike program in Bogota, and years later, I saw that program become a model for New York and for other places.

The Ciclovia program in Bogota"
davidbyrne  politics  urban  urbanism  bogotá  curitiba  addiction  portugal  colombia  brazil  brasil  jaimelerner  cities  society  policy  qualityoflife  economics  drugs  health  healthcare  crime  ciclovia  bikes  biking  bikesharing  activism  civics  citybike  nyc  medellín  afroreggae  vigariogeral  favelas  obesity  childabuse  education  casamantequilla  harlem  civicengagment  engagement  women'smarch  northcarolina  ingridlafleur  afrotopia  detroit  seattle  citizenuniversity  tishuanajones  sunra  afrofuturism  stlouis  vancouver  britishcolumbia  transportation  publictransit  transit  velib  paris  climatechange  bipartisanship  energy  science  technology  culture  music  art  arts  behavior  medellin 
january 2018 by robertogreco
Escola Aberta
"Escola Aberta1,2 is:

a) autonomous b) reflexive c) temporary

1.The Escola Aberta will be a temporary design school based in Rio de Janeiro. Teachers and students of graphic design from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam) will conduct a week of workshops, lectures and activities, aiming to ignite a discussion on ways of teaching and learning and to establish an exchange of ideas with Brazil.

2. Directed at students, young professionals and artists, masters and apprentices, the Escola Aberta will be free of charge and take place from the 6th till the 11th of August, at the Carioca Design Center, Tiradentes square.

Escola Aberta1,2 will be:

a) free of charge b) in Rio de Janeiro
c) on August 2012 d) from monday to friday

1.Application deadline is 1st of July 2012. A total of 60 participants will be selected.
2. Please note that the Escola Aberta is unable to provide or organize any accommodation, board or transportation. Attendance is expected for the entire duration of the school, i.e. every day from Monday till Friday.

Escola Aberta1,2 seeks:

a) students e) craftsmen i) Brazilians
b) teachers f) artists j) foreigners
c) masters g) designers k) you
d) apprentices h) philosophers

1.The Gerrit Rietveld Academie is a dutch art and design academy, based in Amsterdam. It has grown to be a uniquely international school, open to applicants from all over the world. As a consequence an increased multicultural exchange of ideas, customs, knowledge and skills is cultivated. Particularly in the graphic design department the gap between teachers and students has become eminently narrow. This closeness ultimately opens up an intensified reciprocal exchange of opinions and ideals.

2.The Escola Aberta is looking for people with open minds, will for exchange, a questioning attitude and love for debate. Participants will be challenged to assume different roles during the week, to act as teachers and students, masters and apprentices, designers and artists. They must be able to switch from theory to practice and from protest to action.

T (true) or F (false):
( ) An art school, simply put, is a representative of the institutionalization of art.
( ) When our view of art is limited, so is our view of society.
( ) If questions aren’t asked in art schools, where then?
From Teaching to Learn by Joseph Kosuth, 1991.

Knowledge is something that:
a) You have to repeat and memorize, in order to get a diploma.
b) When in fact you need it, you can get it anywhere.

In 1971, conceptual artist John Baldessari was asked to exhibit his work at an art school in Nova Scotia. Since the school had no funds to fly him out for the installation, Baldessari sent a piece of paper printed with the words, ‟I will not make any more boring art,” and instructed the school to recruit students to write the sentence repeatedly all over the gallery walls, ‟like punishment.”

Art cannot be taught. However, one can teach _______________. The School is the servant of the _____________. One day the two will merge into one. Therefore, there are no teachers and pupils, but ________________ and ________________.
From the ‟Bauhaus Manifesto”, Walter Gropius, 1919.

“We do not need to consciously learn anything in order to learn something”. Do you agree? Explain. ____________________________________________ ____________________________________________ ____________________________________________
From Robert Fillou’s interview with John Cage in ‟Teaching and Learning as performing arts”.

Schools are:
a) on demand d) museums
b) commodities e) all of them
c) social events
School (from Greek “scholè”) means “free time”, being the time when people don’t have to act economically or politically. Within the domain of the school, neither accumulation and profit-seeking nor power games take center stage, but only the subject matter."

[via: ]
brasil  brazil  lcproject  openstudioproject  altgdp  design  art  artschools  riodejaneiro  2012  ephemerality  ephemeral  autonomy  reflection  temporary  escolaaberta  bauhaus  bmc  blackmountaincollege  robertfillou  johncage  johnbaldessari  franklloydright  hermannvonbaravalle 
january 2018 by robertogreco
There’s a reason many more Indians might want to read the works of Clarice Lispector
"Soul over mind

The “grand witch of Brazilian literature” needs no introduction to readers around the world, and yet she remains – puzzlingly – relatively unknown in India. Readers are often expected, even encouraged, to read “foreign” literature to better understand cultures and people other than their own, but the higher purpose of literature, of any art, is to break down the very idea of the foreign, of revealing the essential and not the contingent human condition. Lispector’s writings force us to plunge into the metaphysics of our soul – as opposed to our minds. This is what makes her a writer uniquely important to the Indian sensibility.

Sometimes, reading between the lines of Lispector’s works, one arrives at a relative mysticism, somewhere between hermetic style and discrete metaphysics. For her, it’s not just one life that is in existence, but many lives. No definitive deity, but the destiny of the soul (dharma for many in India), an unreasonable search for happiness.

How, then, can we not be caught by this delicacy, by these intelligent meanderings to which she invites us? How to resist her? How not to be conquered? How, in short, not to read Clarice Lispector?

The value of incoherence

When reading her, one almost gets the feeling of being suddenly plugged into the supernatural in whose presence reason and pragmatism constantly fails and falters. In this, Lispector’s writing is also marked by an instinctive stand against the European insistence on the sole importance of reason. Lispector was a flamboyant believer in the soul, and her search for the unconscious and the divine have deep resonances with the idea of a transcendental supreme reality found in ancient Indian philosophy.
She preferred incoherence and inconsistency to order, and the death-like calm of Switzerland, which epitomised the European love for reason, bored and terrified her."

"And so, suddenly, while reading her, Rio de Janeiro turns into New Delhi, Macabea becomes a woman from Bihar, sitting with her palms stretched out in front of an astrologer on a sidewalk, G.H. is a woman in an apartment in South Bombay searching for god in her maid’s room, Clarice Lispector is a writer living in an Indian city filled with demons, the occult is everywhere like black magic, and poverty is unbearable.

We nod in recognition of the similar and not the foreign. There is no more foreign."
2017  claricelispector  saudaminideo  india  brasil  brazil  incoherence  spirituality  occult  mysticism 
december 2017 by robertogreco
Katrina Dodson on Clarice Lispector, "Brazil's Kafka" — Chapter & Verse
"The figure of Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) left two mysteries in her wake: the mystery of how her writing hits us so powerfully, and the mystery of how it came to be composed by this particular Brazilian-Jewish woman, who was, by turns, a law student, a glamorous journalist, a diplomat’s wife, a mother of sons, and, by the 1970s, perhaps the most treasured writer in Brazil’s literary firmament.

Katrina Dodson has spent the last several years grappling with Lispector's mysteries in a very tactile way: as the translator of her Complete Stories, a collection whose pieces range from the comic to the anguished, the mystical to the surreal, the journalistic to the experimental. In their variety Lispector's short stories serve as a perfect entry-point into her multifaceted genius, and so it's quite fitting that Dodson's translation of the complete short stories — which recently won the 2015 PEN Translation Prize — has helped touch off a full-fledged Lispector revival in the English-speaking world.

In this episode, Dodson reads two Lispector short stories in their entirety — the fable-like "A Chicken" and the intricate "The Smallest Woman in the World" — and reflects on how she tried to render Lispector's very special Portuguese in the English language.

Dodson's sensitive translation of Lispector's Complete Stories has been much acclaimed. In the citation for the PEN award, the PEN judges called Dodson's translation "a revelation that lays bare the breadth of both the author's and translator's talent...An extraordinary translation of an exceptional author." Dodson holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley."

[direct link to SoundCloud: ]
claricelispector  tolisten  katrinadodson  brazil  brasil  2016  benjaminmoser  translation 
december 2017 by robertogreco
Memories of Underdevelopment | Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
"In collaboration with Museo Jumex in Mexico City and the Museo de Arte de Lima, MCASD will present an exhibition examining the ways in which Latin American artists from the 1960s to the 1980s responded to the unraveling of the utopian promise of modernization after World War II, most notably in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela. In the immediate postwar period, artists had eagerly embraced the “transition to modernity,” creating a new abstract geometric language meant to capture its idealistic possibilities. As modernization failed, and political oppression and brutal military dictatorships followed, avant-garde artists increasingly abandoned abstraction and sought new ways to connect with the public, engaging directly with communities and often incorporating popular strategies from film, theater, and architecture into their work. Memories of Underdevelopment will be the first significant survey exhibition of these crucial decades and will highlight the work not only of well-known artists such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape but also lesser-known artists from Colombia, Peru, Chile, and Uruguay.

Memories of Underdevelopment is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego in partnership with the Museo de Arte de Lima and the Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo. Lead support is provided through grants from the Getty Foundation. Additional support provided through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. This project has received generous underwriting support from Maryanne and Irwin Pfister and the LLWW Foundation. Institutional support of MCASD is provided by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture, and the County of San Diego Community Enhancement Fund."
colombia  chile  uruguay  brazil  brasil  mexico  venezuela  latinamerica  argentina  héliooiticica  lygiapape  modernity  development  mcasd  tosee  togo  1960s  1970s  1980s  art  architecture  perú 
august 2017 by robertogreco
Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms | The Metropolitan Museum of Art
"Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms is the first monographic exhibition in the United States devoted to Brazilian artist Lygia Pape (1927–2004). A critical figure in the development of Brazilian modern art, Pape combined geometric abstraction with notions of body, time, and space in unique ways that radically transformed the nature of the art object in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Covering a prolific, unclassifiable career that spanned five decades, this exhibition examines Pape's extraordinarily rich oeuvre as manifest across varied media—from sculpture, prints, and painting to installation, photography, performance, and film."

"A selection of video excerpts from the exhibition Lygia Pape: A Multitude of Forms, on view at The Met Breuer from March 21 through July 23, 2017."
lygiapape  art  2017  film  performance  photography  installation  brazil  brasil  bodies  body  time  space  1950s  1960s 
july 2017 by robertogreco
A World Without People - The Atlantic
"For a number of reasons, natural and human, people have evacuated or otherwise abandoned many places around the world—large and small, old and new. Gathering images of deserted areas into a single photo essay, one can get a sense of what the world might look like if humans were to suddenly vanish from the planet. Collected here are recent scenes from abandoned construction projects, industrial disaster zones, blighted urban neighborhoods, towns where residents left to escape violence or natural disasters, derelict Olympic venues, ghost towns, and more."
landscape  photography  apocalypse  worldwithoutus  multispecies  riodejaneiro  brasil  brazil  us  nola  neworleans  alabama  germany  belarus  italy  italia  abandonment  china  bankok  thailand  decay  shengshan  athens  greece  lackawanna  pennsylvania  tianjin  russia  cyprus  nicosia  indonesia  maine  syria  namibia  drc  fukushima  congo  philippines  havana  cuba  vallejo  paris  libya  wales  england 
may 2017 by robertogreco
Wherever you find people - Reviews - Domus
[Book is here: ]

"In 8 chapters, 20 interviews and many photos, this book edited by Aberrant Architecture analyses the history of a Brazilian icon of public architecture: the CIEPs conceived by the architect Oscar Niemeyer."

"The CIEPs, Centros Integrados de Educação Pública (Integrated Centres of Public Education), were meant to solve a problem. The 508 school buildings constructed from 1982 onward in the State of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil were meant to be an alternative answer for the future.

A dearth of schools, overcrowded classrooms, meagre funds and a growing abyss between public and private institutions were just a few of the problems facing the State of Rio de Janeiro in the early 1980s. Brazil was at a turning point, heading toward the end of the military dictatorship, a slow transition to democracy, and for the first time in decades, free elections. In Rio, mass migration had swollen the population, but the public schools were utterly unprepared to educate the great quantity of students living in conditions of poverty. Leonel Brizola (1922-2004), the state governor elected in 1983, decided to respond to the demand by creating the CIEPs, an ambitious architectural project devised with his chief adviser the anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, and one of the most visionary architects at the time, Oscar Niemeyer.

Wherever You Find People – The Radical Schools of Oscar Niemeyer, Darcy Ribeiro and Leonel Brizola tells the story behind the CIEPs by giving an in-depth and detailed account of the historical and sociological motives that led to their construction. The pros and cons of this iconic and socially driven architectural initiative are weighed. Compiled by Aberrant Architecture in London (David Chambers and Kevin Haley), the book is divided into 8 chapters and over 20 conversations/interviews with the designers of the centres. Numerous photographs that have never been published before are featured. Half of the 508 schools were built in the 1980s, and half in the 1990s, during Brizola's second term in office, all in the State of Rio de Janeiro. Another 500 were left unbuilt, but blueprinted by Niemeyer. They are modular constructions built mainly with solid, tough and inexpensive concrete.

The model for the CIEPs was a "concentrated city" with a central building and other smaller satellites around it: a covered sports hall, an octagonal library, a penthouse for students on the roof, a dental office, a medical office and sometimes an outdoor swimming pool. It was a complete package, given to many cities, from Rio to small towns.

A simple idea, almost a utopia, lies at the base of the design. On the one hand we have Brizola’s vice-governor Darcy Ribeiro (1922-1997), who firmly believed in the power of education and in a system that would, in his words, lead the country to salvation. “Our children represent the most valuable part of Brazil, and also our own destiny as a free and democratic nation, committed to building a worthy existence for all its sons and daughters,” he says in an interview. On the other hand we have Oscar Niemeyer (1907-2012), who through architecture helped obtain the political aims of creating a polis. “I’ll begin by saying it is a revolutionary project, from an educational point of view. A school that not only seeks, like the old ones, to instruct its students, but also to provide an effective support to all the children of the neighbourhood,” the Brazilian architect says in an interview held in 1986. He was referring to redemptive and necessary architecture.

Then there is the criticism of the project. It comes from right-wing politicians who judge Brizola's social ideals unsuccessful, and from people criticising its technical imperfection. In fact, the centres have required special rehabilitation in recent years, especially regarding classroom acoustics and climate control. Fortunately, the CIEPs have shown to be durable. Today, they are being painted. They are decorated with colourful writing and drawings and the grass is cut regularly. It is probable that the State of Rio will need more CIEP school buildings. Toward the end of the book, hoping for such development, the Brazilian Claudia Costin, a senior director for education at the World Bank, says, “And this idea, it’s magic. The idea that it’s possible to change the lives of these kids. If we don’t believe in this, then why have public schools?”"
schools  schooldesign  architecture  2016  books  oscarniemeyer  brazil  brasil  leonelbrizola  darcyribeiro  cieps  education  1980s 
december 2016 by robertogreco
Trust Me - Freakonomics Freakonomics
"Societies where people trust one another are healthier and wealthier. In the U.S. (and the U.K. and elsewhere), social trust has been falling for decades — in part because our populations are more diverse. What can we do to fix it?"

"HALPERN: We almost seem to hardly notice that it’s there. So it’s incredibly consequential and we see it in lots of areas of policy that we touch on.

DUBNER: So you write this about low trust: “Low trust implies a society where you have to keep an eye over your shoulder, where deals need lawyers instead of handshakes, where you don’t see the point of paying your tax or recycling your rubbish since you doubt your neighbor will do so, and where employ your cousin or your brother-in-law to work for you rather than a stranger who’d probably be much better at the job.” So that has all kinds of business and ultimately economic implications. However, when you talk about high trust being good for us on a personal level, whether it’s health or individual income, do the two necessarily go in hand? In other words, can we have a society that has a business climate where there isn’t a lot of trust and, therefore, you do need all those lawyers instead of the handshakes, but where you have good social trust among neighbors, family and friends, communities and so on, or are they really the same thing that you’re talking about?

HALPERN: Well, there is a key distinction and Bob Putnam has often made this too, between what’s sometimes called bonding social capital and bridging social capital.

PUTNAM: Social capital is about social networks. But not all social networks are identical, and one important distinction is between ties that link us to other people like us, that’s called bonding social capital.

HALPERN: Bonding social capital often refers to your closeness to your friends, your relatives, those that are immediately around you. It’s particularly important, it turns out for, things such as health outcomes.

PUTNAM: Because, empirically, if you get sick, the people who are likely to bring you chicken soup are likely to represent your bonding social capital."

"PUTNAM: What strategies I would want to emphasize for moving in a positive direction would be more contexts in which people connect with one another across lines of race or economics or gender or age."

"HALPERN: People that go to university end up trusting much more than those who don’t, particularly when they go away residentially. It doesn’t look like it’s explained by income alone. So there’s something about the experience of going off as a young person in an environment where you have lots of other young people from different backgrounds and so on, hopefully, and different ethnicities. You learn the habits of trust because you’re in an environment where you can trust other people; they are trustworthy. And you internalize these habits and you take them with you the rest of your life. So we tend to not think of going away to university as being the reason why you’re doing it is to build social capital and social trust, we think about learning skills and so on, but it may well be that it has as much, or even more value, in terms of culturing social trust going forward. The question is: do you have to do that in university, can you do it another way? So in the U.K., following partly an American lead, the government has championed a national citizen service. And what this means is for every young person, essentially a 17-year-old, increasingly, starts off with a — not everyone does it alone, but more and more every single year, goes and does voluntary experience, community service. This deliberately includes a couple of weeks which are residential and deliberately includes mixing with people from all different walks of life. Look, it’s only limited data, but in terms of before-and-after data, we see significant impacts in terms of higher levels of trust between groups and individuals, as well as instantly higher levels of life satisfaction and well-being too. So it looks like we can do something about it."

"HALPERN: In the most recent data, it looks like it’s one of the biggest risers. So the Netherlands had pretty similar levels of social trust in the 1980s to America and the U.K., but whereas we have now drifted down towards sort of 30-odd percent, they are now up close to 70 percent in levels of those who think others can be trusted.

DUBNER: What would you say it’s caused by?

HALPERN: Well, I mean, one of the characteristics of the Netherlands, and you have to be a bit careful when you pick off one country, is it has wrestled quite hard with the issues of, not just inequality, but social differences. They’ve really tried to do a lot in relation to making people essentially build cohesion. Particularly Amsterdam, is a very famous area for — it’s long been an extremely multicultural city. It’s had issues over that over time, but they’ve really in a sort of succession of governments have tried to quite actively make groups get along with each other in quite an active way. So that may itself, of course, root in the Netherlands, it’s quite a deep culture of a strong sense of the law, being trustworthy and that contracts will be honored and so on. It’s what helped to power its economic success in previous centuries, so it does have that tradition also to draw on."

"PUTNAM: I looked hard to find explanations and television, I argued, is really bad for social connectivity for many reasons.

“More television watching,” Putnam wrote, “means less of virtually every form of civic participation and social involvement.”

HALPERN: As Bob sometimes put it, I think, rather elegantly, when we were looking forward in terms of technology or the Internet and of course, even pre-Facebook and so on, would it be, in his words, a “fancy television”? In other words, it will isolate us more and more. Or would it be a “fancy telephone” and would connect us more and more? Because technology has both those capabilities. So when I played video games when I was a kid, you basically did them mostly by yourself or with a friend. When I look at my teenage kids playing videos, they’re actually talking to each other all the time. To some extent it looks like, to me, that we get the technology that we want, and even this is true at sort of a societal level. So one of the arguments you can make, in my view is true anyway, by explaining some of these differences in the trajectories across countries is in Anglo-Saxon countries, we’ve often used our wealth to buy technology and other experiences. That means we don’t have to deal with other people — the inconveniences of having to go to a concert where I have to listen to music I really like, I can just stay at home and just watch what I want and so on and choose it. And even in the level of, if I think about my kids versus me growing up, I mean when I was growing up we had one TV and there were five kids in the household. You know, had to really negotiate pretty hard about what we were going to watch. My kids don’t have to do that and probably not yours either. There are more screens in the house than there are people. They can all go off and do their own thing. To some extent, that is us using our wealth to escape from having to negotiate with other people, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Some people and some countries seem to use their wealth more to find ways of connecting more with other people. And the technology has both these capabilities and we can’t just blame it. It’s the choices we’re making and how we use it and the technology which we’re, kind of, asking and bringing forth.

DUBNER: It reminds me a bit of — we once looked into the global decline of hitchhiking, for instance. One of the central reasons being that people no longer trusted strangers to not kill each other, really, is what it boiled down to, even though there was apparently very little killing involved, but just the fear of one. And yet now, Uber is a 60-some billion-dollar company that’s basically all about using technology to lure a complete stranger into your car. Which, I guess, argues, if nothing else, the fact that technology can be harnessed very much in either direction.

HALPERN: That’s right. Indeed, so, as you say, there’s actually two points here, and there’s a really important behavioral one, which I think we’ve only figured out in recent years to bring together these different literatures, how does it relate to behavioral scientists versus those people studying social capital? We look like we have certain systematic biases about how we estimate whether we think other people can be trusted. And in essence, we overestimate quite systematically the prevalence of bad behavior. We overestimate the number of people who are cheating on their taxes or take a sickie off work or do other kinds of bad things. This doesn’t seem to be just the media, although that may reinforce it. It seems to be a bit how we’re wired as human beings. So why is that relevant and why does this have to do with technology? Actually, technology can help you solve some of those issues. So when you’re buying something on eBay or you’re trying to decide where to go using, you know Trip Advisor, you’re actually getting some much better information from the experiences of other people as opposed to your guesstimate, which is often systematically biased. So it turns out it’s a way we can sometimes use technology to solve some of these trust issues. Not just in relation to specific products and “Should I buy this thing from this person?” but, potentially, more generally in relation to how do we trust other people because, ultimately, this social trust question must rest on something. It must be a measure of actual trustworthiness. "
trust  diversity  socialtrust  2016  us  society  socialunity  via:davidtedu  trustworthiness  socialcapital  australia  uk  netherlands  davidhalpern  stephendubner  bobputnam  italy  corruption  socialnetworks  civics  government  governance  community  brazil  brasil  norway  edglaeser  tobymoscowitz  hunterwendelstedt  ethnicity  stockholm  education  colleges  universities  military  athletics  multiculturalism  culture  law  economics  behavior  technology  videogames  socialmedia  television  tv  toolsforconviviality  hitchhiking 
november 2016 by robertogreco
From Belém to a new Brasília: Brazil's cities in the 1950s – in pictures | Cities | The Guardian
"As a young man, Marcel Gautherot abandoned his architecture studies in Paris to travel the world as a photographer. He became best known for his documentation of the construction of Brazil’s new capital city, Brasília, which can be found in a collection of his work, The Monograph"
brazil  brasil  photography  1950s  brasilia  marcelgautherot  architecture  brasília 
october 2016 by robertogreco
"UNESCO often threatens to strip a site of its status when it or its surroundings are becoming too drastically or too visibly modern. Dresden lost its status because of a new bridge that was thought to threaten the beauty of its protected riverbank landscape. Saint Petersburg is at risk of losing it because of the construction of a Gazprom tower.

Tiring of these endless frontline battles, UNESCO is developing a new definition of the Historic Urban Landscape: heritage is no longer considered as a single object or a single urban ensemble, but as ‘all natural and historical layers of a site, its empty spaces, its infrastructure, and its social, cultural, and economic processes’. Brasília might be one of the most interesting tests for this new definition.

In CRONOCAOS [1], we concluded that the interval between ‘now’ and that which has been ‘preserved’ is shrinking continuously. Shortly, heritage might even acquire a prospective character instead of a retrospective one.

In Brasília, this is already happening. A federal ukase from 1992 demands that any addition to the ‘plane’ be designed by Niemeyer himself (at that time, 85 years old). From this moment, Niemeyer’s future plans were automatically considered World Heritage. And this might make him the biggest threat to his own posthumous reputation: Niemeyer’s most recent additions are nonchalant, sometimes grim, seldom convincing, and always situated somewhere in the wide range between the sublime and the worthless. Just as the ‘older De Kooning’, his recent work makes one wonder whether there still is a functioning mind guiding the master’s hand, or whether the hand has taken over."
brasil  brazil  architecture  remkoolhaas  2011  design  unesco  cities  heritage  worldheritagesites  preservation  urbanism  urban  oscarniemeyer  luciocosta  urbanplanning  brasilia  brasília 
september 2016 by robertogreco
61 Glimpses of the Future — Today’s Office — Medium






10. Borders are permeable.



14. Pretentious people are inherently less curious.
















38. Tibetan monks prefer iOS over Android.













july 2016 by robertogreco
The end of post-neoliberalism | openDemocracy
"The time when dictatorships and neoliberal governments in Latin America were replaced by several progressive governments which benefited the poor without seriously affecting the income of the rich is coming to an end. Governments are back on the Right track. This signals a new time when unity of the popular sectors is once again the only way forward.

Latin America was the only continent where neoliberal options were adopted in several countries. After a series of US supported military dictatorships carrying the neoliberal project, reactions were swift. They culminated in the rejection, in 2005, of the Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada, which came as a result of a joint effort by social movements, leftist political parties, non-governmental organizations and Christian churches.

The new governments of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Ecuador, Paraguay and Bolivia put into effect policies which reestablished the role of the state in redistributing wealth, reorganizing public services, particularly access to healthcare and education and investment in public works. A more suitable share of the revenue from the exploitation of natural resources (oil, gas, minerals, agricultural produce) was negotiated between multinational corporations and the state, and the decade-long favourable international market situation allowed a significant increase in national income for these countries.

To talk about the end of a cycle conveys the idea of some sort of historical determinism that suggests the inevitability of the alternation of power between the Left and the Right - an inadequate concept if the goal is to replace an oligarchy’s hegemony by popular democratic regimes. On the assumption that the new governments were post-neoliberal but not post-capitalist, a number of factors allow us to suggest, however, that we are witnessing an exhaustion of the post-neoliberal experiences.

Obviously, it would be delusory to think that “instant” socialism is at all possible in a capitalist world during a systemic and therefore particularly aggressive crisis. The question of a necessary transition arises."
2016  latinamerica  progressivism  neoliberalism  brazil  brasil  argentina  uruguay  nicaragua  venezuela  ecuador  paraguay  bolivia  oligarchy  government  policy  development  economics  françoishoutart 
july 2016 by robertogreco
Tijuana Shelters Help With US Immigration Backlog Of Haitians | KPBS
"U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that the agency will process these migrants on a “case by case” basis. While migrants await their turn, Tijuana's shelters offer food and a place to sleep. At Madre Asunta, the Haitian women made friends with women from Central America and southern Mexico, who were also staying at the shelter. Their children played together as they communicated in a mix of gestures, smiles, French, Spanish and Portuguese.

“We’re a family,” Mevil said.

She told a Mexican woman about her difficult journey through Latin America, concluding, “I have more lives than a cat.”

The Mexican woman responded, “That means you have six more,” and they giggled together.

Footsteps away from Madre Asunta, a men’s migrant shelter called Casa del Migrante is accepting Haitian men as well as some women and children, because there aren’t enough beds at the women’s shelter.

Director Pat Murphy called the influx of migrants a “crisis” and “an emergency.”

“People here have told us, ‘there are thousands of people coming behind us,’” Murphy said.

During an especially busy day last week, Casa del Migrante slept 56 Haitians in addition to about 150 migrants from southern Mexico and Central America.

In less than two weeks, Murphy said his shelter received migrants from 11 different countries, mostly from Haiti. Murphy said he considers them refugees.

Although these migrants seek to enter the U.S., Tijuana must address the surge during the immigration backlog.

Casa del Migrante and three other Tijuana shelters are offering the migrants food and beds. Mexican immigration officials let the shelters know when U.S. Customs and Border Protection is ready to process a few more people.

“When their place in the line is ready, they call us, and we transport them right to the front door of immigration,” Murphy explained.

But he said Tijuana officials are relying too heavily on the shelters, which depend on donations.

Haitian migrants came just as the shelter was seeing a spike in Central Americans and southern Mexicans fleeing violence, Murphy said. Some had to sleep on the floor.

He said he thinks Tijuana should open a shelter of its own, like those opened during heavy rains tied to El Niño.

“They have to just admit that this isn’t a temporary problem, that this is going to continue for a while,” he said.

In the meantime, Tijuana residents are bringing food, clothes and other donations for the Haitians, Africans and other migrants.

“The best news of all this was the generosity of the people, just showing up at the door, saying, ‘here’s food for 50 people,’” Murphy said. “Even though they’re not rich themselves, they realize, ‘I may have a little bit more to share.’”

Twenty-five-year-old Haitian Jeff Son Pascal arrived at Casa del Migrante in early June, also by way of a two-month journey departing from Brazil.

Like hundreds of other migrants, he slept on the sidewalk just south of the San Ysidro Port of Entry for the first few days. Then he was redirected to the shelter while awaiting his turn to see a U.S. immigration official.

He said he is grateful for Casa del Migrante, where he and other Haitians take turns helping with domestic duties, such as washing clothes and serving food.

“The Casa is very good, very good,” he said in broken Spanish.

Son Pascal embarked on his journey alone, without friends or family, but he said he has made many friends in Tijuana, both Haitian and Mexican.

He said he dreams of a better life in the U.S.

When asked how many people are coming behind him, Son Pascal sighed and said: “Many, many, many, many, many.”"
sandiego  haiti  immigration  border  borders  mexico  brasil  brazil  tijuana  refugees  casadelmigrante  2016  migration  sanysidro  us 
june 2016 by robertogreco
Identity 2016: 'Global citizenship' rising, poll suggests - BBC News



Pollsters GlobeScan questioned more than 20,000 people in 18 countries.




[See also: ]
identity  cosmopolitanism  nigeria  china  perú  india  spain  españa  kenya  uk  greece  brazil  brasil  canada  pakistan  ghana  indonesia  us  mexico  chile  germany  russia  ethnicty  citizenships  globalization 
may 2016 by robertogreco
Página/12 :: libros
"Referencia imprescindible en la literatura brasileña, Ana Cristina César aparece con la fuerza de un impacto condensado en una vida breve (nació en 1952 en Río de Janeiro y se suicidó en 1983 en la misma ciudad). Para entonces ya había logrado consolidar una voz particular inscripta en la poesía, en la correspondencia, artículos críticos, ensayos y traducciones. Definió su modo de escribir como “el método documental”, que involucra una concepción de la literatura: “Recrear los vínculos de afinidad espontánea entre textos y autores diversos dentro de la ficticia intimidad del propio escrito”, según señala en el prólogo a esta antología de textos de entre 1975 y 1983 Bárbara Belloc. Junto con Teresa Arijón se encargó de traducir y seleccionar intervenciones de Ana César que delinean una nítida imagen de poeta e intelectual, evadiendo los mitos de la “hagiografía en torno de su figura, una sacralización ciertamente acrítica que es producto del impacto causado por su muerte trágica y prematura”, como expresa Renato Razende en “Para un apunte biobliográfico de Ana C.”

En su clara conciencia de la construcción ficcional, Ana sigue a Pessoa y enuncia una frase clave: “el poeta es un fingidor”. Tema que recurre cuando se refiere, remarcando la distancia entre las palabras y las cosas, a modos de escritura muy ligados a la expresión de lo subjetivo, así la correspondencia o el diario personales. En sus deslindes puede señalar que hay una intimidad inescribible, lo cual a su vez se vincula con el método documental que implica hacer literatura (no desligada de lo que apela e incide en la circunstancia vital, sino por la conciencia que tiene respecto de la distancia entre lo individual y biográfico, y la configuración de un texto literario donde cuentan y mucho la lectura, las voces de otros poetas como material compositivo), actitud reacia por tanto a interpretaciones biografistas que intentan “explicar” o aun validar o edificar una obra en función de los avatares de la vida del autor con “muy poco de literatura y mucho de confesión”.

En “El poeta fuera de la República” se refiere al mercado. Ese artículo de 1977 trata acerca del escritor vinculado con un circuito de producción y circulación, para poner en escena cuestiones ligadas al pago por un trabajo (el de la escritura), así como para señalar otras posturas: una marginalidad elegida, esto es situarse en un lugar ajeno a los circuitos de consagración, promociones, etcétera. No poco importante es señalar este aspecto si se considera que por los años setenta en Brasil la llamada “generación del mimeógrafo” (en la que se la quiso incluir) definía una pro-puesta de modos de escritura y de difusión que desafiaban el ahogo cultural ligado a una concreta situación política.

En igual sentido, se visualizan otros temas polémicos. Entre ellos, dos, cuya persistencia sirve para apreciar la actualidad de sus reflexiones: la llamada literatura femenina y la traducción. Aparecen entonces facetas del acto de traducir como una suerte de performance cuando remite a la Elegía del poeta metafísico inglés del siglo XVII John Donne, interpretada por Caetano Veloso. Y también con las refe-rencias a Walt Whitman, Dickinson, Mallarmé, que ofrecen simultáneamente afinados comentarios sobre la composición poética en general y sobre estos autores en particular, focalizados según esa especial forma de escritura que es la traducción. Comparaciones en fin que también anclan en un cotejo entre Poe y Herculano, donde analiza cuál es la función del bufón respecto del poder.

En consonancia con una tarea que, en el recorrido por los géneros, funde lucidez y sensibilidad, Ana César no puede dejar de preguntarse qué sucede con esa recurrente cuestión de la literatura femenina, y aquí también, da muestras de su rigor analítico al emplazar la instancia de “lo femenino” en la literatura, más allá del género sexual de quien la produzca.

Recorrer este conjunto de artículos, con sus valorables citas (Mario de Andrade, valga el ejemplo), no sólo permite apreciar el justo lugar que la obra de Ana César está ocupando con creciente firmeza por el mérito indiscutible de instalar un sólido lugar de enunciación, una voz que expresa la confluencia en la que arte, vida, ideologías y política hallan su ajustado punto de enlace."

[via: ]

[See also: ]
anacristinacésar  brazil  brasil  writing  capitalism  books  toread  literature  methods  poetry 
april 2016 by robertogreco
Ranking countries by the worst students - The Hechinger Report

It turns out that many of the top performing nations or regions also have the smallest numbers of low-performing students. Fewer than 5 percent of 15-year-olds in Shanghai (China), Hong Kong (China), South Korea, Estonia and Vietnam scored at the lowest levels on the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests in math, reading and science.

In the United States, by contrast, 29 percent of students scored below a basic baseline level in at least one subject, and 12 percent students score below a basic baseline level on all three tests — math, reading and science. The latter number amounts to half a million 15-year-olds who can’t do the basics in any subject. The worst is math. More than a million U.S. 15-year-olds can’t reach the baseline here. The OECD calculated that if all American 15-year-olds reached a baseline level of performance, then the size of the U.S. economy could gain an additional $27 trillion over the working life of these students.

Of course, the United States has relatively higher poverty rates than many nations in this 64-country analysis. One might expect more low performers given that our number of disadvantaged students in public schools surpasses 50 percent. But the interesting thing is that there wasn’t as tight a connection between low performance and poverty as we might expect. Some countries contend with higher poverty levels, but do better — Vietnam, for example, where only 4 percent of students were low performers in all subjects. Meanwhile, some other countries with lower poverty rates nonetheless have a bigger problem of low performers. For example, France, Luxembourg and Sweden all had higher percentages of low-performing students than the United States did.

Poor children around the world, on average, are between four and five times more likely to become low performers in school than children who grew up in a wealthier homes among more educated parents. But in the United States, poverty seems to seal your educational fate more. A socioeconomically disadvantaged American student is six times more likely to be a low performer than his or her socioeconomically advantaged peer. Here’s a stark figure: 41 percent of disadvantaged students in the United States were low performers in mathematics in 2012, while only 9 percent of advantaged students were.

In South Korea, by contrast, only 14 percent of disadvantaged students were low performers in math. In neighboring Canada, it was only 22 percent of the poorest students who scored the worst.

The report highlighted countries that had significantly reduced their share of low performers in math between 2003 and 2012. They were Brazil, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Portugal, Tunisia and Turkey.

“What do these countries have in common? Not very much,” admitted Andreas Schleicher, director of the education division at the OECD. “They are about as socioeconomically and culturally diverse as can be.”

Also, each country had embarked upon different reforms to improve educational outcomes at the bottom. But Schleicher sees hope in the fact that these countries succeeded at all, proving that poverty isn’t destiny and that schools can make a difference. “All countries can improve their students’ performance, given the right policies and the will to implement them,” Schleicher said."
education  schools  rankings  2016  pisa  standardizedtesting  testing  jillbarshay  poverty  us  southkorea  estonia  vietnam  hongkong  china  shanghai  france  luxembourg  sweden  brazil  brasil  germany  italy  poland  portugal  tunisia  turkey  diversity 
february 2016 by robertogreco
The Territory of Play - Conversations with Education - YouTube
"A collection of short observational clips on childhood and play collected across Brazil, and a 25 minute documentary of educators and partner schools sharing how the research on the various communities affected their seeing towards children, their understandings of the children's gestures and play."
play  children  brasil  brazil  film  documentary  2015  education  unschooling  deschooling  learning  gestures  howwelearn 
february 2016 by robertogreco
Martin Roemers - Metropolis | LensCulture
"Dutch photographer Martin Roemers won the 1st prize in the LensCulture Street Photography Awards 2015 for his series, Metropolis, which documents street life in "mega-cities", defined as urban areas that are home to more than 10 million inhabitants. Here we present an extended slideshow of this project, as well as an interview with the photographer."

[via: ]
martinroemers  photography  streetphotography  2015  cities  urban  urbanism  global  kolkata  lagos  pakistan  bangladesh  cairo  nigeria  egypt  karachi  dhaka  mumbai  india  guangzhou  china  istanbul  turkey  jakarta  indonesia  buenosaires  argentina  manila  philippines  basil  brazil  riodejaneiro  mexicocity  mexicodf  mexico  nyc  sãopaulo  london  tokyo  japan  df 
november 2015 by robertogreco
Literary Hub: Now Trending: Clarice Lispector
"Clarice Lispector has long been a literary darling in Brazil, where she is fondly referred to on a first name basis. Now, nearly 40 years after her death, she is gaining long-deserved international recognition. New Directions will publish 86 of her short stories in the forthcoming The Complete Stories, and the literary world is rejoicing; The New Yorker ruminated on her literary witchcraft, The New Republic declared that she will finally receive “the Bolaño treatment,” Slate proclaimed her to be a “genius on the level of Nabokov,” and Tin House celebrated with an entire week devoted to her.

Several of her stories, gathered below, have been published in anticipation of the collection.

• Amor
• Remnants of Carnival
• Better Than Burning
• Covert Joy
• Praça Mauá
• Report on the Thing
• Clandestine Happiness
• One Hundred Years of Forgiveness
• The Hen & Family Ties

Bonus: Rachel Kushner on Lispector, from Bookforum’s archives"
claricelispector  2015  brasil  brazil  literature 
october 2015 by robertogreco
ORI INU Film: It Shall be Epic | Adebukola Ajao
"According to the filmmakers, Ori Inu is a "coming of age story about a young immigrant woman who must choose between conforming her identity and spirituality to the cultural norms of America or revisiting her roots in the Afro-Brazilian religion called Candomble."

Protagonist, Natalia Cruz struggles between clinging onto her ancestral religion, Candomblé, and conforming to Christianity, which her mother Camilla imposes on her. The Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé derived from Yoruba and was brought to Brazil along with the slave trade. As many African religions brought to the West, believers worshiped in secret. With films such as "Ori Inu" a positive, informative, and accurate story of the Candomblé experience will be told."
oriinu  film  folasadeadeoso  candomblé  chelseaodufu  emannodufu  brazil  brasil  helenbeyene  traeharris  michaelodofin  us  migration  identity 
august 2015 by robertogreco
Transforming the Fight Against Poverty in India - The New York Times
"Transferring cash to poor families, on the condition that their kids attend school and get vaccinations, has been shown to be an effective way to reduce poverty and improve human health and well-being. Latin America is widely recognized as the pioneer of large-scale conditional transfer programs, starting with Mexico in the late 1990s and expanding across Brazil over the past decade.

Now these programs have the potential for making a serious dent in poverty in India. Under the acronym JAM — Jan Dhan, Aadhaar, Mobile — a quiet revolution of social welfare policy is unfolding. Jan Dhan is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship program to give poor people access to financial services, including bank accounts, credit and insurance. Aadhaar is the initiative to issue unique biometric identification cards to all Indians. Together with mobile money platforms, they will enable the state to transfer cash directly to those in need — without the money going through intermediaries that might take a cut.

India, the world’s largest democracy, is also the world’s largest poor country. The legitimacy of any elected government turns on its ability to provide for the poor. As such, both our federal and state governments subsidize a wide range of products and services with the expressed intention of making them affordable for the poor: rice, wheat, pulses, sugar, kerosene, cooking gas, naphtha, water, electricity, fertilizer, railways. The cost of these subsidies is about 4.2 percent of India’s gross domestic product, which is more than enough to raise the consumption level of every poor Indian household above the poverty line.

Sadly, government provision of these subsidies is associated with significant leakages. For example, as much as 41 percent of subsidized kerosene, which poor families use to light their homes, is “unaccounted for” and is probably lost to the black market. Dealers sell it on the side to middlemen who mix diesel into fuel and resell it, which is bad for both health and the environment.

Furthermore, some subsidies benefit those who do not need them. Power subsidies, for example, favor the (generally wealthier) two-thirds of India who have access to regular grid-provided electricity, and, in particular, wealthier households, which consume more power.

Why, then, do product subsidies form such a central part of the Indian government’s antipoverty policies? Subsidies are a way for states that lack implementation capacity to help the poor; it is easier to sell kerosene and food at subsidized prices than to run effective schools and public health systems.

The three elements of JAM are a potential game-changer. Consider the mind-boggling scale of each element. Nearly 118 million bank accounts have been opened through Jan Dhan. Nearly one billion citizens have a biometrically authenticated unique identity card through Aadhaar. And about half of Indians now have a cellphone (while only 3.7 percent have land lines).

Here’s one example of how these three elements can be put to work.

The Indian government subsidizes households’ purchases of cooking gas; these subsidies amounted to about $8 billion last year. Until recently, subsidies were provided by selling cylinders to beneficiaries at below-market prices. Now, prices have been deregulated, and the subsidy is delivered by depositing cash directly into beneficiaries’ bank accounts, which are linked to cellphones, so that only eligible beneficiaries — not “ghost” intermediaries — receive transfers.

Under the previous arrangement, the large gap between subsidized and unsubsidized prices created a thriving black market, where distributors diverted subsidized gas away from households to businesses for a premium. In new research with Prabhat Barnwal, an economist at Columbia University, we find that cash transfers reduced these “leakages,” resulting in estimated fiscal savings of about $2 billion.

The scope for extending these benefits is enormous. Imagine the possibility of rolling all subsidies into a single lump-sum cash transfer to households, an idea mooted decades ago by the economist Milton Friedman as the holy grail of efficient and equitable welfare policy. JAM makes this possible.

To realize the full benefits of JAM, the government needs — and has begun — to address both “first-mile” and “last-mile” challenges.

The “first-mile” challenges are identifying eligible beneficiaries and coordinating between states and government departments. To deliver means-tested benefits via cash transfers, the government will need a way of identifying the poor and linking beneficiaries to their bank accounts. Further, eligibility criteria and beneficiary rosters vary, and technology platforms, where they exist, may not be seamlessly interoperable. Hence the need for an extensive coordination exercise under the national government, which can incentivize states to come on board by potentially sharing fiscal savings with the states.

The “last-mile” challenge arises because cash transfer programs risk excluding genuine beneficiaries if they do not have bank accounts. Indeed, even if they have an account, they may live so far away from a bank — India has only 40,000 rural bank branches to serve 600,000 villages — that collecting benefits is arduous. Extending financial inclusion to reach the remotest and poorest will require nurturing banks that facilitate payments via mobile networks, which has achieved great success in countries such as Kenya. India can then leapfrog from a bank-less society to a cashless one just as it went from being phoneless to cellphone- saturated.

Over all, JAM offers substantial benefits for government, the economy and especially the poor. Government finances will be improved because of the reduced subsidy burden; at the same time, government will also be legitimized and strengthened because it can transfer resources to citizens faster and more reliably. Experimental evidence from the world’s largest workfare program — the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme — found that delivering wages via a biometrically authenticated payment system reduced corruption and enabled workers to receive salaries faster. With the poor protected, market forces can be allowed to allocate resources with enormous benefits for economywide efficiency and productivity enhancement. The chief beneficiaries will be India’s poor; cash transfers are not a panacea for eliminating their hardship, but can go a long way to improving their lives."
india  2015  economics  poverty  policy  cashtransfers  universalbasicincome  latinamerica  brazil  brasil  mexico  leakages  blackmarket  subsidies  government  ubi 
july 2015 by robertogreco
Animated interactive of the history of the Atlantic slave trade.

This interactive, designed and built by Slate’s Andrew Kahn, gives you a sense of the scale of the trans-Atlantic slave trade across time, as well as the flow of transport and eventual destinations. The dots—which represent individual slave ships—also correspond to the size of each voyage. The larger the dot, the more enslaved people on board. And if you pause the map and click on a dot, you’ll learn about the ship’s flag—was it British? Portuguese? French?—its origin point, its destination, and its history in the slave trade. The interactive animates more than 20,000 voyages cataloged in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. (We excluded voyages for which there is incomplete or vague information in the database.) The graph at the bottom accumulates statistics based on the raw data used in the interactive and, again, only represents a portion of the actual slave trade—about one-half of the number of enslaved Africans who actually were transported away from the continent.

There are a few trends worth noting. As the first European states with a major presence in the New World, Portugal and Spain dominate the opening century of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, sending hundreds of thousands of enslaved people to their holdings in Central and South America and the Caribbean. The Portuguese role doesn’t wane and increases through the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, as Portugal brings millions of enslaved Africans to the Americas.

In the 1700s, however, Spanish transport diminishes and is replaced (and exceeded) by British, French, Dutch, and—by the end of the century—American activity. This hundred years—from approximately 1725 to 1825—is also the high-water mark of the slave trade, as Europeans send more than 7.2 million people to forced labor, disease, and death in the New World. For a time during this period, British transport even exceeds Portugal’s.

In the final decades of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Portugal reclaims its status as the leading slavers, sending 1.3 million people to the Western Hemisphere, and mostly to Brazil. Spain also returns as a leading nation in the slave trade, sending 400,000 to the West. The rest of the European nations, by contrast, have largely ended their roles in the trade.

By the conclusion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade at the end of the 19th century, Europeans had enslaved and transported more than 12.5 million Africans. At least 2 million, historians estimate, didn’t survive the journey. —Jamelle Bouie"
maps  mapping  animation  slavery  slavetade  history  africa  americas  us  brasil  brazil  caribbean  southamerica  northamerica  centralamerica  europe  andrewkahn  timelines 
june 2015 by robertogreco
The Tamborzão Goes to Thailand — Chrysaora Weekly — Medium
"It started with a WeChat Sight I received from my mom at 7 a.m. one morning. I squinted sleepily at the silent preview, amused by the elderly Asian woman’s adorable dance moves. Then the music kicked in, and I woke up fast. The woman was dancing on a sidewalk somewhere in Thailand, but the Portuguese rapping and the beatbox beat were unmistakably Brazilian.

This is the kind of world-spanning electronic music thing I live and skip meals for. I spent all my free time over the next two weeks investigating.


The music I care about the most hasn’t settled on an umbrella label, but I know it when I hear it. To generalize wildly: it’s the kind produced by and for young people using pirated software all over the world. It’s loud enough to be its own drug, with a heavy foundation of bass to give people something to gyrate to at dance parties. It’s released online with file names that end in “FINAL DRAFT 05–12.mp3,” and is also sometimes sold in homemade mix CDs by street vendors. Often, it’s raunchy and violent enough to incite moral panic.

Well-made dance music, like design, is a highly functional form of art created in conversation with those who enjoy it. New songs are tested live at parties, often well before they’re finished, and co-evolve alongside the dance forms and fashions they accompany. Many of the genres are so tied to spaces that they’re named after their venues: dancehall, ballroom, or just (Baltimore/Jersey) “club.” The lyrics and instrumentals of the music are prone to sampling, soaking up references to mainstream music, pop culture, current events, and tech with in record turnaround time. The tracks are raw glimpses into their birthplaces, each one reflecting the place not as it was or as it would like itself to be, but as it is in the instant it’s made.

Though the sounds and contexts of these musical genres differ from place to place, they share a lot in common these days: production tools (Ableton Live, Fruity Loops, Roland drum machines), distribution platforms (SoundCloud, YouTube), and demographics (kids who want to party). These commonalities have allowed these regional club scenes to find, borrow from, and even work with each other. The dynamics of this interplay mostly reflect the globalization that connected the world in the first place, with European and American labels acting as brokers and gatekeepers. But occasionally an unexpected cross-pollination appears— like a Thai grandmother dancing to Brazilian music on the sidewalk."

"IRL, dances take place in hard-earned public spaces ruled — and sometimes run — by young people. These dance floors are important liminal spaces where identities and communities can be explored, normalized, and established, and where young people can simply have unsupervised, escapist fun with their peers.

Online, dance floors are asynchronous and global. People share videos of themselves dancing — sometimes in groups, often in their bedrooms or living rooms — and watch each other’s videos in turn to learn new moves or just to take a hit of contagious joy straight to the amygdala.

“Kawo Kawo” itself is not the pinnacle of music production, but it’s remarkable both as the result of an unlikely global discourse and as the rallying call for some incredible dance videos. It’d be overly naïve to claim that dance music alone can breed some kind of universal empathy, but in the success of “Kawo Kawo” I see a glimmer of hope for new global connections born in the rapture of music rather than in the trauma of colonialism.

When the sun is hot and the music is blasting, whether it’s during Songkran or Carnaval, anything seems possible."
christinaxu  2015  music  global  thailand  brasil  brazil  dance  internetonline  youtube  soundcloud  wechat  facebook  international  kawokawo  djchois  mcjairdarocha  crosspollination  remixing 
june 2015 by robertogreco
Watch: Satellite time lapse reveals humanity's global footprint - Vox
"[video: ]

In the 1970s, some forward-thinking NASA scientists put an Earth-observing satellite into orbit. At an altitude of 570 miles, it photographed the entire planet every 18 days, circling Earth 14 times a day and sending the data back to ground stations.

Forty years later, this satellite and its successors have created the longest continuous record of our planet's surface. By stringing the images together, NASA and the US Geological Survey have shown how rapidly and how profoundly humans are changing the face of Earth.


In this time lapse showing the massive growth of Las Vegas, vegetation appears red because the images were partially gathered through infrared sensors. Golf courses and lawns jump out, foretelling the city's water scarcity problems. Off of Lake Mead an artificial lake appears in the 1990s, and developments form alongside it. This is Lake Las Vegas, where Celine Dion lives.

Check out the video above to see what 40 years of satellite imagery reveal about humanity's global footprint.

Read more: 15 before-and-after images that show how we're transforming the planet"
satelliteimagery  via:vruba  anthropocene  nasa  geology  geography  2015  energy  defoestation  envionment  earth  urbansprawl  wateruse  aralsea  lasvegas  brazil  brasil  climatechange  wyoming 
may 2015 by robertogreco
MoMA | ArquiMoMA Instagram Project

MoMA and Instagram are collaborating to celebrate the exhibition Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955–1980 (March 29, 2015–July 19, 2015). The exhibition features over 500 original works that have largely never been exhibited—even in their home countries—including historical architectural drawings and models, vintage photographs, and films from the period. To kick off the project, InstaMeets were held across Latin America on March 14, 2015. (See a list of InstaMeet locations below.)
We’re inviting you to share your images of buildings featured in the exhibition, to show their current context and how people see and use them today.

Share your photos of any of the locations in the complete list below at any time leading up to or during the exhibition using the hashtag #ArquiMoMA. Be sure to tag your location.
Select photos will be featured on a display in the exhibition galleries at The Museum of Modern Art and on"
moma  latinamerica  architecture  instagram  #ArquiMoMA  design  argentina  brazil  brasil  chile  colombia  ecuador  guatemala  mexico  uruguay  venezuela  cuba  perú  puertorico  dominicanrepublic  museums  socialmedia  photography  crowdsourcing  participatory 
march 2015 by robertogreco
Sounds and Colours | South American music and culture magazine

Sounds and Colours is a magazine about South American music and culture. Through regular articles, news, reviews and audiovisual features we focus on the diverse cultures of the South American continent with music, film and the arts at the core of what we do.


Sounds and Colours began in order to promote South American music and culture. We felt that Latin American culture was often shown through a narrow lens, missing much of the diversity that makes it such a rich culture. Our aim from day one has been to show all sides of South American culture, especially those that have been under-represented in the past.


Sounds and Colours started in May 2010 by a team devoted to South America and its culture."
brazil  brasil  argentina  chile  colombia  perú  uruguay  paraguay  southamerica  culture  music  bolivia  venezuela  ecuador  playlists  mixtapes 
december 2014 by robertogreco
EXCLUSIVE: “That Damn Samba” – An Intimate Portrait of Samba | Sounds and Colours
"Charlie Inman – the co-director behind Gilles Peterson’s Brasil Bam Bam Bam: The Story Of Sonzeira documentary – recently put together a 30-minute documentary on samba and we’re very proud to be bringing it to you all as a Sounds and Colours exclusive.

O Danado do Samba (translating as “That Damn Samba”) was a labour of love for Inman. Sparked off by a chance encounter with a samba musician in London, he soon found his home taken over by rodas, all-night jams and samba sing-alongs, and a undoubted connection with Rio’s most famous rhythm had been struck. As soon as he got the chance he headed to Rio to discover the samba scene there, a trip which is documented in this great film, an intimate and personal portrait of samba that shows to what extent the music has a part in everyday Brazilian life.

Watch the film below and also read about its making and Inman’s “samba journey” in the interview underneath:"

[video: ]
music  brasil  brazil  samba  documentary  film  video 
december 2014 by robertogreco
Open Arms Closed Doors - Brazil - Viewfinder - Al Jazeera English
"Brazil's booming economy brings many African migrants to its shores, but once there does the dream of a better life die?"
brasil  brazil  2104  immigration  african  africandiaspora  film  fernandapolacow  julianaborges 
december 2014 by robertogreco
How one startup mapped Brazil's confusing favelas | Motherboard
" Pedro, Ramos, and Viera decided to take matters into their own hands, and make some money in the process. The first step was to make a map of the community and create virtual addresses that they could use to create a company to deliver the Post Office mail.

The task was much more complex than they had thought. If you typed 'Rocinha' in Google Maps a few months ago, you would only get the Gavea Road when, in fact, there are hundreds of streets, alleys, back-alleys, and stairs throughout the community.

One of the problems for mapping a slum via satellite is that many buildings create tunnels over the alleys and stairs below. Another problem is that sometimes the concrete slabs used for roofs are used as streets.

They gave up on the idea of a visual map and started a logic map by generating algorithms. Algorithms are a set of instructions for specific operations; a good example of a simple algorithm is a recipe for lasagna.

The algorithms created by Pedro and his partners are way more complicated than a lasagna recipe, of course. Without a visual image, they created a pseudo-code, an informal language of categories to explain each fixed structure, natural or built, which is on each street, stairs, or alley inside the huge Rocinha community. For example, a “condominium” is defined as a blind alley with less than 12 homes.

As there are no official names for most of the streets in Rocinha, the residents make them up. A street usually has at least two to three names. The streets do not start in an arbitrary way; depending on who you are speaking with, a street can begin on the upper side of the slum and come down, or vice versa, or even somewhere in the middle. Pedro and his friends had to create a virtual beginning and end for each street.

The end result is an algorithm for each street, stairs, or alley. Together, these hundreds of handwritten pages turned into a huge map, chock full of lines and codes, impossible for anyone without understanding of its logic to decipher.

A typical sequence goes like this: "Wall, stone, henhouse, store, house, building, condominium," Pedro explains. Each one of these concepts has the same specific definition that makes their work easier. "Rocinha is constantly under construction," he adds. "It is possible that a month from now a henhouse is gone and there is a house there instead. For this reason we need to register everything; it’s easier to make changes when we need to."

When they finished the map, they patented it, and after this, they created a service to deliver Post Office mail called Friendly Mailman. It was a success, and also the first franchise in Brazil’s history born in a slum. Currently, Friendly Mailman acts in eight slums in Rio.

Each residence using the service pays a monthly fee—currently R$16 in Rocinha, or $6.64 USD. Their houses get an address, a number based on the order the service was hired. Every day the Post Office van stops by the Friendly Mailman office and leaves all mail for the community. The employees sort out those for their thousands of customers. Later, the Post Office van stops by to get whatever was left and then they park on top of the hill and allow people to look in the boxes to check if they have any mail.

Back on the trail at the Vila Verde community, we snake through a hole in the middle of two buildings and up a long stairway.

"What is this?" Pedro asks. "Is it a street? Where does it start?" He shows the page on the map that refers to this part of the stairway. "Look at this. Is it a building or a house? And this here, is it a street or a condominium? The map tells you all."

Pedro indicates the doors on the houses. "This one here is a customer of the Friendly Mailman," he says, pointing to a sticker with the Friendly Mailman’s logo and the number 1166.

"You’ll notice that the numbers do not appear in order," he goes on. "Look at this house here: 8044. This is because they get their addresses according to the date when they hire the service. No one can locate these houses without our map. And no one will understand the map unless we explain how to use it."

Pedro explained the map in a general way, but there are certain elements that are secret. It also changes every day.

"Each time one of our mailmen go on duty, he will update it," he explains. "It could be that there was a wall the week before, and now something else is being built. We have made our map digital and we want to create an app so that our mailmen can do the updating in their smart phones."

"Are there problems with drug trafficking?" I asked.

"None," he said. "Do you think the drug lords don’t want to get their mail? Do you think they don’t want to buy tennis shoes over the internet? Everybody likes it. After the Friendly Mailman, sales bursted all over in Rocinha. And as you can see, there is a lot of money in this community, a lot of trade, most people living here are middle class. This is a characteristic of Rocinha. If you go to the Juramento hill, for instance, you won’t see trade. It’s a poorer community, and for that reason we charge less over there. If you look over the world, it is full of slums, and everybody needs mail service. So we are making money, which is good, but also supplying a service for the betterment of the community.”

We went back to the Friendly Mailman’s headquarters for coffee. There is a large traditional map on the wall, showing all the alleys in the community. "Look at this," Pedro says. "We made this based on all our mapping. Google came by here last month. They asked if they could take a photo of our map. I said: 'No way.' Let them do their own.""
brasil  brazil  maps  mapping  favelas  brianmier  2014  rocinha  riodejaneiro  deliveries  postalservice  addressess  algorithms 
october 2014 by robertogreco
Chico Correa's Future Brazil Roots mixtape by Movimientos | Mixcloud
"A fresh mixtape of Brazilian roots meets future bass sounds from DJ and Producer Chico Correa featuring Carimbó, Forró, Coco, tropical bass, and Rasteirinha.

Ahead of his London DJ set @ Muevete - Notting Hill Arts Club on 20th September

Esmeraldo Marques, known as "ChicoCorrea", is a pioneer of a fusion of Northeast music and electronic music. He represents a new generation of Brazilian Bass music producers, focusing his artistic creativity between the oral traditions of his land and the low end frequencies of the sound systems.

Blending 808, analog synthesizers, with roots rhythms from Brazil like Cocos de Roda and Emboladas, his sets are a mix of his own productions and a mashup with samples he may find some hours before the gig. Always improvising and reconstructing the set each gig, in a live electronics format."
brasil  brazil  mixtapes  music  chicocorrea  carimbó  forró  rasterinha  tropicalbass  esperaldomarques  cocosderoda  emboladas 
august 2014 by robertogreco
The Mathematics of Child Street Vendors, by Geoffrey B. Saxe JSTOR: Child Development, Vol. 59, No. 5 (Oct., 1988), pp. 1415-1425
"The mathematical understandings of 23 10-12-year-old candy sellers with little or no schooling from Brazil's northeast were compared to 2 groups of nonvendors matched for age and schooling-a group from the same urban setting and a group from a nearby rural setting. Children's performances were analyzed on 3 types of mathematical problems: representation of large numerical values, arithmetical operations on currency values, and ratio comparisons. Vendors and nonvendors alike had developed nonstandard means to represent large numerical values, an expected result since problems involving large values emerge in the everyday activities of each population group. Most vendors, in contrast to nonvendors, had developed adequate strategies to solve arithmetical and ratio problems involving large numerical values, also an expected finding since these problem types emerge frequently only in the everyday activities of the vendor population. The findings are interpreted as supporting a model of cognitive development in which children construct novel understandings as they address problems that emerge in their everyday cultural practices."

[See also (.pdf):

Jean Lave's “Cognition in Practice,” “Everyday Cognition and Situated Learning” and “Everyday Math” ] ]
geoffreysax  informallearning  math  mathematics  research  computation  1988  everydaylearning  everyday  streetvendors  streetkids  brazil  brasil  terezinhanunescarraher  davidcarraher  analúciaschliemann  mckenzieclements  paulusgerdes  jeanlave 
july 2014 by robertogreco
A PAREDE ツ hello[at]
"Oh Hai! We are A Parede, a brazilian design research practice in Berlin.
Our research interests are in Speculative and Critical Design, Gender and Sound Studies."
luizaprado  pedrooliveira  criticaldesign  speculativedesign  designresearch  gender  sound  berlin  brazil  brasil  aparede  designfiction 
july 2014 by robertogreco
Urbes Mutantes: Latin American Photography 1944–2013 | International Center of Photography
"Urbes Mutantes: Latin American Photography 1944–2013 is a major survey of photographic movements in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. Taking the "mutant," morphing, and occasionally chaotic Latin American city as its focus, the exhibition draws particularly on street photography's depictions of the city during decades of political and social upheaval. It is divided into sections that explore public space as a platform for protest, popular street culture, the public face of poverty, and other characteristics of the city as described in photographs. Dispensing with arbitrary distinctions between genres of photography—art photography, photojournalism, documentary—Urbes Mutantes points to the depth and richness of the extensive photographic history of the region.

Drawn from the collection of Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski, the exhibition was first shown at the Museo de Arte del Banco de la República in Bogota in 2013. It was co-curated by Alexis Fabry and María Wills, and is accompanied by a bilingual catalogue published by Toluca Editions."

[See also:
and ]
photography  via:tejucole  latinamerica  argentina  brazil  brasil  chile  colombia  cuba  exico  perú  venezuela  streetculture  art  photojournalism  documentary  protest  streetphotography 
june 2014 by robertogreco
Design in Times of Crisis — A Quick Round-Up for a Time of Crisis
"Here’s a quick-and-dirty summary of recent events in Brazil which clearly show where the interest of the capital lies, the situation of human rights, and the creepy, dreadful direction things are taking.

(Last update: 09/June/2014)

• Brazil is living a dystopian present.
Police have “preventively arrested” two youngsters in Goiania (central Brazil) and confiscated “subversive material”, i.e. flyers featuring imagery and slogans against FIFA and the upcoming World Cup;

• Police in Belo Horizonte (southeastern Brazil) admitted to the use of force and violence to remove homeless people from the vicinity of the stadiums and “FIFA-protected” areas;

• Military police have erected a wall that isolates the German national team from the rest of the village their are occupying in Bahia during the World Cup. Villagers were “required” to wear a badge AT ALL TIMES so as to be identified. Maiara Alcântara da Luz, who lives there, said she thinks it is “[…] humiliating. They should identify themselves, for THEY come from outside. I’ve lived here since I was born”.

The Berlin Wall fell 25 years ago.

• The extreme right wing christian section (let’s call them for what they really are) of the brazilian congress has suspended the bill which guaranteed state-covered medication and abortion in cases of sexual violence, life-threatening pregnancies or foetus anencephaly; their next move is to exempt public healthcare from providing emergency care for victims of sexual abuse. This will effectively cut off the majority of the population from receiving any kind of health care following an episode of sexual violence, and make it even more difficult to file police reports and prosecute sexual predators;
(ref. and

• Human rights violations related to the preparations for the World Cup: "
worldcup  2014  brazil  brasil  policestate  protest  force  militarization  control  power  humanrights  stateofexception 
june 2014 by robertogreco
Campanha | Makely Ka
"Percorrer de bicicleta os caminhos do personagem Riobaldo Tatarana no Grande Sertão desde seu encontro com Diadorim às margens do córrego do Batistério até a batalha fatal com o Hermógenes no Paredão de Minas.

 Durante a trajetória registrar em gravações de audio, video e fotos as paisagens sonoras e visuais, que serão posteriormente trabalhadas no disco e no show Cavalo Motor.

 Produzir textos (relatos, poemas e transcrição de falas) durante a viagem e alimentar o site e o aplicativo para celulares com esse material sempre que houver sinal de telefonia móvel disponível.

Utilização de uma bicicleta que gera a partir das pedaladas a energia necessária para carregar os equipamentos eletrônicos para o registro e a transmissão das informações durante o percurso.

A ideia é utlizar durante toda a viagem, prevista para durar aproximadamente trinta dias, prioritariamente a energia elétrica proporcionada pela bicicleta."

"A partir do “Grande Sertão: Veredas” identifiquei o percurso do jagunço Riobaldo Tatarana pelo sertão mineiro, atento aos saltos e reviravoltas da narrativa não-linear. Com efeito Riobaldo, o narrador personagem, vai e volta no tempo acompanhando o fluxo natural de sua memória, o que torna o traçado de seu percurso uma tarefa meticulosa, uma espécie de quebra-cabeças cartográfico. Uma grande contribuição nesse sentido foi o livro “Itinerário de Riobaldo Tatarana” do pesquisador Alan Vigiano, que nos anos 60 fez um levantamento e identificou centenas de topônimos encontrados no romance; outro livro fundamental foi o “Boiada”, edição fac-similar da caderneta de anotações do próprio João Guimarães Rosa, escrita durante sua viagem com a comitiva de Manoel Nardy em maio de 1952 conduzindo uma boiada pelos campos gerais.

Com essas referências estabeleci um roteiro junto com dois colaboradores ( um designer e um geógrafo) transpondo para o sertão real o que foi possível transpor, ou ainda, o que restou do sertão imaginário do romance. É certo que localidades mudaram de nome dos anos 50 para cá, alguns lugarejos, fazendas e veredas desapareceram. Não há dúvidas também que muitos nomes foram trocados ou criados pelo escritor. Muitos dos locais por onde Riobaldo andou, todavia, puderam ser identificados, e é por essas trilhas que resistem no sertão que pretendo passar."
grandesertãoveredas  grandesertão  audio  music  makelyka  joãoguimarãesrosa  guimarãesrosa  riobaldotatarana  bikes  biking  brasil  brazil  maps  mapping  poty 
april 2014 by robertogreco
Objeto Livro | Makely Ka
"O meu primeiro livro, chamado “Objeto Livro” foi lançado em 1998 numa pequena tiragem de 200 exemplares. O livro é composto por poemas metalinguísticos e toda sua concepção gráfica, desde a capa às orelhas, remetem ao objeto livro como mercadoria. As gravações foram realizadas para o projeto “Arregale os Ouvidos”, que se propõe a produzir audiolivros para deficientes visuais, aproximando a escuta à experiência da leitura do texto no papel.

Alguma Crítica

“Há pouco tempo fui presenteado com um livro de estréia em que o poeta Makely, de Belo Horizonte, leva a idéia da produção independente às últimas consequências (…) Objeto Livro provoca uma ruptura radical em toda sua composição, com a clara intenção de desautomatizar a consciência do leitor que, de tão acostumado com a ‘lógica’ e a naturalidade dos objetos, não reflete mais sobre eles.” Paulo Andrade / Jornal “O Imparcial” (Araraquara – SP) / 06 de junho de 1999"
makelyka  poetry  poems  brasil  brazil  audio  books  metalinguistics  1998  sound  portuguese  portugués 
april 2014 by robertogreco
The Commonspace > June 2004 > Expatriates
"There are, as far as I have been able to discover, three cities in the world that share the name Saint Louis: the dilapidated colonial ruins on an island off the northern coast of Brazil, in the state of Maranhão; our sister city — the dilapidated colonial ruins on a fluvial island near the edge of the Sahara desert, in Senegal; and ours, the dilapidated colonial ruins that lie along the banks of the Mississippi. All once great. All once golden. Today, all lie in ruin.

I love our ruin. I have to. I am a product of that ruin, for better or for worse. To me, the ruins are completely surreal. They exist on a different physical plane, in a different time. Monuments to Indian burial mounds. Tenement complexes overgrown with vines. Vast expanses of natural grasses, where entire blocks once stood. Snoots and tips. Blues, jazz, and soul being played to almost empty clubs. Arson.

I have always suffered ridicule for being from Saint Louis, especially from East coasters who are fond of making comments like, "If you are not living in New York you are just camping out." But I know that Saint Louis, along with Memphis and New Orleans — the crowning gems of the American Nile — form the true cradle of American culture. We are the cultural standard-bearers of the nation, despite the fact the little credit is ever given, and despite the fact that Saint Louisans themselves rarely do their part to improve our image.

I should clarify that Saint Louis to me is just the part east of Skinker. The suburbs, the sprawl, and the people that contribute to them, are my real enemies. I think we ought to build a Great Wall around the City and charge toll for the suburbanites to visit the Arch, the stadium, the zoo, the museums, the parks, and the other marvelous public resources the City offers for free to all. Let's see where the suburbanites will draw their inspiration and cultural identities from when their access has been cut off. When I lived in Saint Louis I made a vow never to stray west of Skinker, on principle.

I have lived in Brazil for many years now, because I found that I am freer in Brazil than in the USA. Free of the Puritanism and false morality in the States; the sexual repression; the obsession with consumerism and material goods, and work, work, work, at the cost of friendships, family and quality of life; free of the terrible diet of fast food, processed food, industrialized, over-packaged food, and over-packaged lifestyles; free of the cold winters; and most importantly, free of the racism. Brazil may be a classist country, but it has at least recognized and embraced its African influences. Saint Louis, and the rest of the United States, owes a tremendous debt to the cultural contribution of African-Americans, a debt that can never be repaid. Yet no one wants to acknowledge this debt. In fact, Saint Louis continues to adhere to a social regime tantamount to apartheid. This makes me feel true shame.

I grew up near Delmar Blvd., at a time when that street practically divided the City in two halves — blacks to the north, whites to the south. Today, with "white flight" at its most expressive levels in decades, and with Saint Peters the fastest growing city in the state, the south side has taken on a more diverse character, but the dichotomy between white and black continues strong as ever. No contact between the races. I am not even surprised any more when I hear whites in Saint Louis say they have never heard of the St. Louis American.

I moved back to Saint Louis from Brazil in 1995, because I had decided to wanted to spearhead an urban pioneer movement, to repopulate abandoned areas of the city. Tax abatements, neighborhood associations and marketing campaigns only go so far. The war is won on an individual level. Someone has to move to the City and become an example, convincing others to follow. Someone has to dispel the myths of crime and hatred. Someone has to take action. So I bought an abandoned smokehouse from the LRA (Land Reutilization Authority) on Iowa, with a friend of mine, and without any financial resources to speak of we started fixing it up with our own four hands. The crack dealers on the block burned it to the ground, but we were relentless in our commitment. We traded the ashes for another building — squatting in the second without electricity for many months — until we had it back up to habitable conditions. It served as my home for several years. I made lasting friendships with neighbors that most Saint Louisans would never give themselves the chance to meet.

In fact, my friends from the suburbs continued intransigent in their stance. It was like high school all over again: attending the Priory, I was one of a handful of boys that lived in the City. My friends were not allowed to visit my home. Their parents thought I lived in the jungle, and that their children would be robbed, raped, or murdered if they left West County. In college, when I lived near Crown Candy, I convinced a few to visit. It was like taking them to a foreign country. They had never even driven through north city. They didn't even know it existed! Living in my LRA property I discovered that nothing had changed years later. People were still unable to overcome their prejudice and fear. They actually liked hiding out in Saint Peters. And so, recognizing that we live in a cultural democracy, where people vote with their feet, I accepted the defeat of my pioneer efforts and returned to Brazil.

I miss a lot of things about Saint Louis, especially the radio. When I was growing up there were more than five or six full-time jazz stations: KBIL, KWMU, WSIE, KATZ (on the prowl). Webster University had a real funky one, too, but I don't remember the call letters. There was even a smooth jazz station, though I never liked it much. Add all these to KDHX, and its eclectic array of programming, and man, we were in a really privileged position musically. That was a fact. I got hooked on funk, soul, R&B, jazz, blues, reggae, rap, African. You name it. If it had roots in the diaspora of African music, it got played on Saint Louis radio. Saint Louis is a deeply funky place, but so many people are unable to tap into the vibe.

I do not consider myself a patriotic person. I don't care much for the USA as a whole, but I have deep, unseverable ties to Saint Louis. And the reason for this is that Saint Louis is a very unique place. I just can't figure out why people are so self-denigrating, why they can't define and give value to what makes them so special. I have a different vision, but it doesn't seem like many people share it with me, so it has just remained a daydream that I indulge in moments of homesickness. Maybe my Saint Louis will only ever exist in my mind."
stlouis  2004  tomkarsten  friends  missouri  maranhão  mississippiriver  ruins  midwest  us  patriotism  brazil  brasil  race  class  society  segregation 
april 2014 by robertogreco
Feeding 9 Billion | National Geographic
"Where will we find enough food for 9 billion?"

"A Five-Step Plan to Feed the World: It doesn't have to be factory farms versus small, organic ones. There's another way."
food  gobalization  agriculture  farming  2014  classideas  peojectideas  jonathanfoley  foodproduction  us  india  china  global  brazil  brasil  africa  mali  perú  ukraine  uk  ethiopia  bangladesh  efficiency  diet 
april 2014 by robertogreco
The poetic architecture of Luis Barragán and Lina Bo Bardi -
"My house is my refuge,” wrote Luis Barragán; “an emotional piece of architecture, not a cold piece of convenience.”

A direct challenge to Le Corbusier’s contention that “a house is a machine for living in”, Barragán (1902-88) offered a poetic view of the home as a retreat. His highly individual house in Mexico City, built in 1948, is a minimal masterpiece and curiously monastic. He was intensely religious and an obsessive reader of theological and philosophical texts, and his house embraced layers of public-ness. Some rooms are expansive and generous; the most private ones small and spartan.

Inspired by north African houses, Barragán’s house presents a blank face to the street: just a solid white wall and a small door with a sliding panel – the kind of feature you might find at the entrance to a nunnery. Its entrance hall is modest but its combination of geometric simplicity, flush surfaces, rough plaster and a floor of dark volcanic stone offer an idea of a house luxurious in its attention to detail yet ascetic in its architecture.

There is, however, a flash of colour that draws the visitor in: a canary-yellow door leading to a bright pink room. Where Le Corbusier and his modernist contemporaries might have used the odd colour highlight – typically red, yellow or blue – Barragán was renowned for soaking his houses in bold, unforgettable colour.

Take his most photographed work, the San Cristóbal stables outside Mexico City. For its vivid blast of pinks and fuchsias set against the bright blue Mexican sky (and its reflection in the pool), the stables are a powerful Latin American riposte to the notion that modernism had to be anaemically white and allergic to colour.

A tour through Barragán’s house reveals layers in which the more public parts of the house are gradually stripped away to reveal the sparse rooms inhabited by the architect himself, and intended only for him. Each room features some nod to Christian art, ritual or iconography.
In the guest bedroom, a Madonna is placed not directly above the bed (Barragán was sensitive to those who might not share his beliefs) but to one side, her eyes turned towards her infant son – a Madonna not dominant yet still keeping an eye on the spiritual wellbeing of the guest.

The Casa de Vidro (Glass House) in São Paulo was built three years after Bárragan’s masterpiece. It too rebels against Le Corbusier’s concept of the house as a machine or as abstract sculpture – even if it is at least in part inspired by his use of concrete. But unlike Barragán’s insular, contempl­ative house, this is a dwelling that opens up to the landscape, that scoops up the surrounding rainforest and sucks it in. The Casa de Vidro was designed by Lina Bo Bardi (1914-92) for herself and her husband Pietro Maria Bardi, director of the São Paulo Museum of Art, not long after arriving in Brazil from their native Italy.

The site, which has now developed into the upmarket suburb of Morumbi, was in the middle of the rainforest. Even now, enough jungle remains on the hillside to remind people of the original wilderness.

Where Barragán’s house resolutely looks inwards, Bo Bardi’s looks out. Its living space is purely public, glazed all round, and the dining and living areas flow into each other. Like Barragán, Bo Bardi and her husband collected artworks – many of them profoundly Catholic images. Both architects consciously play with the juxtaposition of the emotional intensity of religious imagery and the asceticism of modernist architecture.

Bo Bardi thought Brazilian architecture should look to its indigenous past as well as to modernism. “Its source”, she wrote in a 1951 essay, “is not the architecture of the Jesuits: it comes from the wattle-and-daub shelter of the solitary man, laboriously constructed out of the materials of the forest; it comes from the house of the rubber-tapper, with its wooden floor and thatch roof.” Her house exhibits some of those fetishes and crafted objects that express that urge to make, alongside Catholic artefacts.

Yet her house never feels like an exhibition space; instead these pieces form a landscape of memory that stretches from Italy to Brazil. If there is a difference (beyond the obvious openness of the façades), it is in the sense of hierarchy between the private and the social, which is much less pronounced in Bo Bardi’s house. This feels like a house for company rather than contemplation.

Both houses, in their preoccupations with the delineations of public and private space, their concerns for transparency or opacity and their treatment of landscape or street, are very Latin American in spirit. Both depart from the more showy aspects of their contemporaries in Europe and North America, where houses were seemingly built as much for public consumption as they were for the client, and with the photographed image in mind. They are also among the most influential houses of the past century, their genius apparent in their constant rediscovery by each successive generation."
luisbarragán  linabobardi  design  architecture  mexico  2014  color  lecorbusier  modernism  brasil  mexicocity  mexicodf  sãopaulo  brazil  df 
march 2014 by robertogreco
Partido Alto is the Portfolio of Pedro Oliveira –
"I’m a Brazilian Design Researcher, currently a PhD Candidate at the UdK Berlin. I am also a frustrated musician.

My research and practice fall at the intersection of Design Research and Sound Studies. I’m deeply interested in investigating the social, economical and political agendas of our everyday relationships with listening, as mediated through designed artifacts. I explore these issues mostly through developing objects, performances and sometimes even workshops. As a design researcher dealing with relationships between people and technology in a broader level, I also investigate near-future scenarios and emergent systems.

Here you’ll find a selection of projects I’ve developed in the past few years. If you like, you can browse a more comprehensive list, check some research sketches and ideas, or take a look at my CV.

Moreover, there’s also a moodboard I keep online, as well as some rather old stuff I’ve made as a graphic designer."

[via: via @annegalloway ]
brasil  design  sound  pedrooliviero  designresearch  listening  realationships  brazil 
february 2014 by robertogreco
"Luiza Prado
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1985.
Currently living in Berlin, Germany.

I'm a designer, researcher, artist and all-around curious person interested in the intersections of feminism, critical and speculative design, technology and our perceptions of our bodies and identities. I am currently a Design Research PhD candidate at the Universität der Künste Berlin; the working title for my dissertation is "Body extensions and the politics of designed artifacts". If you're curious you can check out my dissertation-related rants and reflections here.

Inquiries, stories, questions and general friendliness are always welcome! Say hi: "

[via via @annegalloway]
luizaprado  design  criticaldesign  brasil  feminism  art  speculativedesign  designfiction  bodies  identity  body  berlin  research  brazil 
february 2014 by robertogreco
Brazil let its citizens make decisions about city budgets. Here’s what happened.
"Our results also show that Participatory Budgeting’s influence strengthens over time, which indicates that its benefits do not merely result from governments making easy policy changes. Instead, Participatory Budgeting’s increasing impact indicates that governments, citizens, and civil society organizations are building new institutions that produce better forms of governance. These cities incorporate citizens at multiple moments of the policy process, allowing community leaders and public officials to exchange better information. The cities are also retraining policy experts and civil servants to better work with poor communities. Finally, public deliberation about spending priorities makes these city governments more transparent, which decreases corruption."
brazil  development  economics  brasil  2014  government  via:jedsundwall  participatory  budgeting  participatorybudgeting  transparency  democracy  governance  administration  leadership  management  classideas  tcsmny 
january 2014 by robertogreco
Educ-ação | Uma jornada em busca de inspiração
[Book (in Portuguese) is here: ]
[See also:

"Este projeto nasceu de uma motivação coletiva pela busca de modelos inspiradores de educação. Todos fomos e somos impactados profundamente por modelos educacionais desde cedo. Nosso aprendizado formal é um dos grandes responsáveis pelo que “vamos ser”. Quando crianças, nossa vida gira em torno das escolas. Quando jovens, nos deparamos com escolhas de disciplinas que vão delinear nosso futuro. Quando adultos, temos que tomar as mesmas decisões para nossos filhos. Movidos por inquietações ligadas à forma como entendemos educação hoje, um pequeno grupo se uniu em busca de reflexões e aprendizados em torno do assunto.

Foi assim, com estes desafios em mente, que um grupo de provocadores sonhou junto e desenhou um propósito em comum. Foi com um olhar não acadêmico em busca de inspiração que encontramos escolas, espaços de aprendizado, cursos formais e não formais que estão propondo novos formatos. Foi assim que chegamos a diversos modelos mundo afora: na India, na Suécia, na Indonesia, na Espanha, na Inglaterra, nos Estados Unidos… e no Brasil. Por acreditarmos na importância de escutar as experiências de quem está vivendo estes novos modelos, decidimos fazer uma jornada presencial por 13 destes espaços, em diferentes países e continentes. Vamos visitar estes locais, conversar com pessoas que compõem as histórias que dão vida e cor a estas iniciativas de educação.

Se quiser nos apoiar de alguma forma, por favor entre em contato:


This project was born out of a collective motivation to search for inspirational educational models. We are all profoundly impacted by educational models from an early age. Our formal training is largely responsible for the individual we’ll become when “we grow up”. When we are kids, our life revolves around school. When we are young adults, the disciplines we choose will help determine our future. As adults, we have to make these same decisions for our kids. Motivated by questionings related to the way we understand education today, a small group united in search for insights and learnings related to the subject. With this challenges in mind, a group of provocateurs came together, dreamt and designed a common goal.

It was with a non-academic viewpoint that we set out in search for inspiration, and we found schools, learning spaces, formal and informal courses that are proposing new formats. This is how we found diverse new models around the world: in India, Sweden, Indonesia, Spain, England, the US… and in Brazil. Some of these initiatives are still being selected in other countries. Because we believe in the importance of listening to whom is actually experiencing these new models, we decided to personally visit 13 of these spaces, in different countries and continents. We will visit them, talk to the people that are creating these stories and giving life and color to these new educational initiatives.

We believe this journey must be shared with the world, so the book will have a version for free download and will also share its contents through Creative Commons."
books  education  unschooling  alternative  deschooling  schools  northstar  quest2learn  argentina  brasil  brazil  spain  españa  cpcd  amorimlima  politeia  cieja  teamacademy  escuelasexperimentales  schumachercollege  yip  sweden  riversideschool  india  indonesia  greenschool  southafrica  sustainabilityinstitute  international  johnholt  paulofreire  rudolfsteiner  autonomy  openstudioproject  tcsnmy  lcproject 
january 2014 by robertogreco
STET | Speaking in tongues
"A counterpoint (or sometimes complement) to Jakobson’s “referential function” of language is what he calls the “poetic function” of language. They aren’t mutually exclusive, but the poetic function of language is not about communication. It’s about language as a pure material. Perhaps this is why poets are among the most notorious code-switchers. The Cantos of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” are good examples, frustrating and bewildering undergraduates for decades with their seemingly snobbish hodgepodge of languages alive and dead. But language isn’t always about clarity of expression. It’s about magic. That feeling of recognition you get, when someone says something you might not exactly understand or feel able to paraphrase, and yet it makes perfect sense. (These, by the way, are the kinds of thoughts I have while I’m in a boat on a river zooming towards what I can only assume is yet another bad decision.)"

"And this is where it gets a little tricky. Because even though linguists are fairly strict with their definition of code-switching, there are anthropologists and sociologists and philosophers and theorists who persuasively suggest that you can code-switch within a language depending on who you happen to be talking with, or your intention, based on relationships and personal and communal identities. Some recent sociolinguistic studies suggested that people have a few basic reasons for code-switching. For one thing, we want to fit in, so we often code-switch as a way of showing solidarity. We sometimes code-switch subconsciously in this kind of situation. I’d intuitively choose the word “try,” for instance, when I’m sitting on the Greyhound bus out of Salt Lake City, talking to the friendly trucker next to me who’s deadheading back from LA to Indianapolis. We talked for, like, two hours about how to make the perfect Bolognese, and disagreed only about whether or not the milk was really important. But I’d probably intuitively go with “attempt” if I were asking a question of a panelist at an academic conference. Well, depending on the panel. People code-switch for all kinds of contexts, including social class, age, race, and other kinds of origin. A lot of us have identities that belong to more than one discourse. Of course, the darker side of solidarity is less about belonging and more about hiding. Or perhaps more aptly, passing."
culture  german  identity  language  languages  codeswitching  2014  spanish  portuguese  español  portugués  juncen  rebeccalindenberg  conversation  onomotopoeia  romanjakobson  brasil  brazil  argentina  germany  poetry  poeticfunction  words 
january 2014 by robertogreco
hector zamora stacks mud brick lattice atop brazilian bikes
"subverting the traditional function of a bicycle, mexican artist héctor zamora uncovers the familiar object’s conceptual and metaphorical possibilities. best known for his architectural and public interventions that deconstruct the urban surroundings and raise questions for passing observers, ‘brasil’ reflects the local south american landscape, haphazardly stacked on something transient and portable, alluding to much of the country’s volatile building foundation. zamora’s sculptural works asks observers to reconsider the physical environment, paying acute attention to the probable implications of the constructed world we live in today. by reappropriating the physical characteristics, forcing the bike to maintain a stationary position, ‘brazil’ asks us how to define the terms architecture and art in a rapidly changing landscape. ‘brasil’ was recently exhibited at art basel miami beach 2013 for luciana brito galeria, são paulo."
art  hectorzamora  bikes  brazil  brasil  construction  architecture 
january 2014 by robertogreco
The ambassadors of the hinterlands [Diplomacy influenced the literature of Vinicius de Moraes, Guimarães Rosa and João Cabral] | Revista Pesquisa FAPESP
"If there are differences among the authors, there is, nevertheless, one similar point: the three were diplomats. “More than a coincidence, diplomatic work, which entails coming into closer contact with the exterior aspects of a system, an opening to a set of differences in social, cultural and political life, enabled the articulation of the extremely heterogeneous projects of all three of them, with different esthetic pathways, but sharing a single concern: the tension between the line of discourse of the development-oriented Brazil of the elite and the line of discourse of the archaic and needy Brazil, whether rural or urban,” notes Menezes. These writers-diplomats corroded the notion of a closed, toughened regionalism, alien to any connection with the external world. At the same time, they go against the pretenses of a development-oriented State focused on the idea of national unity. Their texts emphasize the diverse identities of the country, Brazil’s multiplicity of cultures and of social needs,” he analyzes. Just as the movement of diplomatic writing is underscored by “de-territorialization.”

These writers-diplomats were travelers in a Brazil lost in the labyrinths of modernization. “The tension created in the spirit at the same time bureaucratic (they were civil servants) and also as travelers casts a piercing look upon those native ‘foreigners’ that wander around their country like the mass of post-war refugees seeking a home. The dislocation, the exile, the complex adaptation to different lands, which are part of the life of diplomats, contributed to the de-territorialization of their thinking,” assesses the researcher. The social reality revealed in their texts is addressed from an overseas viewpoint.

“Diplomatic writing is suspicious of a limited link with places. Cabral, Rosa and Vinicius know that they cannot write ‘from within,’ as they lack the speaking style of the peasant or the inhabitant of the shantytowns. That is why they created ‘spaces from without,’ in which they have voices that resonate from ‘within’. This boundary-based perspective, that comes neither within nor from without, pursues a constant dialogue among various propositions, giving rise to new reflections, new esthetic configurations,” notes Menezes.

On the itinerary of the reverberations of the writer diplomats, approximations and translations among the cultural production of several parts of the world arise, precisely during times when the country was experiencing its belated modernity, when local production was articulating itself with foreign manufacturing and the concepts of dependence started to be influenced by the concepts of cultural simultaneity, even though the idea of modernity in Brazil arose before the modernization process. Brasilia is a symbol of this, as the capital of an “avant-gardist” state in a nation in which many modernity values had not yet even been assimilated. “In this, the three writers were wise to resort to diplomatic writing, in particular to the use of affection for the ‘other’ in the acknowledgement of foreignness in relation to established places,” analyses the researcher.

Diplomatic work functions like an allegory of the process of literary creation that involves writing as a type of relation with otherness. Hence the empathetic image that the authors reflect about these “foreigners” to modernity moving about Brazil’s territory."

“The writer-diplomats, when dealing with the politics of writing, know that the most important political work is not tied to the visible physical frontiers, but to the means of separating the invisible lines of prejudice, of discrimination,” states Menezes. It is in this “minor place” that they try to corrode separation and exclusion. “In official diplomacy, the work is carried out via the political, legal and economic institutions. In ‘minor diplomacy,’ it is conducted, for example, by the representation of the simple folks exposed to the cruelty of reality, by their way of dealing with biopolitics, with the limits that they must cross every single day in order to survive,” he observes. “Translating internal needs into external possibilities to expand the power of control of a society over its destiny is, to my mind, the task of foreign policy,” wrote the diplomat and University of São Paulo professor Celso Lafer in O Itamaraty na cultura brasileira [The Brazilian Foreign Office in Brazilian culture] (Instituto Rio Branco, 2001).

“Rosa’s ability to use various linguistic registers was, on the literary plane, the perfect correlate of the first item on any diplomatic agenda: the establishment of borders, the basis of foreign policy, which assumes that there is a difference between that which is ‘internal’ (the national space) and that which is ‘external’ (the world),” Lafer analyzes. “He translated in his literature one of the basic principles of Brazilian diplomacy, a line of action geared toward transforming our borders from classical, separation borders into modern cooperation borders,” he assesses. Unlike Rosa and Cabral, who experienced the hinterlands during their childhoods, Vinicius only gets to know the North and the Northeast of the country at the age of 29, in 1942. He joined the foreign office when he was discovering the country and internalizing his new ‘Brazilianness’ and, as a result, his artistic production started being influenced by the social reality of Brazil and popular culture."

"“The writings of the trio are not based on class struggles, parties or power, but on mediations, on negotiations,” observes Menezes. In the text of the three diplomats, a number of uncomfortable images arise that clash with the discourse of the development-oriented nation symbolized by Brasilia, which the trio, each in his own way, was able to admire and to criticize.

“During a time when the country wanted to join the concert of nations, investing in modernization and in progress, they trusted in the future, but mistrusted the processes employed to lead the country into this new political and economic stage,” notes the researcher. So they ventured into the hinterlands, hills and to the outskirts of the cities, in an attempt to acknowledge the value of the popular culture and creations. “The ‘minor diplomacy’ and the ‘frontier poetics’ had to find something capable of forcing thinking to emerge from its interiority. “The movement toward the exterior of conventional places contributed to the development of the imagination and to the authors’ critical view,” says Menezes."
diplomats  diplomacy  writing  interstitialspaces  outsiders  joãoguimarãesrosa  guimarãesrosa  joãocabraldemeloneto  viniciusdemoraes  2012  translation  literature  otherness  brasil  brazil  borders  sertão  hinterlands  culture  prejudice  discrimination  separation  exclusion  biopolitics  celsolafer  carloshaag  mediations  negotiations  modernism  modernization  progress  ronieremenezes  interstitial 
january 2014 by robertogreco
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