On that week, Leonardo arrived determined to show a documentary about TV Morrinho to the kids. I am not sure he knew exactly what he wanted to do with this material, which questions and discussions he wanted to trigger among the students, and I blame him for that. We could have used this material a lot better had we been prepared for it.
Projeto Morrinho is a really great project, started a few years ago by teenagers from a small favela in Rio. The kids started building miniature models of the favela using bricks and found material, and using them as the set for games in which they reproduced situations from their everyday life in the favela. Their models got noticed and attracted the attention of designers, artists and documentary makers who helped them to create an NGO and show their work outside the favela. The transformation of what started as a game, a joke, into a work of art in its own right, culminated in the Venice Biennale 2007, where the boys from Morrinho project showed a huge model of a favela. There are pictures of the models here on flickr.
The documentary we showed during our classes retraces the history of the project and shows the boys travelling around Europe to show their models at art shows and exhibitions.
For me this project is interesting because it shows the power of inventiveness and creativity. It shows that anyone, whatever their environment and their cultural background can find the means and ways to express themselves through art in a way that's revealing and interesting to the world. On the other hand, you can argue that the favela is such a laden topic, the symbol of social inequality, drug trafficking and the failure of democracy in Brazil, and the entire world, that any representation of it is bound to be interesting to the middle class and to find its way to our TV sets and art galleries...
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