Press note | Exhibition Arquitetura da sobra
   

HELIÓPOLIS I. Fotografía siliconada / metacrilato. 180 x 900 cm.Ed. 3 50 x 250 cm. Ed. 7

NOVA HELIÓPOLIS I. Fotografía siliconada / metacrilato. 180 x 900 cm.Ed. 3 50 x 250 cm. Ed. 7
HELIÓPOLIS II. 150 x 263 cm. Ed. 3 100 x 175 cm. Ed. 7HELIÓPOLIS III. 150 x 230 cm. Ed. 3 100 x 153 cm. Ed. 7
NOVA HELIÓPOLIS II. 180 x 350 cm. Ed. 3 100 x 195 cm. Ed. 7NOVA HELIÓPOLIS III. 180 x 338 cm. Ed. 3 100 x 188 cm. Ed. 7
NOVA HELIÓPOLIS IV. 180 x 400 cm. Ed. 3 100 x 225 cm. Ed. 7HELIÓPOLIS IV. 100 x 210 cm.
MARGINAL II. 170 x 300 cm. Ed. 3 125 x 220 cm. Ed. 7Partial view of the exhibition
Partial view of the exhibitionPartial view of the exhibition
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La Favela is the only architecture, along with funerary architecture, that is made expressly to dissolve the gaze for exclusion. It is also the only architecture proposed in phases, that is in constant movement. If we add to this the fact that the city of Sao Paulo, as C. Levi Strauss would define it, is the city in movement - and nothing illustrates this idea as well as the flow of construction (a new building every 2 hours) - and also the incoming flow of population from the country's interior, which installs itself in a precarious existence in the megalopolis, you can see why movement is accentuated from these two routes.

And the video "Cartografías para a remocao" also describes the favela or shanty town from a constant movement. A visit through different favelas in the city of Sao Paulo that show a building architecture that is focused on the collection of heteroclitic materials drawn from, and even stolen from the planned city's surplus. The favela gathers its resources and materials from a planned context for the construction of districts created in an unplanned context, and for this reason, with no final pre-established form. This also means that the favela will never be entirely finished; the structure of the favela is not articulated in a project, but rather comes from the instrumentality of a random architectural recycling.

The video includes shantytown neighborhoods that will be demolished, and some have already been destroyed (deactivated as the government perceives this demolition) by the city of Sao Paolo. Behind this demolition is Proyecto Cingapura, which is the largest shantytown (favela) verticalization and reurbanization program in Brazil. It was planned by the city of Sao Paulo and implemented in different parts of the city, with a total of 34,394 square meters and more than 3000 apartments built.
But the removal of the favelas and the verticalization of these deteriorated areas also generates the rupture of the group identities and the social and symbolic restructuring of is "in-habitants" in proletarian housing developments.
What is true is that behind these Faustian projects is a cultural uprooting based on the "functional" notion of re-adaptation and reeducation of the residents to convert them into citizens who can be cataloged.
There is also a loss of urban and architectural values established over the course of decades that are unique to the residents-architects. These values can be recovered with a building policy that takes these concepts into account, rather than the city's "clientization" approach. These actions must be sensitive to communities establishe in the megalopolis from the country's interior, and whose origin is not other than that unnatural diaspora.

Finally, the project for the verticalization of the favelas de Cingapura neighborhoods: a proposal by the city government selected in the good practices selection process sponsored by the Unesco in Dubay in 1996, which was intended to reduce and prevent crime, obtain access to communications, provide electrical power usage and generation, supply drinking water, waste management, housing, and access to financing for housing, and, of course, organization of the territory and regulations; I say that ultimately the project failed. Failed, because among many other irregularities, it was a project that did not implement a plan for urban development and architecture, that did not address the involvement of the residents, and that abandoned the completed housing to deterioration, insular deterioration as the favelas grew around a vertical buildings cast out among the shanties. There was also intent to ambush: the intent to catalog all of the landless, lawless, submerged, and invisible into the system; in other words, to prescribe a certain type of morality for them because they were given the use of a predefined space.

The video visits not just the favela and part of the technological city, but also shows the Cingapura verticalization project, and then articulates proposals for personal intervention that mimics or attends to those "shantified" resources, respecting their randomness and disparity, but making them more hygienic and structurally consolidated around their characteristic lack of distinction between the public and private.

Also, The photographs provide a linear and horizontal view of favelas that are in danger of being demolished by the city of Sao Paolo and replaced by a vertical proletarian architecture with no social identity, that periodically alter the group alignment and generate a process that detracts from identity.

For this reason, I have systematically shown 2 parameters, either separately or together, of intervention in the photographs
1- Projects to make containers compatible for housing modules
This group of photographs shows alternatives to that suppression from an attentive "natural" mobility to that unplanned growth of urban development. For this reason, there are digital actions micrografted between the surface of the graft and assemblies, that plan the project and supplement, from a personal proposal of sustainable architecture, the preexisting shanties, but in a way that is sensitive to the habits and customs of the inhabitants, inhabitants who, on the other hand, have lived in these settlements for decades.


2- Projects for the construction of buildings (institutional landmarks) with an avant-garde aesthetic, in unstable neighborhoods, as a system of social insertion, growth of the business fabric, and regeneration of the land.
There are possibilities of incorporating areas of social exclusion into maps of citizen inclusion. In other words, there should be an official recognition that gives names to streets and numbers to houses, and this will depend on the official recognition of some clandestine settlements (more than 1000 in the last four decades). This interior voyage that we are proposing was done photographically with digital interference from an idea as simple as it is perfectly feasible: If construction is taking place at a dizzying rate in the city of Sao Paolo and both the city as well as private companies live around a colossal construction site, why aren't public buildings such as maternity wards, hospitals, courts, pavilions decentralized, regulating and building marginal neighborhoods that are more compatible with a dislocation of habitation that is more dynamic and non-concentrated? Why not help private companies to create their high-tech buildings in unstable neighborhoods?
This would make it possible to generate a business fabric around marginal neighborhoods with minimal possibilities for sustainability. In turn, each neighborhood would be identified by the building or group of buildings that would give it an identity without damaging its way of life, but increasing its social insertion, and would, in a certain way, become its emblem, or even is aesthetic identifier.

 
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