Recyclart, March 2011
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Jornal de Artigos Não Lidos (Journal of Unread Articles) is a journal by Repórter sem Beiras that wants to communicate a broader view and sense of personal identity on the people living in favelas — Brazilian slums.
This issue, Stereo Sculpture, focuses on ‘Change’. Time is changing and there is no escape — we are all changing. Night becomes day, and days become years. Time passes with each tick of the clock. With each passing second there is change. Because it is fluid, change is difficult to define.
The natural world is shrinking, while cities are expanding. New urban structures are appearing. Within some of these megalomaniac cities, there exist small, but growing islands of slums. The favelas are changing as well — their structure, function and definition. Some favelas are being removed in order to construct new buildings, ‘real buildings’. New slums arise in places that were deserted just a minute ago. Change is the enemy of all conservatives, but some changes are positive. Sometimes change is ambiguous; for everything that is gained, something is lost.
As elections draw near, governments propose introducing new services in the slums, utilities such as water and electricity and paving the streets. They do it in the hope that the large favela population will vote for them. Rio de Janeiro will host the Olympic Games in 2016, and the city is demanding improvements in the slums that are visible from the tourist zone in the southern part of the city. The city is building new medical and sport facilities here in order to ease its conscience in the eyes of the international community. They are ‘cleaning up’ the favelas and getting rid of drugs. But then the drug gangs leave the south zone and move up to the northern part of the city where they keep on trafficking. Does this qualify as change?
Everything changes, for better or for worse.
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