In the early 2000s, upon hearing about the Art Environmental Action initiative and the idea of creating a cultural outpost conceived on the Family Doctor model, Niemeyer gifted a design for a cultural center “modulo” that could potentially be replicated in other favela/community contexts.39 The Brazilian social bank BNDES who had just given the project a small grant came on board to support the construction. The first design was developed for an empty lot opposite the Palácio clinic, approximately 75 meters from the faveal entrance coming from the commercial city side of the neighborhood of Inga. However, after armed threats to MAC staff and municipal officials by an alleged owner of the land, a new location was chosen at the top of the favela that, similar to MAC, would overlook Guanabara Bay. The center/outpost would house a music studio, library, computer room, general-purpose space, and studio for the handmade paper project.
As the construction project advanced, MAC director at the time, Luiz Guilherme Vergara (2005-2008) who had been formerly director of education (1996 – 2004), was concerned with the life of the center post inauguration. It was critical to ensure a continuing program that would:
renew the energies of what had emerged in the late 1990s, expand the network of those involved, engage more artists and embrace a more diverse range of practices, and foster agency among a
37 Évelin Generoso Ferreira, “Programa Médico de Família: Sua inserção nas politicas públicas de saudade e intersetorialidade,” 2013, 9 & 13 unuhospedagem.com.br/revista/rbeur/index.../4299
38 Moema Guimarães Motta, “Programa Medico de Família de Niterói: Avaliação da assistência pré-natal na região oceânica,” Revista APS, v.8, n 2 (July/December, 2005): 118-122, 3 http://www.ufjf.br/nates/files/2009/12/niteroi.pdf
39 Luiz Guilherme Vergara notes that it was Niemeyer’s granddaughter who in talking with MAC director at the time Dora Silveira (also sister of the mayor Jorge Roberto Silveira) suggested the idea of presenting the project to Niemeyer.
new generation of youth. In 2007-2008 drawing on conversations with a transdisciplinary team of professors from UFF – Geography, Education, Art, Medicine, Literature– the Family Doctor Program, and an international partnership with The Andy Warhol Museum (AWM), Pittsburgh, USA, where at the time I was curator of special projects, as well as collaborations with the artist Marcos Cardoso, choreographer Luiz Mendonça and the collective RUST (Radical Urban Silkscreening Team), the Comuniarte project evolved.40 So named by the youth themselves, this public art, education and museum initiative supported by a grant from Oi Futuro, aimed to nurture socio-cultural agency amongst six university students from different disciplines and twelve favela youth from Morro do Palácio, ranging in ages from fifteen to twenty six.
The project began with a short course where each professor introduced various concepts and practices, particularly those of mapping which had emerged as resonant across disciplines. A six-month informal process followed where mini-teams of university students, professors and favela youth developed projects that “mapped” diverse aspects of favela life. Workshops and residencies with collaborating artists were integrated throughout the project. Mapping was not only key as a set of transversal practices across diverse fields of knowledge, it also emerged as a tool of empowerment. For communities, often not on any map, a process of mapping of self, other and community, of (re) claiming and (re) naming space offered new ways of seeing and validating everyday life and history. As for the Arte Ação Ambiental initiative as a whole, Milton Santos’ concept of practicing space, where “the lived surrounding is the place of exchange, matrix to an intellectual process” was also foundational to the project’s philosophy. 41
Similarly Freire’s concepts of consciousness-raising, agency-building and existential learning outlined in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed informed Comuniarte’s framing concepts and strategies of: awareness, belonging and agency.42 Importantly, this was not a one-way street
40 The entire project team comprised: Ana Karina Brenner, pedagogic coordinator now professor of education at Universidade Estadual de Rio de Janeiro (UERJ); Jessica Gogan, curator of special projects, The Andy Warhol Museum now independent curator/educator and director Instituto MESA; Luiz Guilherme Vergara, director/curator MAC-Niterói and professor art department UFF; Luiz Hubner, professor, Institute of Community Health, UFF and former coordinator Family Doctor Program (Morro do Palácio); Marli Cigagna, professor, Instituto of Geoscience, UFF ; Paulo Carrano, professor of education, UFF and director Youth Observatory; Sonia Monerat, professor, Institute of Literature, UFF ; and Renée Douek, psychologist and evaluator. RUST artists were Mary Tremonte and Heather White, their project evolved out of their work as artist/educators at the Warhol. At the time, the Warhol had recently developed an international project in collaboration with Russian partners featuring an online curriculum and various community based and school projects in different city locations as part of a major traveling exhibition of Warhol’s work supported by the Alcoa Foundation. The idea was to explore similar projects in Latin America, starting in Brazil.
41 [Author translation. Portuguese original: “O entorno vivido é lugar de uma troca, matriz de um processo intellectual.”] Milton Santos, O espaço do cidadão, 4th edition (São Paulo: Nobel 1998 (first published 1987)) 61.
Unfortunately there is little of Santos’ work translated into English. The following are two resources: Shared Space:
The Two Circuits of the Urban Economy in Underdeveloped Countries, trans. from French and adapted to English by Chris Gerry (London: Metheun, 1979).
42 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th edition, Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York/London:
Continuum, 2007 (first published 1970)).
exercise where presumably middle class teachers are the catalyst for consciousness-raising in low-income contexts that has, on occasion, been a criticism of Freire’s work.43 It was rather conceived as a wholly collective learning process (a mutual learning that Freire himself insisted upon) between professors, students and favela youth. The practices and discourses of mapping in each discipline – memory, narratives, sentiments, territories, space, body, experience – provided the architectural framework for this process.
Resulting projects included: a life-sized map of the favela that marked and photographed territories of affection and their interconnecting “becos” (alleyways); a photography project documenting life at the top of the favela under the themes of leisure, religion, and work; word poems and audio interviews with the Comuniarte group recollecting the games and locations where they played as children; miniature reliquaries comprising object assemblages and silkscreen books inspired by the lives of various individuals in the favela; video interviews and youth surveys on skills beyond school knowledge; and a multifaceted mapping of the favela football field, decided by one of the groups to be the center of community health, featuring video Screen Tests (inspired by Andy Warhol’s) of various angles at different times of day of the football field, large-scale panoramic photographs, interviews, and memorabilia. Together with Marcos Cardoso, the youth also created a quilt-like piece featuring the logo they designed for the project, comprising MAC’s outline with the favela inside, sewn together using left-over package wrappings. On December 8th, 2008 MAC and the city of Niterói inaugurated the Morro do Palácio cultural center/outpost that would thereafter be called MACquinho with the exhibition Territórios de afetos (Affective Territories) featuring the Comuniarte projects and also a selection of displays from the history of the Arte Ação Ambiental initiative presented at MAC.
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We hadn’t slept in 24 hours. We had worked through the night to mount the exhibitions and get the center ready. Embroiled in city politics, after a recent mayoral election that would change the
43 Jailson de Souza e Silva notes that the 1970s and 80s produced a generation whose political consciousness was marked by critical pedagogy and popular activism. While respecting Freire’s “Pedagogy of Freedom,” Souza remarks that there was a strong elitist character to the logic of “conscientization” which often assumed a consensus of political alienation amongst favela dwellers and that it was up to the middle class groups and organizations to raise their consciousness. This is an operative preconception that continues to play out amongst political sectors. The difference in the new generation of NGOs is that they come from favelas themselves. The last two decades have seen a marked explosion of activism e.g. Observatório de Favelas, Afro Reggae, Redes de Maré (Maré Networks), Central Única da Favelas (One Center of Favelas) and Nós do Morro (Us from the Hill). I will refer to some of these organizations later in the text. Jailson de Souza e Silva, De Baixo para Cima, 70 – 71 and footnote no. 6, 78. Tom Finkelpearl in his introduction to his interview with Freire also commented on this aspect: “One of the basic criticisms of Freire’s work is that it still depends on the teacher, the presumably middle-class, educated leader, who will open the minds of “the people” for their benefit, whether they like it or not.” Tom Finkelpearl, “Interview with Paulo Freire,” Dialogues in Public Art (Cambridge/Mass/London: The MIT Press, 2001) 277-293, 281.
current municipal administration including the directorship of MAC, the inauguration of MACquinho was bound to be as political as it would be joyful. A complex dance had been worked out between all the various players, drug traffic leaders in the favela, outgoing mayoral office, police, favela neighborhood association, long time youth members of the Arte Ação Ambiental initiative now in their mid twenties, and the “graduating” Comuniarte group. The temporary alliances, however, would not hold. The mayor’s calendar changed, altering police presence, leading to violent incursions, infuriating traffic leaders, and usurping carefully laid plans for community speeches from the Arte Ação Ambiental youth. It was devastating for those closest to the project. Yet, all the while political appearances were upheld and congratulations offered. A bittersweet moment. The very inauguration of an almost impossible achievement was also the quasi assuredness of its non-continuity.
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Six years later, a few days before MACquinho was to be re-inaugurated as a Digital Urban Technology Platform, now under the auspices of Niterói’s Secretary of Education and Technology and a new mayor, I stood on the museum ramp looking toward the political juggernaut taking over the center. Shortly after opening MACquinho became mired in building problems from limited access to water to a major landslide requiring the construction of a holding wall that closed the center for over a year. Between a seemingly endless array of construction and resource issues and other political interests, the center and its possibilities had not been a priority.
To MAC’s administration (2009 - 2012) due credit they had managed to tread water, maintaining some of the Arte Ação Ambiental members, mostly as building security, and on occasion hosting community programming. During this time the official jurisdiction of MACquinho, then under the direction of FAN (Niterói Art Foundation), as is the museum itself, was transferred to the department of education.
With the re-election of the Worker’s Party at the end of 2012, a new ambitious young mayor and the return of the previous museum administration, interest in MACquinho was renewed, resulting in both new investments and complex political and community lobbying.
Secretary of Education Waldeck Carneiro saw the potential of the center as part of a career move to run for state representative. Visible, prestigious and needy, given its years of disrepair and underachievement, the center could be mobilized as a prime pawn in a publicity and electoral campaign. However complex and prone to corruption, Brazil’s obligatory voting means that politicians cannot ignore favelas. Palácio’s population of 5,000 would be a significant boost to the Secretary’s planned run for state parliament. The good news would mean that it would be finally
possible to complete the planned music studio, purchase computer equipment, create a simple outdoor stage with bleachers at the back of the building for events and screenings, and with the promise of staffing truly advance on original goals – an array of investments all but impossible for MAC to have realized on its own. Unfortunately, this also meant the dismantling of the last remnants of Arte Ação Ambiental initiative. The community was tired of MACquinho and saw it as an underachieving white elephant. Justly so. But this also meant that trying to foster discussion about a mix of possible futures was almost impossible amidst the cries of “what have you brought us that’s concrete?” and the clever use of such opportunities as platforms for political speech delivered in an almost delirious oratorical mix of evangelical pastor and hip-hop DJ.
On that day, standing on the ramp, the artisanal paper studio cleared out and used as storage (or rather dumping ground), the organic in-door garden in-process evicted, the political promise of intersectorial collaboration all-but-ignored, everything was being manically painted the city’s municipal orange. I watched, what seemed like the final straw. Niemeyer’s design for MACquinho featured an elegant boomerang shaped white building, a breasting curve on the edge of the favela with large open windows overlooking the Bay, with a signature supporting yellow wall offsetting the structure – a use of primary contrasting colors, like the startling red of MAC’s ramp, that was common to the architect’s style.44 Here, just days short of the re-inauguration, the wall, fully appropriated by the political machine, was being painted orange.
A few hours and cell phone conversations later, the Secretary of Education clearly keen to avoid potential loss of face in his “oranging” of Niemeyer, the wall was being painted back to its original yellow. It was a strange micro victory amidst a political machine that absorbs everything in its wake. Perhaps it is only ever in this minor suspension of the real – the way things operate – however momentary, that art, here via the mobilization of the symbolic power of Niemeyer, institutes the possible. On the B side of this, a few days later on April 4th, 2014, a small exhibition of the Farmácia Baldia project somehow miraculously made it onto the walls of the new MACquinho, now a Digital Urban Platform, just hours before the re-inauguration. Put together by a series of contributions much more analog than digital including botanists, health agents, pharmacists, designers, curators, educators, producers, and community members – the exhibition sat powerless yet also like a potent seed, amidst the flash of political posturing and technological ambitions. Another bittersweet battle notch as all the while doors were closing.
44 It should be noted that Niemeyer’s design is not without criticism. The curved boomerang shape with expansive glass windows opens out to the view of Guanabara Bay but the entire rear of the building is closed off with no windows giving the impression that the building turns its back to the community. While it is a critique I have only heard from foreign visitors and rarely from those living in the community and working at MACquinho, a certain front of
house/back of house dynamic can be seen in events that engage both “asphalt and favela.” Also, it is important to note that because the time of design was one of increased violence, there was a concern re windows at the back as being possibly exposed (as the building would be higher than most dwellings) to gunfire or loose bullets.