One Favela’s Aspirational Graffiti

Architizer News

One Favela’s Aspirational Graffiti

March 5, 2012

Following Hass&Hahn’s favela murals, Spanish art collective boa mistura has recently completed a large-scale art project in Vila Brâsilandia on the outskirts of São Paulo which transforms the favela’s winding streets and alleys into giant anamorphic, illusionary spaces. As part of the “participatory urban art” project, the artists, or “graffiti rockers” as they call themselves, worked with residents and locals to re-envision the material conditions which comprise their environment. Continue.

With the community’s help, the collective flooded the vecos and vielas of the favela with bright, optimistic colors emblazoned with simple aspirational messages. Words such as beleza (beauty), doçura (sweetness), and firmeza (steadfastness) are suspended in the perspective frame of the beholder. Step off the prescribed visual axis and the large script becomes fragmented and unintelligible. Resituate your gaze and the clarity of the message is restored. In this way, the project begins to determine the flows of movement animating the favela, thus choreographing, to an extent, the play of its unique internal life. One hopes, however, that the poetics of abstraction does not distort the realities of the impoverished living conditions on the ground. Life, and more pointedly, social mobility can not be sustained on inspiration alone.