Why whirlwind? 'Whirl', because we have been criss-crossing the country by plane, using the Brazil Pass, a special offer for visitors from abroad who want to visit different cities during a set period of time. But why 'wind', that is another question. Maybe it has to do with the air, that warm tropical air which received us in Rio de Janeiro with a variety of smells, from sweet flowers and other plant smells to the stench of open sewers in the Favela; wind, also because of the frequent tropical thunderstorms which we have encountered; and wind also because of ...
Ipanema Beach
but no, don't think anything wrong, our digestion runs smooth like a biofuel production plant from Petrobras. The air that we have been breathing was always very different. While Rio de Janeiro in itself hosts a variety of different smells so that you can always say there is something in the air in RJ -- a fiery but sweet Forro rhythm and melody for instance, mixing with the sweat of dancers and spilled beer and caipirinas at Club Democraticus at 3 am in Lapa, or lead bullets from automatic weapons by the special forces, the Tropa Da Elite, using the woods behind the neighbourhood where we stayed as target shooting exercise ground, hopping onto an airplane and two days later --
Surfers in Pipa
we found ourselves refreshed by an Atlantic breeze in Pipa, a holiday village between Recife and Natal. For many years a small fishing village with a few surfers dropping by to explore the beautiful beaches where you can swim with the Dolphins, literally, one jumped out 5 meters in front of me, it has recently experienced a bit of a boom, but is still a place nice enough to be remembered only in the most beautiful terms. Pipa is full of small stories of the sort which we dont have in the cities anymore: a mule that runs away while the whole street laughs at the boy trying to catch it; a little girl using a much too big stick trying to get some of the tasty Caju fruits. In Pipa we visited Ricardo Ruiz and Tati Wells, founders of Miditatica, early involved in the Pontos de Cultura program and currently preparing foor Submidialogica which happens on December 3 and 4 in Lencois, state of Bahia. Their hacker friends who came over the same weekend when we were there reminded me a bit of the Freaknet spirit, combining work with lots of fun. Currently in this group it is totally necessary to install Slackware to get any credits at all, so maybe I will try that. Ubuntu sucked already anyway.
Traditional dish cooked by Ricardo, line caught Tuna and shrimps in vegetable sauce.
Ricardo and Tati are now working for the communications ministry going out to remote places doing workshops with people teaching them Linux. However, often they find themselves in situations where there is a basic lack of anything, where they have to start from zero, more or less. The communication ministry is running this program without any strategy for evaluation at all, apart from numbers - counting how many workshops happened and how many people have in theory been 'empowered'. It would be interesting to know what happens after Ricardo and Tati leave, what is the long term impact of this work. Both are confident that a positive effect does exist but share this concern that the funding body forgot to include a pposition for research and evaluation. There is also no money for them to go back to the places and see for themselves, or give people a brushup of what they learned in the first round.
Lucas Bambozzi at opening night of art.mov
After letting ourselves be driven back to the airport over the road of death where we smell the aethanol of numerous trucks and busses, we enter another plane and take another nightflight to Belo Horizonte. There we take part in the artemov festival, a very well organised and curated festival about mobile media. Initiated by Lucas Bambozzi, it reconnects with the locative media discourse, which sort of climaxed and declined at the same time at ISEA 2006. Lucas' selection highlights the critical use of mobile media and, despite having a mobile phone company as main sponsor of the festival, does not shy away from critical questions about the structure of those networks and the commodity fetishism applied to the mobile gadgets. Rather fittingly, Preemptive Media (USA, Brooke Singer, Beatriz da Costa, Jamie Schulte) have created a device which lets users explore the air quality of places (project Air). Their earlier works explored different aspects of data surveillance, offering possibilities of creative resistance to things such as RFID. Other international participants at Artemov were Mark Shepard, Brett Stahlbaum and Blast Theory. The conference offered interesting talks and discussion, yet suffered a bit from the fact that the local art and tech scene more or less ignored the event -- most visitors came from Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo -- although I have been told that Berlo Horizonte has a lively video art scene as well as skilled hackers. Well, we met one of them, Fernando, who hosted a great party at his house.
Museum of the Arts, Pampulha, by Oscar Niemeyer
Having smelled the highlife of the upper middle class at another party in Belo Horizonte at a villa in the hills and after managing the highest Cholesterol level ever with a visit at Fazenda Restaurant Xapuri, we digested the most gentle Niemeyer curves ny visiting the art museum in Pampulha, built already in 1943, one of three works around a Laguna in Pampulha, which helped Niemeyer to be recognized nationally and which should lead to him getting the commission for Brasilia. The work was created in collaboration with garden architect Burle Marx whose presence, like Niemeyer's, can also be felt all over Brasil and not at last under your trainers when stepping on city asphalt - many pavements carry his famous wave patterns.
Stepping on to another flight we got whirled around and well shaken by a tropical thunderstorm over Sao Paulo before we finally were allowed to land. Brazilians assured us that while rain is frequent at this time of the year, the ferocity of the storms is not and that this was probably already a result of climate change. In Sao Paulo we have not done much so far except eating Sushi in Liberdade with Giselle Beigelman and Nelson Brissac, discussing megacities and Lula's social policies, among other things.
This narration reflects only a small excerpt of all that we could smell in Brazil and future updates are likely to appear on this site.
