Competing Discourses

The chapter focuses on the way museums, historical areas, and iconic architecture become a key asset in the promotion of an urban identity and branding. The chapter examines the various facets of the Wonder Port project and its consequence for local residents. It studies more specifically the key role played by art in the production of conflicting and sometimes contradictory spatial imaginaries. The chapter shows the tensions between Rio Art Museum’s architecture and exhibits and community-based social and cultural projects such as Morrinho (Little Hill) and the Inside Out Morro da Providência project. It illustrates how top-down market-oriented social policies of displacement of long-time residents are put into question by favela-based cultural producers.

Favelas for Sale

This chapter analyzes the short-story “Maria Déia” written by Lia Vieira, which traces the story of some residents who were evicted from Morro de Santo Antonio in the 1950s. It also examines the video ImPACtos produced in 2010 by the collective multimedia group Favela em Foco. These two cultural productions enable us to trace a series of discourses/modes of representation that have been used to legitimize and justify urban interventions. This chapter examines the way both cultural productions challenge the recurring, dominant representations of favelas as a space of otherness and/or spectacles of consumption. The chapter illustrates how these cultural productions allow us to understand that these urban interventions are not simply a dispute over the control of a territory, but are part of the continuing struggle over the meanings and boundaries vis-à-vis conflicting views of citizenship and belonging.

Photographs and Favelas

The chapter studies two photographic projects organized by groups of favela photojournalists in Rio de Janeiro. Moro na Favela (I Live in a Favela) was an itinerant exhibit that was displayed in various communities and cultural centers from 2006 to 2008, and Imagens do Povo (Images of the People), a book published in 2012, contains 102 photographs taken by 25 community photographers. The chapter examines the ways in which the photographs propose an alternative aesthetic of representation, challenging a regime of seeing through which the city has traditionally sought to recognize itself. It illustrates how the two photographic projects expose aspects that are part of the realm of daily life that are traditionally over/mislooked. The chapter also addresses briefly the spaces of circulation of the two cultural productions.

Monuments and Consumption

The chapter focuses on the design and decoration of Complexo do Alemão cable car stations and interviews of architects and state officials involved with the project. It also considers the photographic project Inside Out Providência and two videos in order to explore some of the contradictions and conflicts that lie behind the Complexo do Alemão and Wonder Port projects. The chapter discusses the ways cable car stations attempt to reframe the relationship between space, tourism, and the process of aestheticization of favelas. It considers the centrality of favelas in the marketing and branding of the city as a strategy to attract external investors and tourists. It also demonstrates how urban interventions are part of a process of commodification and social/racial cleansing.

Videos, Favelas, and Childhood

The chapter analyzes three videos: Picolé, pintinho e pipa (2006), Seja bem-vindo a nossa Tavares Bastos (2009), and Tempo de criança (2010). Produced by favela-based residents, these videos relocate childhood into the imaginary of the city in an attempt to challenge hegemonic modes of representing favela children. Constructed as the negative Other, male black favela youngsters are usually portrayed by the official media performing activities associated with begging, windshield washing, consuming and selling drugs, stealing or killing. The criminalization of black male youngsters from favelas has been instrumental in shaping and justifying far-reaching politics of exclusion, diverse forms of inequality. Said videos are thus perceived as acts of seeing that become exploratory strategies intrinsically intertwined with the production of alternative forms of identity and geographical representations. Therefore, this chapter serves as study of some of the strategies employed to propose alternative paradigms of childhood.

Favelas

The introduction historicizes the evolution of favelas in the imaginary of the city. It illustrates how favelas, constructed as a site of Otherness and/or authenticity, have become more recently a consumable good. With the pacification process, favelas have become a seductive component of the city, attracting many interests, and a clear process of urban development is under way. The chapter describes how successive urban remodeling plans have resulted in the eviction of many residents—mostly low-income, black segments of the population. It defines favela-based cultural productions as counter-narratives that are implicated in the articulation of alternative identities and geographies. Finally, it conveys the methods used in the book and the general organization of the book.