file: self organized closeness location: São Paulo / Campinas documents presented: essay date: 2005 - 2007 orginal format: digital dimension: varies textual reference: Karina Landman & Martin Schönteich
file: overnight shopping (stagnation, inflation, and crisis)
The growth of gated communities in Brazil is a manifestation of a growing middle class, and what could be see as a sign of progress, is a result of structural deficiencies that prevent wider economic and social mobility. Security in Brazil means fences and walls, private guards, video monitoring and sensor activated alarms. Security has become a way of life in Brazil and the concept of ‘total security’ is the new “top quality” of real state marketing. Fortified enclaves include now office complexes, shopping centres and other spaces adapted to conform to this new urban model, transformed in a sign of social status and luxury (because its high prices), exacerbating an existing pattern of urban segregation by creating physical boundaries and barriers all over the city. Fortified enclaves can also lead to the privatization of public space or the reservation of certain spaces for exclusive use small social groups and in addition, they are changing the nature of the existing public spaces, that became sometimes almost forgotten. They contribute to higher levels of inequality, fear, suspicion and feelings of vulnerability in those ‘outside’ the boundaries, also contributing to the privatization and transformation of public spaces that are neglected, abandoned and relinquished to violence and other illegal forms of control.
Politics is more and more based on economiccs, and in a speculative era, there is no doubt that social movements will once again be criminalized and oppressed by the official forces. To adopt free trade and fully open economy to the huge international monopolies - could condemn Brazil to a permanent dominance by market policies what would mean perpetuating the inequalities that make our country the most stratified in the world. We can just buy. In the known inflationary and speculative “overnight period” (from midle 80’s to nowadyas ), at night when we slept, others where working to extract informations for the next speculative day of “immaterial exchangings”. What we see is the growing impossibility to materialize and to manifest collectively the people desires in urban spaces, the choice for the closeness of private life instead of a more social one. Even if we think about small changes through social policies, the fact still is if we will have a more unequal country; if we will be a more democratic society or a less democratic one; if we will have a country or become just a speculative market, consolidated as a conservative country run by oligarchic elites (a mix between Daslu and Opus Dei)... If we will be reduced to a stock market, a shopping mall surrounded by poverty on all sides.
location: São Paulo / Campinas documents presented: essay date: 2004/2005 orginal format: digital (diptic) dimension: varies textual reference: Emir Sader, October 12, 2006.