As carnival kicks off this weekend, millions of people are will likely take to the streets and forget Brazil’s political and economic woes for a few days. During the country’s 21 year military dictatorship, however, censorship and intimidation meant carnival and politics were too closely linked for comfort.

By James Young
Belo Horizonte

The giddy souls who called for intervenção militar já (military intervention now) at Brazil’s anti-government rallies in 2015 should perhaps be careful for what they wish. For as the country prepares to swivel its hips at Recife’s Galo da Madrugada, Rio de Janeiro’s Cordão da Bola Preta and thousands of other blocos (street parties), big and small, it is worth remembering how carnaval suffered during Brazil’s 21-year military dictatorship.

“During the military dictatorship, just as with song lyrics, plays and films, carnaval did not escape the scissors of the censors,” wrote journalist Mariana Filgueiras in O Globo newspaper last year, in an article about the digitization by Brazil’s National Archive of thousands of historical documents from escolas de samba (samba schools).

While the dictatorship began in 1964, the military censors’ grip tightened considerably at the end of 1968 following the signing of ato institutional no. 5, better known as AI-5. According to this essay by Wellington Kirmeliene, writing in the History magazine of the Brazilian National Library, this presidential decree allowed the authorities “total and unrestricted powers of censorship, as well as practically legalizing persecution and torture, and, as a consequence of those acts, disappearances and deaths.”

During the period, Rio de Janeiro’s samba schools were forced to provide a detailed dossier of their carnaval projects, explaining and justifying the meaning behind their costumes, floats and song lyrics.

In their book “Pra tudo começar na quinta-feira: o enredo dos enredos” (“Everything starts on Thursday: a history of samba themes”, in loose translation) journalists and historians Fábio Fabato and Antônio Simas describe three episodes of government meddling in the country’s carnaval celebrations.

In 1967, the rehearsals of the Salgueiro samba school were monitored by DOPS (Departamento de Ordem Política e Social) officers, while in 1969, the Império Serrano school was forced to switch the word “revolução” (“revolution”) for “evolução” (“evolution”) in a song glorifying the 18^th century Inconfidência Mineira rebellion and the abolition of slavery.

And in 1974, the Unidos de Vila Isabel escola was pressurized into including a reference to the government’s Trans-Amazonian highway in a song about the rights of Brazil’s indigenous people.

In such a climate, it, was hardly surprising that, according to Wellington Kirmeliene, all the “elements of “planet carnaval” followed the jingoist message of the military regime”, with the majority of carnaval samba tunes adopting a highly nationalistic tone.

The chorus of one song by the Imperatriz Leopoldinense samba school in the 1970s, for example, described Brazil as a “a giant evolving and moving forward”, while another group, G.R.E.S. Estação Primeira de Mangueira, used nature to proclaim the country’s greatness “Oh, what a place!/Oh, what a place!/Everything you plant here grows/There’s no place like this”, before ending with the cry “This is Brazil!/This is Brazil!!/This is Brazil!!!”.

At the same time, many Brazilian artists used carnaval as a way of expressing their opposition to the military government, such as in “Marcha da Quarta-Feira de Cinzas” (“the Ash Wednesday Song”) by Vinícius de Moraes and Carlos Lyra. “Our carnaval is over/no one will hear the songs/no one will dance happily in the street/and in our hearts/there are only ashes and longing for what has gone,” ran the lyrics of the song, which was written in 1963 but gained added significance once the dictatorship took control.

And in 1965 Chico Buarque released “Sonho de um Carnaval” (“A Carnaval Dream”): “At carnaval there is hope/that those who are far away can remember/that those who are sad can dance/that those who are grown-up can be like children.”

As the dictatorship’s grip finally loosened in the 1980s, the carnaval sambas became more openly critical of the regime and the censorship that accompanied it: “I dreamt that I was dreaming a dream/a dream of a mesmerizing dream/of open minds/and no silenced mouths,” ran the words to one song by G.R.E.S. Unidos de Vila Isabel (again, loose translation).

This year’s carnaval, like others in recent years, is sure to be awash with satirical tunes criticising the country’s disastrous political and economic state. “Criticism through humour has been used for a long time in Brazil, even though it lost strength during the years of repression, with the (former president Getúlio) Vargas and military dictatorships, when there was less freedom…but in the last ten years it has been reborn,” the researcher Weydson Barros Leal explained in this interview with the Diário de Pernambuco newspaper from Recife, one of Brazil’s great carnaval capitals.

President Dilma Rousseff is likely to be the target of many of the jibes, as is the under-fire Speaker of Brazil’s Lower House, Eduardo Cunha, whose home was recently searched as part of the Operation Carwash investigation into the enormous bribes scandal at state run oil giant Petrobras.

One song that is already on its way to becoming a carnaval smash pays tribute to Newton Ishii, the Asian-Brazilian federal police officer who has appeared in TV news footage of many of the Operation Carwash arrests. “Oh my God, now I’m in trouble, the Japanese from the Feds is knocking on my door,” runs the chorus.

Other carnaval tunes, meanwhile, mock the paean to unrequited love that was the letter sent by Brazilian Vice-President Michel Temer to Rousseff in December, and in “Tia Wilma e a Bicicleta” (“Auntie Wilma and the Bicycle”), the President’s love of riding her bike. The latter is built around a play on words based on “pedalling” and the “pedaladas fiscais” (financial manoeuvres) on which the impeachment campaign against Rousseff is based.

While many younger revellers will give no more thought to what it means to have the freedom to criticise their politicians in this way than they will to popping open their first carnaval beer, it is worth remembering that not so long ago, speaking out in public was a much more dangerous affair indeed.

River transport in Brazil’s Amazon region is both an essential means of getting around for locals and an unforgettable experience for travellers. And with a unique sense of river camaraderie, it’s hard to feel lonely. In search of adventure, Sam Cowie took the slow boat from Manaus to Porto Velho.   

By Sam Cowie
Manaus

Spending four days on a boat slowly chugging its way down the Amazon is probably not for everyone. For some, sharing a relatively small space with 100 strangers – a fair few of whom are young children – in humid heat, with only two bathrooms, set meals, limited electricity and zero privacy would be a nightmare.

For many Amazonians, however, long distance river transport is unavoidable, as much of the region is unreachable by road and air travel is often prohibitively expensive. Around 14 million passengers used Amazon river transport in 2012, many travelling distances of up to 1600km. Thirty per cent of them earned between R$450 and R$720 a month.

Personally, I found lying in a hammock with no internet and little more to do than read a book or stare at the scenery rolling by an extremely pleasant break from Brazil’s wonderful, but at times stuffy and hectic, metropolises.

After being on assignment in Manaus one of my few ways out of the city without catching a plane was to take a boat to Porto Velho in neighbouring Rondônia, which has the dubious honour of being Brazil’s most deforested state. A highway connecting the two cities was built in 1973 by the then military government, but fell into disrepair shortly afterwards. Today all that remains is a dirt road.

A four day ticket to Porto Velho, including drinking water and three meals a day, costs R$200 (U$52), about three times cheaper than the one hour plane flight. I arrived at the boat a few hours before we set sail and, finding few remaining spaces, set up my hammock in a corner next to a cheerful 70-year-old Afro-Brazilian woman, travelling to Porto Velho to collect her older sister who had fallen ill while visiting relatives.

Sometime after sunset the engine roared to life and, with the sky lit up by lightning from a dry tropical storm, we made way our way down the Rio Negro towards the Amazon, passing flaming gas refineries and the bright lights of the famous Manaus free trade zone.

Lights on the boat go out around 10pm, perhaps because the day begins at 6am when the crew, a surly bunch of few words and even fewer smiles, serve up sickeningly sweet coffee and buttery crackers for breakfast. The lunches and dinners are, perhaps surprisingly, tasty and satisfying, roughly equivalent to what you’d expect to find at a decent worker’s restaurant in down São Paulo or Rio.

The landscape is green and lush, and towering trees and muddy banks slide by as the boat slowly makes its way down river, passing small villages, hut-sized Evangelical churches, herds of horned Amazon buffalo, and fishermen waving from rickety canoes as they pull in their catch.

It doesn’t take long to make friends and very quickly I met a bunch of good-natured, larger than life characters. One of my favourites was “Repeteco”, an 80-year-old forró (traditional folk music from the north east of Brazil) composer from Pernambuco travelling to Porto Velho with 800 copies of his latest CD to sell. Under the circumstances, I could hardly refuse to buy one.

As the days drift by, living with people in such close quarters allows me to witness first-hand the famous, if somewhat cliched, “Brazilian warmth” that one hears so much about. Almost everyone is open, friendly and generous – sharing things like fruit and sweets – as well as respectful of what minuscule privacy their fellow passengers have.

Alongside the Brazilians there was a relatively large contingent of passengers from other Latin American nations on board, including an Ecuadorian juggler, a Paraguayan missionary and Felipe, a 26-year-old Venezuelan history teacher, who was leaving home to start a new life in Uruguay. There were also groups of backpackers from Mexico and Peru. The only other “authentic” gringo on board was Giles, a Canadian in his late sixties who was on a long distance motorcycle trip.

Further down river, the landscape becomes more arid, the brown banks turn golden and there are more sightings – or rather blink and you miss it glimpses – of leaping river dolphins and alligators.

While the largely unvarying scenery is not perhaps truly breathtaking, there is something about the sheer degree of isolation, combined with the relentless flow of the river, that carries the mind to a place far removed from city life. As I sit and stare and at the passing villages, I try to figure out what it would be like to live in the region, a feeling summed up nicely in this article in The New York Times.

At night, the top deck fills up with people, some enjoying an evening beer as the forró and brega (cheesy Brazilian pop) music pumps from a loudspeaker. Most nights I play cards with a pair of factory workers from the Manaus free trade zone.

Among the other passengers was Kelly, 21, who was taking a two month holiday with her young daughter to see an aunt in Minas Gerais. Gilberto, 34, meanwhile, lived in Manaus in free lodgings provided by the soft drink factory where he worked, and was returning home to Porto Velho for a three week holiday, something he did every three months.

Each night the lone TV showed novelas, Brazil club football or DVD films. Most passengers though, were content to simply sit on plastic stools, talking and gazing out into the darkness or up at the piercingly bright stars.

“It’s as if you could reach out and grab one,” said Claudio, a carioca in his mid-forties, who was sleeping in a tent on the top deck, on his way home after a cycling tour of South America. He had caught dengue fever in Colombia and now, with no money and too sick to cycle back, had to present his medical certificate at the council offices of each town we stopped in to have his transport paid.

Word spread that the boat would be docking for three hours at Humaitá, where we would have the option of disembarking and taking a two hour drive to Porto Velho, or staying on the boat for another twenty four hours until we reached our final destination. Due to previous commitments rather than any frustrations with the trip, I decided to take the first option.

To say there was a party on the final night would be a considerable overstatement, but there were more people than usual out on the top deck, and something of a “grand finale” atmosphere. Some of the passengers even seemed to have dressed up for the occasion.

I sat with a pair of cable TV technicians who were traveling between cities looking for work. As we chatted they sipped on cachaça mixed with Fanta and played pagode (another type of Brazilian pop music) tracks on their cell phones. Eventually, exhausted, I crept downstairs to negotiate the dark maze of hammocks before falling into my own bed, the engine throbbing loudly in the background.

We finally arrived in Humaitá at 3am on Saturday morning, where I bid farewell to my newfound friends. The sense of river camaraderie wasn’t over yet, however, as I jumped in a taxi to Porto Velho – shared, of course, with a group of my fellow passengers.

Brazil president Dilma Rousseff declared last week that the country would welcome refugees “with open arms” and talked of the important role immigration has played in Brazilian history. But can such optimism survive the tensions that surround the issue? 

By James Young
Belo Horizonte

Surrounded by a withering economic crisis, the billowing Petrobras corruption scandal, a kick-in-the-teeth credit rating downgrade, and even the looming spectre of potential impeachment, Brazil president Dilma Rousseff must have been delighted to be able to send a positive message this week.

“Even in moments of difficulty and crisis, like we’re going through now, we have to welcome refugees with open arms,” she said in a message delivered via social media on Monday, Brazilian Independence Day. “I want to use today to reiterate the willingness of the government to receive those who, expelled from their homelands, want to come here and live, work and contribute to the prosperity and peace of Brazil,” she continued.

Citing the image of the lifeless body of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy who was found washed up on a Turkish beach, Rousseff also said that the world was facing a “humanitarian tragedy”.

Official figures say that Brazil is currently home to 2,077 Syrian refugees, representing 25% of the total number of refugees in the country and more, according to a BBC Brazil report, than the USA and a number of European countries have taken in. The number of refugees in Brazil has doubled in the last four years, rising from 4,218 in 2011 to 8,400 today.

The total has been boosted by a government policy to relax entry requirements for Syrian immigrants for “humanitarian reasons”, with those arriving in Brazil no longer needing to provide evidence of employment or means of financial support. In the coming weeks CONARE, the National Committee for Refugees, intends to extend such special conditions, which have been in place since 2013, for a further period.

One city that has taken in refugees is Belo Horizonte, Brazil’s third biggest urban area behind Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, where, according to local consulate figures, 78 Syrians have arrived this year.

“Today I’m working as a security guard…but I’m happy. The Brazilians have welcomed us with open arms,” Alaa Kassab, a lawyer in his home city of Homs, told the Globo network. Belo Horizonte has been receiving Syrian refugees since 2012, mostly as a result of the work of Father George Rateb Massis of the Sagrado Coração de Jesus church, a Syrian himself, who has lived in Brazil for 15 years.

“They come from the airport with a Brazilian visa. Thank God the government isn’t denying them that. The job market is very limited for them. Even though they are all university graduates, doctors and engineers, the opportunities are very basic,” Massis told Globo.

This latest wave of arrivals is the most recent chapter in Brazil’s long history of immigration, which began with colonisation by the Portuguese, and the forced transport of an estimated 4.9 million African slaves to the country between the 16th and 19th centuries.

Immigration in the modern sense of the word arrived in the 1820s in the form of large numbers of German migrants, unsettled by political and social upheaval at home and drawn by the lure of a new world in the south Atlantic, filled with vast, untapped areas of verdant farmland. The south of Brazil, where most of them settled, with its mountains and chilly temperatures, would not even have seemed all that far from home. The growth of the coffee industry subsequently created further demand for manpower, propelling more Europeans towards Brazil.

According to the Museu da Imigração in São Paulo, around 5.5 million immigrants arrived in Brazil between 1870 and 1953, from countries such as Italy, Portugal, Spain, Germany, Japan, and Poland. The influences of these arrivals can be felt today, from the stories of the Ukrainian born, naturalised Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector and the Germanic architecture found in parts of states such as Espirito Santo, Santa Catarina, Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul, to the Italian restaurants of the Bixiga neighbourhood in São Paulo and their Japanese counterparts in nearby Liberdade.

Arab immigration to Brazil, mostly from Lebanon and Syria, began in the late 19^th century, with sources estimating that around 140,000 people moved from the Middle East to the country between 1880 and 1969. While there are conflicting opinions about the number of Brazilians of Arab descent today – a 1998 survey by the IBGE research unit found that Arab-Brazilians make up 0.48% of the population, or around one million people, while other sources put the number closer to ten million – there is no doubting the profound influence Arab immigration has had on Brazil.

Comida Arabe restaurants and snack bars selling kibbehs (quibes/kibes) and sfihas (esfihas) are a staple in every Brazilian town and city, with the vast Habib’s chain one of the country’s biggest fast food networks. And many high-profile Brazilians – such as vice-president Michel Temer, whose family originally came from northern Lebanon, renowned author Milton Hatoum, TV presenter Sabrina Sato and actress Juliana Paes – are of Arab descent.

The welcome extended by Brazil towards refugees has not been without its critics, however, with some less globally-minded locals keen to point out the difficulty the country often faces in providing jobs, education and social care for its own citizens, let alone foreigners. “Before opening its arms to refugees, we should look after our own “refugees”, who have to live with violence and poverty,” commented one reader of the Folha de São Paulo coverage of Rousseff’s speech.

Tensions have risen too over the numbers of Haitian migrants in Brazil, with an argument breaking out between the governments of the entry point state of Acre in the north of the country, which lacks the infrastructure to deal with the volume of arrivals, and São Paulo, where the immigrants frequently end up.

And the kind of hostility and resentment that often surrounds the subject of migrants and refugees in the countries of the EU reared its ugly head a few weeks ago with the shooting of six Haitians by a man with a pellet gun in the centre of São Paulo, with the shooter reported to have shouted “you stole our jobs” after pulling the trigger.

“We Brazilians are a nation formed by people from a wide variety of origins, who today live in peace,” said Rousseff, when describing the country’s current stance on the refugee issue. With such tensions likely to grow as more and more immigrants arrive in the country, however, it is to be hoped that Brazil’s arms will remain open to refugees for as long as possible.

Recent high-profile examples of prejudice have stirred up the complex race debate in Brazil, a country that has in the past claimed to be built on foundations of racial democracy. 

By James Young

Belo Horizonte

From the glorious colonial architecture of Ouro Preto in the hills of Minas Gerais to the exquisite Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, Brazil is justifiably proud of the evidence of its rich history and culture. But a recent trip back into another kind of past – the blackface tradition of US theatre, or some of the darkest moments of 1970s UK TV, for example – has left more than a few Brazilians feeling squeamish.

Most famous for its scantily clad Panicat dancers, the puerile Pânico Na Band comedy show is not known for scaling intellectual heights. In recent weeks, however, it has plumbed new depths with the introduction of a character known only as The African, played by “blacked-up” white actor Eduardo Sterblitch, who speaks only in grunts and shrieks and acts in what the show’s creators presumably believe constitutes typical “African” behaviour – scratching at all parts of his body, tearing at plants and leaves and performing a dance of thanks for the judges of a cooking contest.

The show caused outrage among some Brazilians, with the National Black Slavery Truth Commission, an initiative of the Brazilian Bar Association, stating that the character was a “racial affront” which contributed to the “perpetuation of the effects and vestiges of slavery.”

Sterblich has since apologised for his performance, while Pânico has said that it intends to remove the character from the show, before rather spoiling the gesture by offering up the dubious defence that the program makes fun of “Mexicans, Chinese and Arabs” as well.

It is the latest in a string of recent racism-linked episodes in the media or involving well-known Brazilians. Last month the black presenter of the weather segment on the Globo TV network’s nightly news program, Maria Júlia Coutinho, was abused with a string of racist comments on the show’s Facebook page.

This week Flamengo boss Cristóvão Borges claimed that some of the deluge of criticism he has received during his career “has a racial connotation…I was even called the Mourinho of the Pelourinho”, a reference to Chelsea boss Jose and the historic district of Borges’ home city of Salvador, Brazil’s most African-influenced city, the name of which is taken from the Portuguese word for a slave-era whipping post.

Like the “monkey” chants aimed at the black goalkeeper Aranha during last year’s Copa do Brasil tie between Grêmio and Santos, the incidents have brought the issue of racism in Brazil to the fore, and provided further evidence of the myth of the theory of democracia racial – the idea that the country, with its complex racial mix of indigenous peoples, European colonizers, African slaves, and later large-scale immigration from countries such as Japan, Italy and Germany, would somehow magically avoid the racial conflicts seen in other nations.   

The high-profile examples above rather give the lie to such a notion, as does the sheer weight of statistics describing the different realities of life for Brazil’s racial groups. A 2014 study by the Brazilian Public Security Forum found that the murder rate among young black Brazilians in 2012 was 70.8%, compared to 27.8% among their white equivalents.

“There are more than 30,000 young people with this profile (black) murdered every year. It’s as though a full plane crashes every day,” said Atilia Roque, director of Amnesty International in Brazil, on the launch of the “Keep Black Youth Alive” campaign to bring attention to the issue. Another report last year found that black or brown-skinned Brazilians earn slightly over half the average salary of white workers.

 Yet despite Brazil’s great racial divide, visibly obvious everywhere from expensive restaurants to public hospitals, or etched on the faces of the manual workers queueing in early morning bus lines, the race debate is largely played out at low volume here. “If I went after everybody who called me black, I would have sued the whole world,” Pelé said earlier this year, when advising Aranha that “indifference” was the best form of defence against the racists, while the expression “Brazil is not a racist country” is commonly heard.

Part of that is down to the difficulties of racial classification in a country where there has been intermingling between different ethnic groups for so long. A recent survey found that 53% of Brazilians described themselves as “black” or “brown”, but the numbers of people declaring themselves as negro, branco or pardo (brown skinned or mixed race) can vary considerably from one study to another, based on the current cultural and social mood.

The concept that one’s racial identity can be flexible was summed up neatly by the footballer-turned-senator Romario when talking about Neymar. “I’m black,” he said, “If (he) doesn’t consider himself black, then he’s not. It’s up to him.” And a 1980 survey by the historian Clovis Moura identified 136 types of racial classification that Brazilians use to describe themselves, including “milky coffee”, “dirty white” and “cinnamon.”

At the same time, black consciousness in Brazil has grown in recent years through the activities of social groups and initiatives such as Dia Nacional da Consciência Negra, or National Black Consciousness Day.  “I became black – it was a process…but the fact that I had to “learn” to be black is terrible,” the actress Jana Guinond has said of her eventual decision to describe herself as negra.  

Episodes like that of “The African” and the affronts suffered by Cristóvão Borges and Maria Júlia Coutinho raise another issue in Brazil’s race debate – the local habit of using racially based slang terms such as Negão (“Big Black”), or Pretinha (“Little Black Girl”) or Japa (“Japanese-Brazilian”) to describe people.

Brazilians are fond of saying that such terms are mostly affectionate, not intended to be offensive, and used for physical description only. Subconsciously or otherwise, however, such language is surely built on stereotypes, and it seems unthinkable that such terms would be used in countries where the racial discussion is more sensitive.

And Brazilians may now have another area of potential racial conflict with which to deal. The shooting of six Haitian immigrants by a man with a pellet gun in the centre of São Paulo two weeks ago was notable for the fact that the shooter was reported to have shouted “you stole our jobs” after pulling the trigger.

Some estimates say over 50,000 Haitians have moved to Brazil since 2012, and the shooting felt like an unsettling echo of the resentment and xenophobia that surrounds immigration, often from Africa or Eastern Europe, into the wealthier countries of the EU, particularly when such countries are experiencing the kind of economic recession that Brazil is undergoing today.

If such unpleasant incidents have an upside, however, it is that from racist TV characters and football fans to anti-immigrant feeling, the race debate in Brazil seems slowly to be getting louder – and perhaps not before time.

Directors of the beautiful Casa Daros art space stunned Rio when they announced it would shut its doors just two years after opening. Does this forebode a dark period for cultural projects as the city is pounded by recession and scandal?

By Nathan Walters
Rio de Janeiro

A tragedy has struck Rio de Janeiro, and unfortunately, it seems to be part of a larger pattern. Botafogo’s exquisite Casa Daros art space will close this December after only two years of exhibitions, despite the fact that tens of millions were spent refurbishing the neoclassical mansion. The directors blame high maintenance costs and say the decision is irrevocable, but some are still hoping for a change of heart or for some deep-pocketed investors to step up.

More than a few observers are questioning the Zurich-based Daros Collection’s real motives for closing. Some are whispering about real estate speculation, without proof for their suspicions. A few have used the closure as a starting point to discuss high labor costs, but this can’t be fully explanatory. These are a headache for any business owner in Brazil.

Across the board, low turnout, high costs, and a local economy hit especially hard by the Petrobras scandal paint a grim picture for the future of private art institutions in Rio.

The city has witnessed an encouraging expansion of cultural spaces in recent years, and Casa Daros was one of the best. A beautifully refurbished 19th-century structure, a former Catholic school for orphaned girls, would house large-scale contemporary works from Brazilian heavyweights like Vik Muniz, Ernesto Neto, and Luiz Zerbini.

Daros has one of the most impressive collections of Latin American artists, and exhibitions were as fun as they were thought-provoking. The museum seemed to always be comfortably uncrowded, but it was also common to see Botafogo’s hipsters scoping a Cildo Meireles installation alongside school kids.

As with the some of the other museums that have opened recently, such as Museu de Arte do Rio (MAR), Casa Daros had a strong educational agenda and sought to enhance access to contemporary art. The loss of high-quality cultural programs could compound problems that the loss of oil revenues – Rio’s main industry is petroleum, whose company Petrobras is mired in a multi-billion dollar scandal – poses for education funding in Brazil, and Rio in particular.

The project got off to a rocky start and refurbishing work proved to be more challenging than initially planned. The Daros institute sought to refurbish the space to its original splendor, and went through a painstaking process, sourcing original materials and plans. The result was magnificent.

Problems with construction work didn’t seem to deter Daros, and in a lemonade-from-lemons-gesture Muniz created the Nossa Senhora das Graças photo(pictured above), based on the seal that adorns Casa Daros’ façade, from the trash leftover from renovation.

But much here is troubling. How is it possible that a presumably highly organized group like the Daros Collection planned so poorly? Or did something else happen behind the scenes? Have costs jumped so much higher than forecasted?

The wave that Brazil had been riding for ten years has come to an end, yes, but is it really this bad? Or was the grim reality of the country’s current state not considered when the company was shelling out millions to refurbish the 12,000 square meter space?

“Times are tough now, but we Brazilians, who have seen worse times, look for creative ways to respond to the changes,” says Rio-based curator Bat Zavareze. “I don’t understand the response from Casa Daros. It’s not the apocalypse. But is a real pity because it’s a very important cultural and education space.”

The curator for the avant-garde Multiplicidade music festival, Zavareze says he is working in a much different climate than a few years ago but still finds a way to make it work. Other emerging Rio-based artists say they have seen a slowdown in the frequency of government-sponsored events, but continue to work more or less as they have in the past.

The hysteria surrounding Brazil a few years ago has been replaced by the re-emergence of old problems. Staggering corruption, violence, and economic problems have re-appeared, and that is making more than a few foreign individuals and companies nervous.

The idea that the Olympics would be followed by a great exodus of foreigners always seemed more of a joke than a reality, but a completely different outlook on Brazil’s future is prompting some to consider a real exit.

For years, crime, classism and old habits have kept Brazil’s well-to-do away from the messy reality of the country’s streets. But the World Cup, and now, anger at the government, have brought them back onto the scene.

By James Young

“Go downtown?* Are you crazy! It’s far too dangerous!” (*Or “Go to the football” or “Take the bus”).

The refrain, usually uttered by upper middle class Brazilians, is familiar to many foreigners coming to live in the country. Worried by eye-popping murder rates (according to WHO figures, there were over 64,000 homicides in Brazil in 2012) and alarmed at the thought of a naïve gringo or gringa ending up in a darkened alley, such over-protectiveness on the part of the locals was arguably understandable.

Yet an additional subtext lay behind such fears. For years, driven indoors by the levels of violence of the society that surrounds them, Brazil’s upper classes have hidden from public life, seeking refuge in gated communities and behind the high walls of luxury apartment buildings, in shopping malls and expensive restaurants. The result was that with some exceptions (the beaches of Leblon or Ipanema, or the metro system of São Paulo, for example) the country’s public spaces – the streets, public transport networks, football stadiums, even large parts of the carnaval celebrations of a number of cities, became the near-exclusive redoubt of less well-off Brazilians.

Now, however, things may be changing. Brazil’s upper social classes appear to be stirring.

The long-established polarization of Brazilian society came to the fore recently amidst the toxic atmosphere that surrounded the presidential elections, notably in the form of frustrated PSDB supporters attacking PT voters for being “ill-informed” and dependent on welfare programs such as bolsa familia. Although the fault lines were in fact blurred, many chose to see the contest between Dilma Rousseff and Aecio Neves as a straight poor Brazil vs. rich Brazil battle.

But as this blog explored previously, Brazil’s class divisions are more complex, not helped by the bewildering array of definitions and terms used to describe social class. According to figures released by the government’s Strategic Matters Department in 2012, the country can be divided into eight social classes – three of which are described as poor or vulnerable, three of which are defined as middle class, and two of which are upper class.

Such definitions reflect the rise of Brazil’s so-called nova classe media (“new middle class”), who, according to the government, earn between R$291 (currently U$90) and R$1019 (U$317) per capita a month and represent over 50% of the population, their numbers boosted by those moving out of poverty as a result of (now stalled) economic growth, an increased minimum wage and social benefit programs.

In recent years the nova classe media has been touted as Brazil’s rising demographic and economic star. The newfound spending power of its members boosted the economy, and suddenly Brazil’s new middle classes were everywhere – from the country’s airports (traditionally another upper class fortresses) to its TV screens. Brazil’s novelas (soap operas) had always been dominated by characters drawn from the wealthy of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, with the occasional token storyline given over to poorer Brazilians, and usually played for laughs. That changed in 2012 with Avenida Brasil, described by many as a “Classe C novela”.

At the same time, much of the nova classe media is far from any middle class that northern European or North American readers would recognize. A family of four in the middle of the government’s scale would have an income of around R$2,600 (U$850) per month, perhaps enough to buy a flat screen TV, smart phone or small car on a lengthy purchase plan, but hardly sufficient to move into an upmarket part of town. Plenty of Classe C (another term used for the nova classe media) neighborhoods in the periferias of Brazil’s major cities, particularly in the nordeste of the country, are unsafe, lack basic sanitation services and have unpaved roads.

Now, it seems, it’s again time for Brazil’s upper classes to grab the spotlight, and the coming out party of the classes altas was last summer’s World Cup. Whereas Brazil’s run-down football stadiums had previously been seen by many better off Brazilians as dangerous no-go areas, ruled over by the notorious torcidas organizadas (there have been at least 234 football related deaths in Brazil in the last 25 years), the expensive tickets and safe, comfortable World Cup arenas, meant that the Copa, in terms of Brazilian fans at least, became a very upper middle class affair. Throughout the tournament the stadium jumbotron TV screens showed images of shiny-toothed, wealthy looking fans beaming into the cameras, and a Datafolha survey of the crowd during Brazil’s 7-1 humiliation against Germany found that 90% were from Brazil’s upper classes, and only 9% were Classe C.

And then there is carnaval. While the profile of foliões (“revelers”) varies from city to city (“carnaval has always been about the people in the street and the rich on their verandas” MPB legend Gilberto Gil has said of the festivities in Salvador), two of the most notable developments of recent carnaval celebrations have been the popularity of blocos da rua (“street parties”) in São Paulo, particularly in the upper middle class neighborhood of Vila Madalena, and the growth of the festival in Belo Horizonte. For years the main carnaval in Brazil’s third biggest city took place in a grotty outer suburb, but this year over a million people celebrated across the city, with many blocos attracting crowds of wealthier Brazilians.

Brazil’s largest upper class explosion came just two weeks ago, however, when anywhere from a few hundred thousand to 1.7 million (estimates vary wildly) people took to the streets to protest against political corruption and president Dilma Rousseff’s government. There had been similarly large scale demonstrations during the Confederations Cup in 2013, but the profile of the crowd then (young and middle class), was markedly different to those that took to the streets this month.

At the protest in Belo Horizonte’s leafy Praça Liberdade, for example, the vast majority of the 25,000 or so demonstrators seemed to be drawn from the city’s upper social classes. Most were wearing Brazil football shirts and sunglasses, and chatted happily as they waved placards calling for the impeachment of Rousseff. There were plenty of family groups, and several residents of the expensive apartment buildings nearby had brought their Pekingeses or Shih-Tzus along for a walk. Afterwards, the bars and restaurants of the entertainment district of Savassi were filled with people tucking into hearty lunches after a tough morning’s protesting. As at least one site has noted, it was sometimes hard to tell if it was a political protest or a World Cup match. Meanwhile a survey of the 100,000-strong demonstration in the southern city of Porto Alegre found that over 70% of the crowd earned more than six times the minimum monthly wage.

At the same time, the surprisingly large scale of events means that disparagingly classifying the protests as solely the raging of Brazil’s burguês (“bourgeois”) or elite branca (“white elite”) is unlikely to tell the whole story – frustration with the country’s governing classes runs far deeper than that.

The debate over the return of Brazil’s upper classes to the streets and football stadiums, like the rise in visibility of Classe C before it, has once more brought to the surface the simmering class tensions that underlie the country’s society. Class boundaries in Brazil may be blurring, but its social divisions, and the fear and loathing that surrounds them, are as marked as ever.

What if they put on Carnaval, and nobody came? A short work of fiction
By James Young

It was a glorious Saturday morning in Recife. A statue in the form of a multicolored rooster, the Galo da Madrugada, towered over the Duarte Coelho Bridge, streamers hung from the lampposts and on every street corner someone was selling beer, snacks or carnaval paraphernalia – rainbow-colored frevo parasols, wigs or whistles.

The VIP boxes that overlooked Avenida Guararapes were packed with local politicians and minor celebrities. In a box sponsored by one of Brazil’s giant beer companies, the mayor of Recife was talking to a young woman dressed in a halter top and a pair of very tight shorts.

“Being on Big Brother Brasil was just the beginning for me,” the young woman was saying. “Really I’m an actress. It’s my dream to be in a novela.”

The mayor bit his lip pensively and said nothing. He looked at his watch – it was already nine o’clock. What was going on? Normally by this time the streets were thronged with hundreds of thousands of revelers, but this morning there were only the beer sellers and a group of blonde-haired, pink-skinned tourists dressed in German football shirts. He gave an involuntary shudder.

He sipped his caipirinha. It was probably nothing. Perhaps everybody had drunk a little too much cachaça the night before. A few sore heads this morning. They would be here. The people loved carnaval. Everything would be fine.

By ten o’clock the Germans had been joined by a Japanese family and an American couple draped in the stars and stripes. Other than that, Avenida Guararapes was entirely empty. The mayor called his counterpart in the neighboring town of Olinda.

“I don’t understand it,” said the mayor of Olinda. “There’s no one here either. The streets are deserted.”

By eleven o’clock, even with free beer and caipirinhas, the VIP box had begun to empty. In Rio de Janeiro, the organizers of the Cordão da Bola Preta bloco, which usually attracted over two million partygoers, reluctantly announced that this year’s event had been called off as no one had shown up. In the afternoon the trio elétricos rumbled through the deserted streets of Salvador for a few hours before returning to their garages in defeat.

On Jornal Nacional that night, an ashen-faced newsreader described similar scenes across the country – cancelled blocos, deserted sambodromos and empty streets. For the first time that anyone could remember, on the opening day of carnaval, the people had decided to stay at home.

***

In Brasília, the president stared glumly at the TV. No carnaval? She couldn’t understand it. Sure, the economy had tanked, there were the usual corruption scandals, and there were water and electricity shortages, but was that really enough to cancel carnaval? The people loved carnaval! Goddamn it, she loved carnaval – axé, frevo, and most of all samba. Samba was her favorite.

Later that night she addressed the nation. She told the people that even though times were hard, they couldn’t let things get them down. There had always been carnaval. Carnaval was in their blood. Goddamn it, it was their duty to celebrate carnaval! She said “o povo Brasileiro” as often as possible, hoping to stir up a sense of patriotism, and finished off by saying that “God was Brazilian, and carnaval was Brazilian, so get out there tomorrow and party!”

The next day, however, the streets, the blocos and the sambodromos once again lay empty and silent. A survey showed that the president’s approval rating had fallen from 44% to 24% following her speech.

The opposition party was naturally delighted by the president’s woes. A television commercial was hastily put together where the leader of the party, a man from a wealthy family who had trouble connecting with less-well off voters, discussed the crisis. “The boycotting of carnaval is a clear sign that the Brazilian people have rejected this corrupt government, and the president’s message last night shows just how far out of touch she is! Carnaval belongs to the people, not the government!” The commercial ended with an exhortation to vote for the opposition in the next elections.

A survey the next day revealed that the opposition leader’s popularity had also dropped by half.

The crisis continued. Hundreds of foreign journalists arrived to cover the situation, and the Brazilian media reported with pride that the carnaval crisis was making international headlines. A group of well-known soap opera stars, footballers and musicians made a TV commercial in which they sang songs, danced and smiled at the camera, and begged people to come out into the streets and party.

In a darkened underground bunker in Mato Grosso, a group of generals from the Brazilian army discussed what action might be required on their part should the government fail to resolve the situation. Nothing, they decided, was too extreme. In some cities, the police attempted to make Brazilians celebrate carnaval by force – twelve people were shot in two days.

Meanwhile the main TV network attempted to coax people into the streets by showing carnaval footage from the year before and packaging it as live. It did not take long, however, before an observant viewer noticed a banner labeled “Carnaval 2014” and spread the news of his discovery via Twitter. The TV network pulled the footage (though neglected to apologize or admit any wrongdoing). The stock market and the currency both crashed as tourists demanded refunds from their airline companies and hotels and the billion reais carnaval industry ground to a halt.

Monday brought more empty streets. The carnaval cities of Brazil, normally filled with the sound of music and partying, had fallen silent. But then on Tuesday morning something surprising happened. An elderly man, his step frail and uncertain, climbed slowly up the Ladeira da Misericórdia in Olinda. He led a little girl, dressed in a traditional frevo costume, by the hand.

Immediately he was surrounded by TV crews, journalists thrust microphones under his nose and helicopters circled overhead. A nearby frevo orchestra started playing “Vassourinhas” and hired dancers filled the street, leaping in the air and twirling their parasols.

Watching on TV, the president smiled and quickly arranged a conference call with senior party officials. “This will show that playboy from the opposition!” she shouted triumphantly down the phone. “The Brazilian people never give up! Carnaval is back!” She hung up and told an assistant to dig out her old samba records. She was in the mood for a little celebrating herself.

On her TV the elderly man in Olinda was being interviewed. “Sir,” cried one journalist “why do you think no one wanted to celebrate carnaval this year?”

“Hum?” said the elderly man, who was a little deaf.

“Carnaval!” yelled the journalist. “There was no party, no blocos, no Galo. What happened?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know anything about that,” said the elderly man.

“Come on sir,” pressed the journalist, “you must have an opinion.”

“Well, I can only really speak for myself,” said the old man. He looked down at the little girl, who stared up at him with a worried expression. He squeezed her hand gently.

“Of course! Please do!” yelled the journalists.

“Well, personally, it just seemed a bit silly this year. With all that’s going on, I mean. To go out and jump around, though I don’t do much jumping around these days, he he, not with my hip, I’m not as young…”

“Yes, yes,” shouted the journalists impatiently, “but what about carnaval?”

“Oh, well, like I was saying, it didn’t really seem right, with things as they are, to go into the streets and celebrate, and drink, and laugh, and pretend that everything is great. How does the song go? “Sadness has no end, but happiness does…the great illusion of carnaval, we work all year for one moment of joy”, something like that? Like I say, I can’t speak for anyone else, but…”

The journalists looked perplexed. They stood quietly and tried to digest what the old man had said. Finally, someone asked another question.

“But you’re here now, aren’t you? Have you changed your mind? Do you think there are others coming? Is carnaval back on?”

“Well,” said the old man. “I wouldn’t know about that. And anyway, I’m not here for carnaval. I live around the corner, and I’m on my way to the bakery. My granddaughter here is hungry and wants a snack. Do you know if it’s open?”

Slowly, the journalists lowered their cameras and their microphones. The frevo orchestra fell silent and the helicopters drifted away. In the president’s office, the television screen went blank.

*

Disclaimer – this is a work of pure imagination with no relation to the reality of 2015 Brazil. Tens of thousands of Brazilians have already taken to the streets for Carnaval. Some Folha coverage of that here. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. (With thanks and apologies from James Young to Jose Saramago’s “Ensaio Sobre a Lucidez”)

Nathan Walters asks why so few foreigners recently have chosen to capture Brazil in letters, and takes us through the rare exceptions that open up the country to international readers. Above, the cover of a recently published book by From Brazil contributor James Young.

Nathan Walters

So much of Brazil’s literary treasures remain locked in the Portuguese language, which is a shame for the world. Though some of the country’s iconic authors, like Clarice Lispector, Machado de Assis, Paulo Coelho and Jorge Armado, have been competently translated, so much remains reserved for those at or nearing fluency.

No translation can compare with work in the original language, and that’s most definitely the case with Brazilian Portuguese. Brazilians love wordplay, and their language is full of idiomatic expressions that are largely untranslatable. Brazilian novels that rely heavily on slang might be pure poetry in the native tongue, but tend to fall flat when translated to another (Paulo Lins’ City of God is one example). The situation can be frustrating for foreigners who want to learn more about Brazilian culture.

Though quality nonfiction works about the country by foreign writers are easy to find (Joseph Page’s The Brazilians, Michael Reid’s Brazil: The Troubled Rise of a Global Power, and Larry Rohter’s Brazil on the Rise stand out), fiction works by foreign authors that tap into the seemingly endless possibilities Brazil offers remain rare.

We have to ask why. Because to anyone with even the slightest inclination to write, Brazil is a paradise.

The streets in the major cities, like Rio and São Paulo, are littered with spectacular histories. And the vast interior, replete with realities that would make Zola blush, remains largely untouched by the imaginative storytelling of foreigners.

The country’s history is sprinkled with some amazing stories of foreign writers that have made a splash here. Austrian Stefan Zweig’s Brazil, Land of the Future may best be remembered for its misappropriation: “Brazil, land of the future…and it always will be.” Hungarian Paulo Rónai fell madly in love with the country and the language in the early 20^th century. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss spent months trekking through the unwieldy Amazon. Hunter S. Thompson used to work with his Olympia SF typewriter out on Copacabana beach.

Yet, few Anglophone writers enjoy the prestige reserved for American poet Elizabeth Bishop. While Bishop’s autobiographical poetry manages to capture the complex feelings of a foreigner’s life in Brazil, the form leaves fans of literary prose wanting.

In the early 1990s, American novelist John Updike spent time in the country for his novel Brazil. Though considered a bit cliché, the work remains one of the few where a foreign author takes on the intricacies of the whole country, the regional idiosyncrasies, and the social issues that continue dominate public discourse. Imaginative, well written, sexualized (it’s Updike), the novel remains a notable work of fiction dealing with the splendor and anguish of life in Brazil.

Brazil was published in 1994 and in the twenty years since, Brazil has opened its doors to foreigners, who now pour into the country in droves. Yet, the flow of fictional works from expat writers has failed to keep pace.

There are many explanations for this. For one, weaving a story into the complexities of Brazil is no easy task for foreigners who are still doing their best to understand the country.

Sarah de Sainte Croix, an English writer living in Rio for the past four years, has organized a writers group in Rio (Rio Writers’ Forum), one of the few support networks for foreign writers in the country, where foreign and native writers gather to share their experiences and work during weekly sessions.

“One difficulty we have talked about in the group is not knowing where to set our stories. As we are mostly foreigners, it can feel like we are impostors if we write Brazilian stories, and yet many of us feel quite detached from our countries of origin and the details of everyday life there,” she says. “One solution for our Brazilian stories is to create ‘foreign’ characters to tell them. The other is to simply bluster ahead and invent, despite our insecurities, and in the name of fiction. Which is actually quite a good metaphor for moving to another country when you think about it, because most of the time it feels like you’re living inside a big, unwieldy story, with surprises around every corner, making it all up as you go along.”

Author James Young, author of A Beer Before Lunch, a collection of stories set in Recife, as well as From Brazil contributor, has been writing in Brazil for years, but still faces the challenges most expat writers deal with.

“I think there are two challenges for an expat writer living in Brazil. One is the need to be original and avoid stereotype and cliché,” Young says. “I think there’s a cycle to most expat lives here—the initial giddy honeymoon phase, the plateau that comes when real life kicks in, the discontent as frustrations seem to outweigh benefits, and then hopefully, a return to the plateau and a realization that there are good and bad things about life anywhere. No one should ever write anything during the giddy honeymoon phase!”

Another problem is the fact prose fiction has taken a backseat to other forms of enjoyment (Why read a novel when you can watch a video of a dancing cat?).

James Scudamore, the British author of the 2009 novel Heliopolis, has won accolades for his story of life in modern São Paulo, but to finish the novel (one of three by the author) he had to face down the same obstacles every writer faces.

“The usual ones, especially persuading myself to keep on doing it in the face of my own laziness and the basic indifference of much of society towards prose fiction. But once the urge to do it has been implanted, you can’t ignore it. Or rather it won’t ignore you. It’s a compulsion.”

For Scudamore, the urge to write about the concrete jungle that is contemporary São Paulo was implanted as a child during a temporary residency in the city, one of many homes during a childhood shuttling around the globe.

“I think the idea that I might try to write fiction probably first came to me when living in Brazil. It’s certainly the earliest memory I have of trying to write stories. Something about piranhas, when I was 9. But I think more widely the fact of having been moved around so much as a kid was a key driving factor: abrupt rupture and profound change are often to be found in the childhoods of those who end up writing fiction. It leaves you with a sort of ‘yearning energy’- an urge to recreate in prose the places you are missing in real life. The act of missing things becomes an act of invention.”

For those inclined to face down the challenges, Brazil is fertile ground for fictional creations.

“Brazil is a tremendously evocative country, entirely removed from drizzly Belfast where I was born. It provides a vivid backdrop to any story—whether it’s the light, the smells, the sounds or the people,” says Young. “Moving to a country like Brazil can be an almost hallucinogenic experience—it allowed me to escape the confines of my other life and look at things in a fresh way.”

For some expats, writing in Portuguese for a Brazilian audience is now more interesting than weaving stories in their native language.

American writer Julia Michaels, perhaps the most well-known gringa blogger in Brazil, has lived in the country for more than thirty years. After a few attempts at writing a novel, Michaels says she gave up to focus on other writing projects.

Her 2013 memoir Solteira no Rio de Janeiro was well received by Brazilian audiences, but the English edition is still in the works.

“I’m lucky to be able to write in Portuguese and direct myself to Brazilians, this is a great relief. Otherwise I would be very frustrated because books don’t sell. It’s a tough career!”

Pelas Entreviagens, the 2014 travelogue from New Orleans transplant Heyesiof Epwe’ru is an account of the writer’s time working as a translator in Bahia. So much of Epwe’ru’s story, the expressions, places, commands the Portuguese language, so why fight it?

Perhaps not surprisingly considering the attention given by local writers, many stories set in the country explore the two major themes that dominate the outside world’s vision of Brazil: violence and inequality.

“Rather sadly, the one narrative strand that underlies much of my work, and pops up again and again, involves the poverty, violence and tragedy that results from the inequality that so scars the country,” says Young. Echoing the sentiment of other expat writers. “Such inequality exists everywhere of course, but not on the scale that it does here. The size of everything in Brazil—the country itself, the cities, the crime rates, the incredible numbers of people—feed my imagination.”

Sunday was full of surprises, and most of them dispiriting for the groups that thought they’d made gains during last year’s protests. Here’s the five biggest.

By Mauricio Savarese

1 – Marina Silva out of the run-off

From presidential front-runner to the falling star of Brazil’s politics. The former environment minister was a bad player from the start of her campaign. Not all of her demise is her fault, of course. As usually happens with third way candidates, she preached new politics and became an easy target for the left and right. But her defeat doesn’t have to do only with her rivals: she flip-flopped on gay rights, lost many of the staff that were working with her deceased former running mate Eduardo Campos, avoided openly supporting of conservative politicians, played victim too soon, failed in answering criticisms from Dilma Rousseff and Aécio Neves (who are now heading to the run-off), and failed to make Brazilians more confident about what kind of president she would become. In the end, anti-government voters left her when it became clear Aécio Neves might have a better chance of actually taking down Rousseff.

After getting roughly same vote she did in 2010, it’s hard to see her as a presidential contender again. For now, supporting Neves in the run-off is all that is left for her – and if he loses that will show her political leverage is even smaller than many expected.

2 – Increase in abstention after street protests

Street protests last year suggested new political forces would appear. That was not the case, at least at the ballot box. What was more noticeable was a rejection of candidates in general. The number of Brazilians who chose not to show up (voting here is mandatory), or cast votes for no one reached 29% this year, the highest level since 1998. This is only a small uptick, but it would be impossible to say that street protests re-energized the country politically, at least in the electoral sense.

It is hard to see Dilma Rousseff and Aécio Neves as so exciting to all the voters that went to the streets last year. And those voters are not putting forward any policies that could be embraced by the candidates. If you look at the first round results, June 2013 looks like too much ado for nothing, at least in terms of the ballot box.

As one left-leaning friend in São Paulo put it on Facebook:

“What happens in June
Stays in June.”

Or, here’s some alternate theories from Rio Gringa.

3 – Brazil’s conservative Congress

Preachers, the military, policemen…Brazil’s new Congress is has become more conservative. Almost 40% of the Congressmen are rookies, which makes for the biggest shakeup since 1998. The Worker’s Party suffered a major defeat: they lost 18 seats and will have 70 in 2015. PMDB comes right next, with 66 seats — they had 71. The most voted-for candidates in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are extremely conservative politicians Celso Russomano,  Jair Bolsonaro, and Marco Feliciano.  If Dilma Rousseff is elected, that means her reform agenda will be even more difficult to carry out. If Aécio Neves wins, there may be more reforms, but some of them could be very controversial: allowing minors to be tried as adults is one example.

Bolsonaro, above, says that the government supports gay pride marches so that it can tear apart ‘the fabric of society’ and make it easier to control the population. In other charming moments, he has praised Brazil’s military dictatorship.

4 – São Paulo governor Geraldo Alckmin wins easily

There is a water crisis in Brazil’s wealthiest state. There are various corruption allegations about a cartel that operated for years in subway here. São Paulo’s military police provided, with their brutality, the spark to set off the biggest street demonstrations that the country has ever seen. Yet governor Geraldo Alckmin, who could be held accountable for all those events, breezed to re-election. He won in all cities of the state but one.

Depoliticized voters, plus a lack of enthusiasm for a Paulista third way, represented by businessman Paulo Skaf, gave the 2018 presidential hopeful a shockingly easy ride. Some analysts expected him to win – his power in the Paulista countryside is unmatched. But so easily? That was shocking.

5 – PT wins in Minas and Bahia

This was a major blow to Aécio Neves in his home state and a surprising victory in the battleground state of Bahia. The best news for Dilma Rousseff was that the gubernatorial races there ended in the first round. Taking Minas Gerais from Neves’ allies means governing Brazil’s second most important state with a close friend of hers, Fernando Pimentel. Rui Costa’s victory in Bahia keeps in PT hands a state that was on the verge of going to the opposition. None of those two results were expected a few months ago. In Costa’s case, it wasn’t expected a few days ago.

Follow Mauricio Savarese on Twitter

As is the case in many countries of this size, the citizens of Brazil don’t know their own nation very well. I mean that geographically – someone from the Southeast may have visited the Northeast, but is unlikely to have been to the Center-West or the North, too. Someone from Recife may have visited Rio, but Paraná? Roraima? Amapá?

Brazilians are travelling more than ever, but they often look to visiting the US or Europe as quickly as they do to diving deep into the Amazon jungle. This is understandable – the prices are often almost as high within Brazil – and things are quite similar in the US, for example. But for this reason, and because basically all media in Brazil comes from Rio or São Paulo, perceptions about life in certain regions can be very far from reality.

As a correspondent, I suppose I could say that travelling by bus allows me to escape the trails tread by Brazil’s traditionally over-represented elites, and that’s it a professional duty. But the truth is that I actually just like it. People in Brazil’s small or far-flung towns have a remarkable amount in common, no matter where they are, and the country’s reputation for warmth holds up everywhere. I’ve done most of the country by road – from São Paulo to Salvador, to Recife to Belem, or from Porto Alegre up to Rio. Last year, to do a story on the “Mais Medicos” Cuban doctor program, I went from São Paulo to Acre, and then to the Bolivian border. It was about 100 hours in total, and took me through the major communities of Cuiabá, Ji-Paraná, Rondônia, and Rio Branco. So here’s some pictures with some captions.

World Cup matches in Manaus are long over, but did the spotlight help the city transcend its reputation as a jungle outpost? Above, photos from Leco Jucá, part of a collective aiming to shine some light on the real city.

by Chris Feliciano Arnold

On the Sunday of the U.S.-Portugal match in Manaus, Isaura Vitória Fróes Ramos sunbathed on the top deck of a riverboat near the Lago do Iranduba.  With a cold beer in hand and salted steaks on a nearby grill, she raved about the World Cup.

“It’s wonderful to see so many visitors. There’s a lot of ignorance about Manaus,” said Fróes, a local banker.  “We have a lot of industry as well as natural beauty you won’t find anywhere else in the world.  More people ought to visit here instead of taking their vacations to Miami or New York.”

Despite being a city of nearly 2 million people, the capital of Amazonas is often misunderstood by foreigners and Brazilians alike as little more than a jungle outpost.  Over the course of the World Cup, Manaus saw an influx of nearly 30,000 foreign and 150,000 Brazilian visitors, according to government estimates.

Local organizers responded with more than 1,200 cultural events to showcase the region’s diversity and dispel tired stereotypes. But despite these efforts, many World Cup visitors will experience the city merely as a waypoint to the jungle, barely exploring Manaus beyond its new stadium and famous historical center.

Beto Silva, a water taxi driver who’s been working the river for more than 22 years, says he’s seen triple the usual amount of business the last couple weeks, but that most visitors are heading to the jungle for a few hours before catching a game and jetting off to their next host city.

“It’s been a lot of work, and I’ve met a lot of new people,” he said.  “I hope they’ll go back and tell their friends about Manaus so that even more people come.”

Yet when those visitors go home, what stories will they tell?

Beyond the Forest

A trio of storytellers wants to make sure that the world sees a different side of Manaus and Amazonas.  Rosana Villar, Leco Jucá and Beatriz Gomes are the founding partners of Yes, Bananas!, a media agency that aims to show Brazilian and international journalists that there’s more to the region than its rainforest.

“I’m from São Paulo, and when I first got here, I had no idea what to expect from Manaus,” said Rosana Villar, 31, who founded Yes, Bananas! when she was reporting at Diário do Amazonas.  “There were so many cool stories that weren’t being covered, and I wondered why the press wasn’t showing another side of the city.  There is a magnificent forest here, but it’s not all about the animals.  We need more stories about the people who live here.”

Villar tapped her colleague Beatriz Gomes, 33, to become the Production Director at Yes, Bananas!  “When I got to Manaus from Fortaleza, I was just so impressed with the city,” said Gomes, who covers the economy for the Diário and local news for TV Cultura.  “It’s totally different from the Northeast.”

Back to the city

“People are so used to seeing the forest and the animals and the Indians that they forget about the city,” audiovisual director Leco Jucá said.  “They just look to the jungle.  It’s almost as if Manaus doesn’t exist as a city.”

Jucá was inspired to document Manaus through images after discovering a book by famous Brazilian photographer Silvino Santos who chronicled the city’s boom during the 1930s and 40s.

“He wanted to look at what people were forgetting,” said Jucá.  “The people inside the city of Manaus.”

When Jucá arrived in Manaus more than 4 years ago, he would walk the city for hours in the morning, sometimes without even taking pictures, just to let the city reveal itself.  His latest projects have been informed by the work of Italian writer Italo Calvino, whose classic novel Invisible Cities has made Jucá more sensitive to the way people and places can shift as the seasons turn or as day turns to night.

“Manaus can seem frozen in time, but it’s constantly changing.” Jucá said.  “There are always new things here.  What I’m looking for are the changes that you might not even see before your eyes.  The kind of changes you just have to smell and feel.”

So, here are two songs (from Brazil) that might serve better as the (un)official soundtrack to the tournament.

Football country” is a collaboration between São Paulo rapper Emicida and ostentation funk performer MC Guimé. As with a lot of the country’s socially conscious urban songs, it helps to know the language. But there are English-language subtitles over the video’s extended intro, which make the themes pretty clear.

The next contender, “Everyone’s Cup,” is a Coca-Cola production, so it’s unsurprisingly more polished. But it features Amazonian star Gaby Amarantos and moves through uplifting scenes of real Brazil without stereotyping. For a more agressive, Brazilian, and visually impressive take on the same song, check out this effort below, “Everyone click play.”

]]> 10 http://frombrazil.blogfolha.uol.com.br/2014/05/09/no-room-for-brazils-best-cinema/ http://frombrazil.blogfolha.uol.com.br/2014/05/09/no-room-for-brazils-best-cinema/#comments Fri, 09 May 2014 15:37:51 +0000 http://f.i.uol.com.br/folha/colunas/images/12034327.jpeg http://frombrazil.blogfolha.uol.com.br/?p=4065

With local entertainment dominated by Globo, cinema that is independent of the monolithic network struggles for space . Two types of movies get made in Brazil – vapid comedies made by the all-powerful novela factory, and small productions, relying on sponsors and donations, that few Brazilians will see.

James Young
Belo Horizonte

The fear of urban violence is never far away in O Som Ao Redor (Neighboring Sounds), a chilling drama about the paranoia that lurks behind the security cameras and towering walls of the apartment buildings of Brazil’s growing middle classes. But for director Kleber Mendonça Filho, the threat that the monolithic Globo TV network and its film production wing Globo Films represent to Brazilian cinema is just as sinister.

“They put incredible amounts of money into making and marketing their films,” Mendonça Filho told Folha newspaper last year. He was talking about insipid Globo comedy blockbusters such as De Pernas Pro Ar (which translates as “Head Over Heels”), which dominate the domestic market, squeezing the screen space available for independent films. “If my neighbor filmed his Sunday afternoon barbecue and released it with the backing of Globo, 200,000 people would go and see it in the opening weekend.”

It was the start of a bitter war of words between Globo Films and the director, whose truly excellent film was elected one of the ten best films of 2012 by The New York Times film critic A.O. Scott. The production giant’s CEO Cadu Rodrigues challenged Mendonça Filho to make a film with Globo money and sell 200,000 tickets in the first weekend. “If he fails, we’ll know that as a director, he’s a great critic,” said Rodrigues.

The director politely refused, saying that “the Globo Films system is bad for the idea of culture in Brazil, kills diversity in Brazilian cinema, and creates a doped up public watching an institutionalized, dead cinema scene.”

Mendonça Filho was criticizing not only the size of Globo Films’ marketing budgets and the lack of creative ambition of its output, but also the fact that the company’s films are extensively promoted by monolithic broadcaster Globo TV, and often feature actors from the parent company’s monstrously popular soap operas, a cornerstone of day to day life for millions.

The debate came at a time when, statistically at least, Brazilian cinema is in rude health, with locally made films holding their own against Hollywood blockbusters. According to the country’s film board, ANCINE, 120 domestically produced films made it onto the screen in 2013, the highest number for 30 years. Yet the majority of commercial hits in the last few years have been vapid, semi-slapstick comedies, easily identifiable to Brazilians from the humorous moments in their nightly diet of soaps.

In 2013 the top three Brazilian produced films at the box office were Minha Mãe é Uma Peça (“My Mum’s Quite a Character” – male actor plays stressed middle aged mother, hijinks ensue), De Pernas Pro Ar 2 (“Head Over Heels 2” – woman opens sex shop in New York, hijinks ensue) and Meu Passado Me Condena (“I Can’t Escape My Past” – newlyweds go on honeymoon on cruise ship, hijinks ensue).

It is a far cry from the gritty social realism of the best of Brazilian cinema, which in the last twenty years has produced classics such as Central Station, City of God, Elite Squad and Lower City as well as the documentary Waste Land. All reveal the inequality and hardship of the lives of Brazil’s dispossessed or marginalized.

Without the resources of Globo Films behind them and excluded from Brazil’s major distribution networks, independent film producers must look to fund raising initiatives or grants from state cultural agencies to get their films made. Mannuela Costa, a producer at Plano 9 films in Recife, explained the reality of the situation.

“Ironically, independent films are actually completely dependent – on grants, prizes and sponsors. Even if you manage to get your film made, often it will be seen by more people outside Brazil than at home, because of the way the market and the distribution system works here. A Globo Films or a Hollywood movie might have 300 or 400 copies to distribute to cinemas, but for an independent film, ten copies is a lot. And if you don’t do well in your opening weekend, you won’t last two weeks. That’s what we’re up against. When Twilight opened here it was showing on 80% of Brazilian cinema screens.”

Costa is currently trying to promote Eles Voltam (“They’ll Come Back”), a film directed by Marcelo Lordello about a young upper-middle class girl from Recife who is taken in by a community of landless agricultural workers after her parents leave her at the side of the road. “At times it can get you down,” she said of the challenges facing independent filmmakers, “but if you believe in the work, you have to keep going.”

Photo above: a shot from O Som Ao Redor

By Nathan Walters

On a purely aesthetic level, pixação—the spiky black glyphs that pop up at dangerously high spots on buildings and spread like a virus on any exposed stone (pixadores surface of choice)—doesn’t offer much to most viewers.

The graffiti style, which is most dominant in São Paulo, can be academically explained in a few different ways: runic inspirations, pulled from old heavy metal album covers, or unbridled Dadaist impulses. But for most people, this doesn’t make it any more palatable, which is the point. It’s the “Kilroy was here” and “f*** the police” tags reduced to an illegible signature that empowers its author because it flies in the face of society’s tastes. It’s no wonder the government and property owners despise it.

To curb the spread of pixação in Rio, the government and property owners have long been more lax in enforcing vandalism laws against graffiti artists painting colorful, generally aesthetically pleasing works that both brighten up blighted areas and serve as a buffer against pixação.

For more than two decades, this gentleman’s agreement has led to a booming graffiti scene in Rio, thrusting artists’ works onto gallery walls, garnering the admiration of foreign artists and public art enthusiasts. It also managed to block some pixadores.

With a recent decree signed by Rio Mayor Eduardo Paes, the understanding between artists and the government was laid out in black and white. The new decree goes even further than a 2009 law permitting graffiti works on private property with owner’s consent; it fully legalizes urban art works on designated city property.

The new law establishes a framework wherein graffiti works will be legal on some public spaces—columns, gray walls, walls without doors or windows, skate parks and construction siding works—so long as the sites are not historically protected. Viaducts and other public facades where anti-graffiti paint have been applied will remain off limits, “because of the high cost of implementation and the need for maintenance cleaning,” according to the decree.

Eixo Rio, a quasi-governmental entity that works as a bridge between Rio’s urban youth community and city hall, will administer the law, and will be responsible for creating an 11-member CariocaGraffiti Council. The group will meet bi-monthly to discuss projects and plans to implement “Cells of Revitalization” for potential tourist attractions.

But what should have been a moment of triumph for the city’s urban artists, official recognition of years of hard work, was greeted by disdain by a large group of graffiteiros, who are worried that the government’s involvement will have a stifling effect. Over the past few weeks, tempers have flared and artists in Rio’s friendly, largely unified scene took to each other’s virtual walls to launch polemics against the decree.

“The thing is, graffiti is a ‘free form’ of art, it normally doesn’t ask for permission. So how are you going to put rules on it?” questions Lelo, a Rio-raised, São Paulo-based muralist.

One of the primary concerns with the new law is that with new, legally designated areas, enforcement will be tightened on popular, non-designated areas.

Many artists feel the new rules are about moving graffiti out of Rio’s more touristy South Zone, a move aimed to appease the hordes of tourist that will descend on the city in the coming months. Criticism of this perceived “tourist-over-locals” agenda is often lobbed at Paes, and is one of the major issues those in the graffiti community have with the new law. But it is not the the only one.

“Usually in Rio, when a law seems to be progressive or vanguardist it’s because it’s hiding real fascist intentions,” says Gustavo Coelho, a Rio-based filmmaker who directed a documentary on pixação.

Just a few days ago, workers wielding paint rollers were starting to whitewash the walls of Rio’s jockey club, the city’s answer to New York’s 5 Pointz and long-known as Rio’s best open-air graffiti gallery. Years of cultural history lost, almost.

Last year, city hall, through Eixo Rio, established an organization, #StreetArtRio, to digitally catalogue the city’s urban art treasures. The imitative is aimed, among other things, at preserving the Rio’s urban works through a massive online photo catalog. The murals that have graced the privately owned Jockey Club wall can still be seen on the site, saving viewers some sunscreen but perhaps diminishing the viewing experience.

For others, the decree, which most say was sprung on them without time for discussion, is a publicity-friendly diversion from other more serious issues confronting the prefeitura and Rio’s disgruntled youth.

“It was a great distraction maneuver by the mayor to create completely irrelevant news that occupied a large space in the media that could have been used for a much more useful discussion about the problems facing the city, like removals of entire communities, the transport mafia, education, and corrupt and unprepared police,” says Rio artist Villas, known for his colorful wooden “love birds” affixed in locations throughout Rio and beyond.

While some artists are left just with questions as to the motives and what the decree will actually achieve in practice, others are happy and willing to explore the new level of cooperation between artists and city hall.

Airá Ocrespo, a veteran of Rio’s urban arts scene, is unfazed by the criticisms, choosing instead to move forward and test the boundaries of the decree.

“This decree positively impacts society because it acknowledges that graffiti is part of the urban landscape and is a reality in the city. This is a big paradigm shift,” says Ocrespo. “Enough talking, let’s do something.”

Ocrespo’s feelings are shared by a large group of artists, predominantly from Rio’s Zona Norte and Zona Oeste, who are welcoming of the changes. For them, changing and experimenting with new arrangements is better than nothing. Whether Paes’ new decree manages to fundamentally change how graffiti is done in Rio will only be seen in the months to come. The walls will speak for themselves.

Photos by Nathan Walters

Carnaval, long concentrated in traditional party centers like Rio, Salvador, and Recife, is taking roots in new cities all over the country. James Young reports from landlocked BH, Brazil’s unglamorous third-largest city, which is learning to put on its own celebrations.

By James Young

Brazil’s carnaval capitals are well established. There’s frevo music on the steep cobbled streets of Olinda, and the giant Galo da Madrugada bloco (street party) in next door Recife, until recently considered by the Guinness Book of Records to be the biggest carnavalesque gathering in the world.

If trotting behind giant sound trucks listening to axé superstars such as Ivete Sangalo or Claudia Leite is your thing, then Salvador, Bahia is the place. And the most flamboyant carnaval of them all, whether you fancy watching the samba schools parade in the sambodromo or getting hot and sweaty among 2.5 million revellers at the Cordão da Bola Preta bloco, is in Rio de Janeiro.

It’s safe to say that the comparatively reserved, landlocked city of Belo Horizonte, Brazil’s third biggest, is not high on the list of traditional carnaval destinations.

Gradually, though, the seeds of carnaval are beginning to find fertile soil in BH, as locals refer to the capital of Minas Gerais, usually more famous for its delicious if stodgy comida mineira cuisine than scenes of gay abandon. Last year over 500,000 foliões (carnaval–goers) partied in the streets. This year, according to the city’s tourist department Belotur, over a million people are expected to kick up their heels at the festival.

Last Saturday more than 50,000 attended the famous Banda Mole bloco on the city’s main central drag, Avenida Alfonso Pena. The theme of the party, which was first held 39 years ago, was “We Were Ready Before The World Cup,” a dig at Brazil’s often shambolic preparations for this June’s footballing jamboree. Among the giant papier mâché dolls were recreations of president Dilma Rousseff, Pelé, and national team coach Luiz Felipe Scolari.

Belotur director Mauro Werkema suggests the growth in popularity of the city’s street parties may be connected to recent social change in Brazil. “It’s part of the social democracy phenomenon. The lower middle classes are growing and have more disposable income to spend on TVs, fridges, and on going out.”

What gives carnaval in Belo Horizonte a different feel is that there are few central, officially organised hubs at which people gather. Instead, in the style of the older carnavals, individual blocos parade through the streets, pulling in crowds as they go. This year, according to Werkema, there will be over 200 blocos, almost triple the total in 2013.

“It’s not like the bigger carnavals,” Monica Carvalho, an English teacher, said at last year’s Bloco Alcova Libertina in the city’s most bohemian neighbourhood, Santa Tereza. “It’s more organic. It’s not based around mega-events organised by the council or the beer companies. It’s like carnaval used to be.”

Not everybody is happy about the explosion in size of the BH carnaval, however. A lack of official organisation led to complaints about insufficient infrastructure and planning at last year’s event. One bloco, Baianas Ozadas, anticipated a thousand revellers at its downtown street party. When over 20,000 showed up, the parade route had to be changed at the last minute. In Santa Tereza, revelers complained about a lack of toilets, security, and public transport.

Many residents of carnaval neighbourhoods were also unhappy, complaining that the parties went on long after official closing time, and that streets were littered with refuse for days afterwards.

The city has promised to improve things. “This year will be better,” promises Mauro Werkema. “It’s a learning process. We’re all learning, from the city council to the police. And it’s great preparation for the World Cup.”

But Belo Horizonte faces another battle if it is to join the ranks of Recife, Rio and the rest as a carnaval hotbed.

“You can tell the difference between those who were born with the carnaval rhythm and those who are trying to learn it,” Francielen Alves, a veteran of several Recife and Olinda carnavals, observed while watching the predominantly middle-class revellers at the Bloco Alcova Libertina take a break from dancing to snap selfies with their I-phones.

Later, at the same street party, a band took to the stage in the Praça Duque de Caxias and belted out raucous Beatles covers while the crowd sang lustily along. Although no one was complaining, the essentially and uniquely Brazilian nature of carnaval, so prevalent in other cities, was conspicuous by its absence.

Perhaps the lack of tradition and authenticity is unsurprising. After all, Belo Horizonte is a mere 116 years old, a baby when compared to Rio (448 years old), Salvador (464) and Recife (476). And while the roots of carnaval in the city date back to 1897, today’s mass celebrations are a relatively recent development.

For decades the festival in BH was best summed up by the saying that “at carnaval, you can walk down Avenida Alfonso Pena naked if you want, because no one will see you,” a reference to the fact that the holiday was traditionally a time for locals to flee to cities where the party pulse beats stronger.

“On the last night of the Recife carnaval all the old maestros get up on stage and all the frevo orchestras play together. And when the sun comes up and it’s finally time to go home, everyone cries because it’s over for another year. It’s not quite like that in BH,” said Francielen.

Such minor griping is unlikely to concern revellers at this year’s carnaval, however. What it lacks in history and musical heritage, the Belo Horizonte street party makes up for with enthusiasm and energy. That in itself will likely be enough to ensure that carnaval in the city keeps on growing.

James Young has lived in Brazil for the last eight years, alternating between Belo Horizonte and the Northeast. He writes about Brazil and Brazilian football for The Independent, Sports Illustrated, ESPN and others.

By Dom Phillips

Last month, Brazilian television network Globo showed something shocking it had never shown on a prime time soap opera before: a kiss between two men. The kiss, between Félix (Mateus Solano) and Niko (Thiago Fragoso), had been anticipated and was shown in the final episode of the novela Amor à Vida (Love the Life). Here it is.

Sensitively handled, romantically filmed, it caught Brazil’s imagination and set social networks ablaze. The next morning, the kiss was headline news and Globo’s news site G1 was one of many to run celebratory stories.

Its primetime Sunday night magazine show Fantástico interviewed both actors and called it “the kiss that moved Brazil.”

You might think: they took their time. Isn’t it 2014 already? The first gay kiss on a British soap opera on long-running East London drama Eastenders happened way back in 1987. Was Brazil ready for the shock? The answer is yes, not, and not sure. Sometimes this confusion seemed to take hold of the same person. Many Brazilians literally did not know what to think.

In big Brazilian cities like São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, with their gay districts and gay couples holding hands on the street, the reaction seemed broadly positive.

I was sitting outside a stall near central Rio that sells acarajé, a sort of spicy prawn and bean sandwich, shortly afterwards and there was a buzz of conversation about the kiss. Nobody seemed particularly put out: the reaction was more “about time”.

In São Paulo, writer Santiago Nazarian lives on Frei Caneca street – pronounced ‘Fray Caneca’ and nicknamed ‘Gay Caneca’ because of its gay population – described whooping and shouting on the street.

“I don’t even watch novelas, and I was ready with my ‘companion’ and my gin and tonic,” he wrote on his Facebook profile. “When Mahler began to play (an old allusion to Death in Venice), I did not even need to lower the volume to hear, here in the gay Caneca of São Paulo, people shouting, applauding, shouting ‘thank you’ and ‘uh-huh’. Cute. Silly, but cute.”

Also in São Paulo, Emilie Brunet was watching the video with three gay friends. She published a video of everyone cheering for the kiss to happen as they watched TV. “I think this was a very touching moment,” she wrote. “I guess most gay guys were secretly praying for that gay kiss to happen.”

Present with them was one of the gay friend’s mother, who was shouting: “Vamos Walcyr! Vamos Walcyr!” – “Come on Walcyr!”, because she was hoping the novela’s writer Walcyr Carrasco had had the courage to include the much-anticipated kiss. Carrosco himself said the romance was the result of the “popular voice” and that the character of Niko was the “heroine” of the soap.

But outside of cosmopolitan state capitals like São Paulo and Rio, the reaction seemed more confused. Antonio Rabelo, 25, who runs his own internet company in São Luíz, in Maranhão, North East Brazil, was initially taken aback.

“I thought it was weird at first, because it is the first time on public TV, but it is pretty common on the streets and in malls here,” he said. He himself does not have gay friends, but he does know friends of friends who are gay and has no problem socialising with them, he told From Brazil. “It’s cool, it doesn’t bother me.”

The gay kiss quickly became the theme of a WhatsApp mobile conversation between Rabelo and different members of his extended family. Radically different opinions were exchanged. “It shouldn’t have happened,” said Antonio, at the beginning. “These things should happen slowly on terrestrial TV, because all sorts of people watch,” said a male relative.

“We are a macho society where what is right is decided by organised religions,” said another male relative, “that we know are hypocrites like any other institution.” He added: “Another battle was won against prejudice.” Yet another chipped in: “I have a gay friend and I don’t accept a man kissing another man.” One guy who supported the kiss said he did not believe gays should marry in church.

The debate did not reach any conclusion. A female cousin concluded: “Guys, the world and human behaviour goes way beyond our small communities.” Another guy joked: “I think your discussion is really gay.”

In Belém, in Pará state, in Brazil’s Amazon, reaction was even more mixed. “Some people close to me didn’t like it and others approved,” A 35-year-old female police officer, who did not want to be named, told From Brazil. “ I think that homosexuality, before God, is not right. Understand that this is not prejudice, it is my position. I have a very close cousin who is gay and I didn’t even stop loving him for this! To me, a gay kiss is not natural.”

Alessandra Marques, 34, a judge at a workers court, gave the kiss a Facebook thumbs up and said: “Maybe just one or two older people didn’t like it.” Public defender Adriana Melo de Barros, 35, said that people in her circles did not support the scene. “I believe that while it has not been scientifically proved that homosexuality is a mental disturbance or a genetic question, society is not going to see this as something natural,” she said.

Even if they have not kissed before, openly gay people are regular features not just on Brazilian television, but in society as a whole. Both São Paulo and Rio have openly gay districts. But attacks on gays regularly happen.

On February 3 Folha reported that police had arrested a gang of six skateboarders, between 16 and 23 years old, suspected of a series of attacks on gays on central São Paulo like Frei Caneca. One victim of an attack had died after being beaten on the head with a skateboard.

According to this blog on the site of Rio tabloid O Dia, 14 middle class youth were arrested for attacking gays who frequented the Aterro do Flamengo park in central Rio on the Sunday after the gay kiss.

Rio’s Aterro do Flamengo park is known to be a cruising ground for gay men, particularly at night. Just nearby, in Glória, the night-time streets are patrolled by transvestite prostitutes. All over central Rio, public telephone booths are plastered with advertising cards for transvestite prostitutes.

It’s an open secret that there is a large market for transvestite prostitutes in Brazil, whom are often patronized by men considered straight. This was the subject of a 2012 sketch by Rio comedy troupe Porta dos Fundos, called ‘The Firm’s Transvestite’, in which a man pulls over his car to pick up a transvestite prostitute, only to discover it is a colleague from his office. The video has been watched almost five million times.

On Sunday Folha carried a report on how gays in some central São Paulo areas have had to change their behaviour and avoid walking the streets alone to avoid the wave of attacks.

Renato Santos, 23, told the newspaper he felt safer on the street when he was dressed as a woman.

In São Paulo, taking to the streets involves far more than protests, riots and demonstrations. It’s also about taking back space from the concrete jungle for parties, festivals, public parks and shopping-mall meetups – ‘rolezinhos.’ The poster in the photo above by Claire Rigby reads “More love, please.” 

By Claire Rigby

2013 may be remembered as the year Brazil took to the streets. Or depending on what’s around the corner, it may be remembered as a mere precursor to what came next. But whatever 2014 has up its sleeve, in São Paulo a tendency to take to the streets en masse, invading public spaces and investing them with life and colour, runs deeper and wider than last June’s headline-grabbing protests.

The push for a more humane city – more street life, more music and more space for human interaction – takes in creative types infiltrating music and art onto the streets of the centro, and campaigners for a new downtown park. It includes the bike shop renting private land to create a mini public square, and the working-class kids turning up in their hundreds at the mall, in Facebook-driven public actions known as ‘rolezinhos‘. And though less overtly politicized so far than the UK’s 1990s Reclaim the Streets movement, which evolved from staging euphoric anti-car parties in the streets to embrace anti-capitalism, the struggle to take possession of the city’s public spaces is becoming more interesting by the week.

Lord knows, São Paulo’s unforgiving urban landscape needs the human touch more than most. In depressing contrast with the warmth and courtesy you encounter every day here from its inhabitants, across large swathes of the city, the bleakly over-developed built environment presents a blunt, blank face to the world, all walls, railings and asphalt. At the heart of South America’s largest metropolis, on the edge of the Tropic of Capricorn, sun and rain ricochet off concrete and more concrete, pedestrians take their lives in their hands crossing the street, and the obsession with ‘verticalization’ that began in the 1950s seems to never run out of steam, with new towerblocks rising endlessly, citywide (see Corruption – it’s the private sector). 

On the Rua Augusta, a long street that runs from Jardins over Avenida Paulista and down into Centro, the demolition of low-level buildings in favour of huge apartment blocks is still in full swing – as is a campaign to save one large, tree-lined plot of land from its fate as the proposed site of a pair of yet more tower blocks. Driven by an eclectic bunch of protest veterans, ‘occupy Centro’ activists and more conservative local residents, the movement to create a new public park, Parque Augusta, on the rare remaining scrap of green held a series of vigils outside the proposed park’s padlocked gates over Christmas and into the new year, including a Domingo no Parque SÓQÑ (‘Sunday in the Park [Not]’) event on 5 January), held in the street outside the locked gates under the slogan ‘The street is a park too!’.

Meanwhile in Vila Madalena, where public spaces and greenery are also in short supply, at the bar/café/gallery/bike shop Tag and Juice, owners Billy Castilho and Pablo Gallardo have seized the chance to rent a vacant lot opposite their shop, to use it as a mini-park. The lot, open whenever Tag and Juice is open, has hosted art exhibitions, mini food fests and live music, providing shade from a tree and grass to sit down on, just round the corner from Beco do Batman, the epicentre of SP’s street art scene, where a long winding alley is plastered with work by some of the city’s finest urban artists.

Party people

On the cool cutting edge of the movement to infiltrate more fun into SP’s streets are clubnights like the pioneering Voodoohop, created in 2009 by the German DJ Thomas Haferlach. Voodoohop has thrown colourful, unpretentious parties and happenings all over Centro, in the streets and in some of its most interesting spaces: at Trackers, a many-roomed, no-frills petri-dish for new clubnights; on the top floor of the residential Edifício Planalto, towering over Centro’s western margins; and on the Minhocão, a godforsaken flyover that snakes through São Paulo at 3rd-floor height. The highway is closed evenings and Sundays, when it becomes a de facto, no-frills High Line park frequented by strolling families, joggers and cyclists, snogging couples and, on the central reservation, the odd groups of friends sharing a discreet sundown spliff.

Métanol, a clubnight collective headed by DJ Akin Deckard, has also graced the city with its fresh, feel-good Métanol na Rua parties, spilling into the roads in Vila Madalena and beyond, spinning its sunny Saturday afternoon vibes on into the night. And in a similar vein, Selvagem, voted 2013’s best party by the jury of Guia, Folha’s weekly listings supplement, held a series of indoor-outdoor Sunday afternoon events last year at Paribar, a bar/restaurant set at the edge of a tucked-away square in Centro.

It’s no coincidence that so much interest should be focused on Centro. There’s a widespread sense of affection for the region, left to rack and ruin for many years but also blessed with some of the best architecture in the city. Far from the social and cultural wasteland imagined by some of SP’s elite, and despite its problems, which include a simmering crack epidemic, downtown SP is packed with heart and soul, and busy with street life – around the crowded 25 de Março shopping region, all over República and up the hill into Bixiga, where people sit out on their doorsteps and linger in botecos on hot summer nights.

São Paulo’s real urban deserts, arguably, are in its affluent western neighbourhoods: in places like Itaim Bibi and Jardins, and in Brooklin and Berrini, where luxury apartment blocks loom coldly behind railings, and large houses shelter behind blank, impenetrable walls. You can walk for many blocks in parts of these neighbourhoods and never see a soul – just gates sliding open briefly to discharge powerful, glossy cars.

Roll on

In the city’s huge, poor periphery, in contrast, where a different kind of architectural chaos prevails, there’s no shortage of human warmth and interaction at street level. But in an equal and opposite reaction to the move to colonize the streets downtown, in the run-up to Christmas, a different kind of movement was born, taking the search for places to gather in a new direction: the rolezinho. Roughly translatable as ‘little excursions’ or outings, rolezinhos are offline meetups organized on Facebook. In December, a series of them brought flocks of teenagers together inside shopping malls around the city’s vast suburbs.

The appearance of fun-seeking crowds of working-class teens, many from neighbouring favelas, struck panic into shopping centre management, some of their customers, and into military police called to the various scenes, who appear to have criminalized the youngsters at a glance, making arrests at each of December’s rolezinhos despite no crimes having been reported. ‘If this had been a large crowd of white, middle-class kids, as has happened a number of times, would this have been called a flash mob?’ asked the anthropologist Alexandre Barbosa Pereira, who specializes in the culture of SP’s periphery, interviewed as part of a wide-ranging article by Eliane Brum at El País’s Portuguese-language site. 

Brum writes that a number of rolezinhos planned for January have been cancelled: ‘Their organizers, young people who work as office boys and assistants, are afraid to lose their jobs by getting arrested for being where they are not meant to be – an unwritten law, but one that’s always followed in Brazil.’ As if to prove it, no fewer than 23 people were detained for questioning after a rolezinho at Shopping Internacional de Guarulhos on 14 December – but with no actual crimes reported, all 23 were later released without charge.

Rolezinho participants claim a variety of reasons for having turned up – mainly that they are out to have fun, flirt and meet other youngsters at the shopping centre – standard behaviour for teenagers worldwide, as well as legitimate claims that the facts of the rolezinhos so far bear out. See this YouTube video from a rolezinho held at Shopping Metrô Itaquera on 7 December, where chattering pre-teens and teenagers are seen milling about aimlessly, at one point fleeing excitedly from a handful of police officers walking through the mall. Then check out the almost unanimous comments below it: ‘favelados’, ‘raça nojenta’, ‘bando de vagabundos sem pai e mãe’, ‘gente feia e mal vestidos’ (‘favela-dwellers’, ‘disgusting race’, ‘motherless fatherless layabouts’, ‘ugly, badly dressed people’).

The latest rolezinho, which gathered 400 youngsters together at Shopping Tucuruvi last Saturday (4 January), ended with panicked shopkeepers calling the police to eject the 400 kids, and the mall closing down three hours early, with no arrests or reports of any trouble having been caused.

Perfect storms

Meanwhile back in Centro, the campaign around the creation of Parque Augusta rolls on. The Prefeitura (City Hall) announced its approval of the new park’s creation just before Christmas, but with its gates still padlocked, the parks’ champions are still working to secure the land as a public space.

The current sporadic occupations of the street outside the park, in front of the locked gates, might not quite amount to a Taksim Square moment for São Paulo; and a series of ruined shopping-mall tweetups don’t necessarily amount to much more than the discrimination faced every day elsewhere by the same kids, whose faces, posture, accents, clothes don’t pass muster in their very own city.

But as Taksim Square itself showed – and as seen in São Paulo in June 2013’s perfect storm, when a series of small demos over bus-fare rises spiraled to epic proportions, fuelled by a brutal crackdown on demonstrators by police, leaving a small, smouldering long tail of unrest in Rio, São Paulo and beyond – when things kick off, the trigger can come from the most unexpected of places.

From sensuality, samba and football to racism, violence and marginalization, Brazil’s struggles around its self image move onto the world stage, as a select group of Brazilian authors takes on the themes dominating Brazil’s crucial international image.

By Claire Rigby

With the 2014 World Cup just around the corner, practical preparations for welcoming the expected hordes of visitors to Brazil are now kicking off in earnest, with guide books, programmes and brochures being commissioned left, right and centre here in São Paulo. As the country prepares to come under sustained international scrutiny, including from close up, the way it is presented, and the way it presents itself have never seemed of greater importance.

Soul-searching questions about where Brazil is headed and where it has come from are matters of constant debate here, not least as a result of the explosive, insurrectionary month of June. But last week, in a precursor to what may lie in store in 2014, those debates also took to the international stage, at the 65th Frankfurt book fair, to be aired painfully, publicly – and, perhaps, cathartically.

Brazil was this year’s guest of honour at the book fair, in a starring role sponsored by Brazil’s Ministry of Culture and National Library Foundation. The project, which had suffered countless alterations and delays in the period between the announcement of Brazil’s role in 2010 and the fair itself – not least due to the three Ministers for Culture the country has gone through in those three years – brought 150 Brazilian publishing houses and no less than 70 authors to Germany, plus a selection of musicians, artists and a special, Brazil-themed pavilion.

Aesthetically challenged

Ana Maria Machado, a children’s writer and president of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, used her opening ceremony speech to call for wider understanding of Brazil, reaching beyond stereotypes based on physical manifestations of culture that revolve around the body: Brazil as more than just a pretty face. “That body’s intellect is usually forgotten,” said Machado, “in favour of a celebration of our dances and our music; of football, capoeira and other sports; of sensuality and bronzed skin on display on our beaches; of Carnival and of caipirinha.”

While scores of the world’s less aesthetically gifted countries can only dream of having problems like these, Machado’s comment nevertheless encapsulates some of the motifs that are often internalised and presented to the outside world by Brazil, as being Brazil. It also finds echoes in other complaints about simplistic conceptions of the country, including in the ways it is represented visually, in photography.

But in the case of Frankfurt, Machado’s wish for a deepened, more complex and intellectual consideration of Brazil’s nature had come true. “Brazil has revealed itself to be an anguished country,” said Juergen Boos, the book fair’s president during its closing ceremony on 13 October, “but one that keeps moving forward.”

Much ado 

The controversies began in the run-up to the event, when the world-famous Brazilian author Paulo Coelho objected to the list of 70 Brazilian authors invited to Frankfurt. Withdrawing from his planned appearance at the book fair in protest, Coelho gave an interview to the German newspaper Die Welt, suggesting that the selection might be tainted by nepotism, featuring writers who were presumably “friends of friends of friends”. Coelho, the Jack Vettriano of Brazilian literature, who sells millions of copies of his books but is looked on with scorn by the Brazilian literary establishment, complained that he had only heard of 20 of the 70 authors, and questioned whether they were all professional writers.

In contrast with Brazil’s previous appearance as the book fair’s guest of honour, in 1994, when the country presented mainly canonical authors like Jorge Amado and Machado de Assis, the Brazilian contingent sent to Germany this year comprised a youngish, São Paulo-heavy cohort, many of whose works have been published in recent anthologies like Granta’s The Best of Young Brazilian Novelists, and in a new anthology, Other Carnivals: New Stories from Brazil, launched at this month’s first Flipside festival – a UK mini-version of the Flip literary festival held each year in Paraty.

Coelho also commented on the fact that the list of authors only included one indigenous author, Daniel Munduruku, and one black writer: Paulo Lins, author of the 1997 book Cidade de Deus [City of God], which became the award-winning, hard-hitting favela-set film of the same name. At the end of the fair, in his closing-ceremony speech, Lins said,“Brazil is a racist country, like the majority of the countries in Europe. There was no racism in the list of authors who were invited.” Speaking to the Brazilian website G1 afterwards, Lins said the list was racist only to the extent that it reflected the prejudice that exists within Brazil, “because there are very few black writers in the publishing market.”

Straight talk

But trumping them all, an opening-ceremony speech  by the author Luiz Ruffato tackled some of the country’s most painful problems head on, and mercilessly. Pouring petrol on the football-samba-Carnival paradigm, setting it alight and booting it into an audience that included Brazil’s discomforted Vice-President, Michel Temer, and Minister for Culture Marta Suplicy, Ruffato reeled off a series of statistics illustrating Brazil’s savage social inequalities, citing high levels of homophobia, domestic violence, illiteracy and institutionalized racism, in which “housing, education, health, culture and leisure are not the rights of everyone, but the privileges of some.”

Speaking at length of the violence, marginalization and discrimination that mar Brazil, Ruffato said, “We were born under the aegis of a genocide. Of the 4 million Indians who existed in 1500, there are just 900,000 left now, many of whom live in miserable conditions in settlements by the side of highways or in large city favelas.” He referred scathingly to Brazil’s euphemistic self-image as “a racial democracy”: “If our population is mestiço [mixed race], it’s due to European men mating with indigenous or African women. In other words, assimilation came about as a result of the rape of native and black women by white colonizers.”

Presenting himself as “the son of an illiterate laundress and of a semi-literate seller of popcorn,”Ruffato introduced the idea of literature as a force for change. “I myself a popcorn vendor, a cashier in a bar, a shop assistant, a textiles worker, a metal worker, the manager of a diner, had my destiny modified by contact, however fortuitous, with books. … If the reading of a book can change the course of somebody’s life, then society being made up of people, literature can change society.”

Read on

And it can, without a shadow of a doubt, also change the way a society is seen, for better, for worse – or for sheer complexity and depth. Ruffato, the author of a five-volume series fictionalizing the story of the Brazilian working class, from its rural beginnings to the start of the 21st century, is one of ten authors whose work, it was announced last week by Amazon, will soon be published in English on its AmazonCrossing imprint.

Ruffato’s first novel, Eles Eram Muito Cavalos (There Were Many Horses), is one of five full-length works slated to be published (the others are by Eliane Brum, Sérgio Rodrigues, Josy Stoque and Cristovão Tezza) following the Kindle-only publication of short story collections by five other Brazilian authors. Ruffato’s novel takes the form of 69 fragments – moments that all take place on one day in São Paulo, from the points of view of their many protagonists – and his emergence into the sights of a wider audience raises the prospect of new, explosive slants on Brazil, and of new opportunities for interested readers to dive in and learn to understand Brazil, warts and all, as the complex, horrifying, delightful, fascinating place it is.

What’s going on in Brazilian music? Journalist and former MTV Brasil presenter Gaía Passarelli introduces a few bands from the contemporary scene, who draw on 70s-inspired soul, Brazilian folk/country, and stoner rock.

In the past they’ve been accused of sounding too much like a tribute to the Brazilian 60s rocker movement know as jovem-guarda: ingenuous, fun, garage-driven. But that time is gone and the band now seems to have drunk heavily from the Brazilian 70s soul scene, as their new album, Feras Míticas (Mythical Beasts) is a powerful, honest and strong collection of tracks, with four of the five members singing. The album’s instrumentation is well arranged, crossing over to rap (as on the gorgeous “A Nuvem”, with Lourdes da Luz) and jazz-funk (“Eu Vou Sorrir Pra Quem é Gente Boa”). There are also good collaborations, with guitarist Kid Congo Powers in ‘LA Funk” and vocalist Paulo Miklos, form Brazilian iconic rock band Titãs, in “Charles Chacal”. You can have it for free here.

Then comes Vanguart, a six-piece band from Cuiabá, Mato Grosso. The band started in 2002 with vocalist and leader Helio Flanders recording some songs in his bedroom, and he slowly developed a personal kind of songwriting in Portuguese and (in the case of the biggest hit so far, “Mi Vida Eres Tu”) Spanish. Vanguart released a successful album in 2011, which was well received on radio and TV, and now are returning with an album that stands as one of the most celebrated of the year, Muito Mais que o Amor. It is everything that Brazilian music is known for: melodic, suave, emotional. But forget bossa-nova standards: we are talking about folk and country music. You can hear it here.

And now for something completely different. A band from Rio Grande do Norte called Far from Alaska. They’re notorious for being praised by Garbage singer Shirley Manson (indie cred), but don’t let this fool you: their music is serious business and not only because they are bold enough to make stoner rock in Brazil’s Northeast. They have some music videos on YouTube and promise a full album before end of year. We’ll be sure to hear more talk of them in the near future.

Artists from Latin America and the world come together in Porto Alegre for a Bienal still named after Mercosul, the stalled regional integration project. Claire Rigby reports on the transformations on offer there.

By Claire Rigby

Moving, evocative, mysterious, provocative: not all great art supplies these sensations, but when it does, it has the power to leave your brain smouldering with new ideas for days. Taken in sufficient doses, that sense of connections being made, and new understandings taking shape via artworks, can even last a lifetime. It’s transformational – it’s the point of art, and it’s art’s sacred calling.

Last week’s opening weekend at the Bienal do Mercosul Porto Alegre, in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, was suffused with interesting, important ideas transmitted via a collection of artworks chosen with precision, all woven into in an interconnected web by the thoughtful young curator Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy.

Entitled ‘Weather Permitting’ (‘Se o clima for favorável’, in Portuguese), this biennale is a tapestry of big, poetic ideas around shapes and masses underground and in the atmosphere, and concepts related to time travel, space and climate – climate in a physical sense, rather than in the concept’s ecologically-charged, more common present-day guise. The exhibition takes place in a row of three adjacent museums in downtown Porto Alegre, and in an old gasworks building, the Usina do Gasômetro, repurposed as a cultural centre. It also takes place in a monthly series of discussions-slash-expeditions to a nearby island and former prison, Ilha do Presídio.

This is the Bienal do Mercosul’s 9th edition – the first took place in 1997, when Mercosul, the Southern Cone economic bloc founded in 1991 and modeled on the EEC, still seemed like it might become a meaningful regional force. As one of two biennales in Brazil (the other is in São Paulo), the Bienal’s setting in the breezy, creative city of Porto Alegre has come to mean more to it than its connection to the failed South American political alliance.

In the grandest of the three main venues, Santander Cultural, a giant, hyper-realistic ceramic squid by the Peruvian artist David Zink Yi lays splatted on the floor, dead, its ink oozing around it (see main image, top). In the main atrium of the next-door building, Memorial do Rio Grande do Sul, a thick carpet of powdered rust has been laid down by the always compelling Cinthia Marcelle, aided by the reckless intervention of nocturnal insects, scurrying minute tracks into it, night by night. And in the adjacent MARG (Museu de Arte de Rio Grande do Sul), a suspended 6m-long satellite made of finely meshed wire hangers and ham radio equipment looks almost invisible until you are right beneath it, staring up. It was constructed by the artistic duo Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla with the intention, in part, of making contact – real contact, by radio – with the International Space Station as it spins through the atmosphere, passing over every 90 minutes, 250 miles overhead.

The opening weekend brought the static artworks together with a series of performance pieces. On the grassed-over roof of the gasworks, the artist David Medalla gave a performance that wove dance, poetry, clouds of balloons and the setting sun into a joyful happening that left parts of the audience, thick with artists, gallerists and a Brazilian and international art crowd, wreathed in smiles and tears.

The work of Medalla, who was a leading member of the 1960s avant garde and a co-founder of London’s Signal Gallery in 1964, has been gathering new interest and recognition in recent years, not least thanks to his association with São Paulo’s Baró Galeria, and he was one of only a handful of artists to have more than one work in the Bienal, including a specially commissioned version of his 1960s Bubble Machine, a cluster of perspex towers from which dense, featherlight foam sculptures are emitted slowly, minutely, and around the clock. Earlier that afternoon, in a techno-music/psychogeographic sound performance, the young Lebanese artist Tarek Atoui worked a radio signal from the Ilha do Presídio island, out in the estuary, into a hypnotic and discomforting soundscape, shaping the sounds with his hands using a theramin-like contraption on his mixing desk.

You can see a short film here, of the curator, Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, pointing out the prison island along with the rest of the Bienal’s venues as she flies over Porto Alegre in a helicopter (in Spanish). In person, Hernández, who lives in New York, is a fascinating speaker, expressing her ideas with precision, artistry and effortless depth.

This is the curator speaking off the cuff as she smoked a cigarette down by the river on the Saturday afternoon of the opening weekend, when questioned about the ideas that influenced her choices of themes for the Bienal: “Understanding the weather is also a way of understanding how observation works – understanding the importance of contemplation, and of observing something.”

Some new people turn up at the riverbank, in sight of the gasworks, where another performance is taking place. Hernández gets a light for her cigarette, greets the new arrivals, and picks up her train of thought again. “When I say ‘observe’ and then I move to ‘contemplation’, it’s because they’re related: they are about looking inside – a constant movement between what you are looking at and what you know. Understanding the reality, and co-existing better. It’s about losing yourself, but also understanding yourself more.”

• The Bienal is on until 10 November, and if a trip to Porto Alegre is possible, it’s highly recommended. If not, some of the texts associated with the Bienal are available for download here. An e-book of essays, The Cloud, and one of the artworks, an album of songs by the Mexican artist Mario Garcia Torres, commissioned for the Bienal, can be downloaded track by track at the same page.
• Listen to the sound of mud bubbling and popping in a vat, part of ‘Mud Muse’, a sound and mud sculpture originally made in 1969 by Robert Rauschenberg.

All photos Ⓒ Claire Rigby.

Claire Rigby discusses, with Folha arts writer Silas Martí, the difficulty of cutting through visual stereotypes in Brazil, a country which is often too photogenic for its own good. Above, ‘Descansando na Canoa’ (1984) by Luiz Braga, courtesy Galeria da Gávea. Throughout the post and below, other selections from the SP-Arte/Foto fair.

By Claire Rigby

What do you see when you picture Brazil? Football, favelas and goddess-like samba queens? Acres of skyscrapers in shades of white and grey, helicopters flitting about them? Or dense green jungle encroaching on stretches of sand? Visual clichés like these are there for a reason – because they’re part of the truth; but do we need to be a little more choosy about what we let into our mind’s eyes?

Too photogenic for its own good, Brazil is all too often objectified, exoticised and even eroticised in photographic images. Take Mario de Janeiro Testino, the Peruvian photographer’s lush book for Taschen, in which lithe, slightly dressed young beauties drape themselves all over Ipanema and each other; or every football-on-the-beach image you’ve ever seen, where muscular youths run, play, sweat in the sand. Skin glows, the sun beats down, people smile.

The way Brazil is seen from abroad – or to be more precise, the way the country and its people are depicted by foreign photographers – was the subject of a polemic published last week in Folha’s Illustrada supplement by the arts writer Silas Martí. Focusing on a major series of images, The New Brazil by Noor, a photography agency based in Amsterdam, Martí’s think-piece was entitled ‘Para inglês ver’ – literally, ‘for the English to see’, but better translated as ‘for appearances’ sake’. In it, Martí criticised Noor’s images – the result of a set of interlinked assignments by the collective’s photographers, arranged into themes including ‘São Paulo rising’, ‘The power of women’, ‘Brazil’s new middle class’, and ‘Salvador da Bahia’ – for what he saw as their typically clichéd, one-dimensional take on Brazil. Including images by a number of other foreign photographers alongside Noor in his critique, Martí writes, ‘Beautiful bodies glowing on the beach, favelas pacified to the sound of batidão funk, and glimpses of aestheticised misery dominate recent essays by foreign photographers attempting to document the country in times of euphoria.’

He singles out a handful of photos: a man gazing out over the shanty-town, wings tattooed on his back; funk-lovers drinking beer; boys playing football outside favela-chic shacks. Brazil-watchers, like Brazilians, will have seen hundreds of such images – they form an inescapable part of the visual discourse purporting to explain what the country is all about. But as an attempt to try and decipher Brazil for the outside world, the Noor images are arguably both as successful and as flawed as any other attempt to sum up the unencompassable complexity of the country – whether in images or in text. It’s a problem that not only photographers but also journalists writing about Brazil, or indeed about anything else, face every day of the week: that of filtering and distilling complex subjects, and absorbing and deciphering signs to present them to readers in a digestible, palatable form.

A guest post by Mauricio Savarese here on From Brazil this week, Why is Brazil important?, touches on some of the same problems: Brazil’s image abroad, the interest Brazil awakens in those curious to understand more about it, and the level of detail, complexity and attention they are prepared to invest in doing so.

For Martí, even the Mexican photographer Carlos Cazalis’s cold-toned images of São Paulo don’t pass muster: ‘Even when the scenario is different, and the softness of Rio gives way to paulistano chaos, exaggerations prevail that disturb the more critical eye.’ As one of Folha’s leading art critics, it’s fair to say that Martí has a better – and a more critical – eye than most. He allows, in the words of one of his interviewees, for the fact that visual clichés of the kinds he discerns in the Noor images are also reproduced – internalised, perhaps – by Brazilian photographers: ‘Certain clichés are connected to our inner vision of the country,’ says Boris Kossoy, a photographer and professor at the University of São Paulo (USP). ‘It’s an opportunistic point of view, or a colonised repetition of what people want to see abroad. It’s exotic content for the consumption of idiots.’

I emailed Silas to ask whether there were Brazilian photographers he thought were doing a better job of portraying Brazil. ‘It’s tricky,’ he wrote back: ‘I don’t feel up to speed with the work of all the photojournalists working at the moment. And although there are lots of photographers whose work I love doing interesting things, they’re not necessarily focused on looking at Brazil in particular. Some of my favourites, though, are João Castilho, Rodrigo Braga and Luiz Braga, and I like some of the things Cia. de Photo does. But you’d have to be careful not to classify these works as journalistic, since their pretensions are more artistic, and not always documentary. Even so, I’d say that these photographers, using some of fiction’s strategies, are registering a Brazil that’s more real in some aspects.’

Leaving him to have the last word – and taking up his implied suggestion of looking to art for the kind of insight that encapsulates complexity without flattening it out – scroll on for more works from last week’s SP-Arte/Foto fair,  including some of the Brazil-focused works that seem to slip between the artistic and the documentary.

Paraty, the colonial coast town near Rio, is becoming known for its festivals which are attracting more and more culturally curious Brazilians. Dom Phillips reports from MIMO, featuring the complex music appreciated here.  Above: the Rum Group with Tareq Al Nasser, from Jordan. Photos Gustavo Otero

Dom Phillips

As the 20 or so white-clad musicians in the Jordanian orchestra on stage, called the Rum Group and presided over by Tareq Al Nasser, romped through what sounded like the soundtrack to a film you couldn’t see, shadows of hula hoop dancers flickered on the white walls of the beautiful old church beside the stage.

Paraty is celebrated for its colonial architecture – and this first edition in the city of the MIMO Festival wisely made good use of it. But it is increasingly becoming known for its cultural events, each of which attracts its own distinct audience. Good news for the tourism industry on which the city depends.

Paraty’s Jazz Festival, for instance, appeals to an older demographic, like jazz festivals all over the world. The creatively-inclined flock to photography weekend Paraty em Foco (Paraty in Focus). Panama hats and pearls are big at the FLIP literary festival. A younger crowd concentrates on getting drunk at the cachaça festival. New Year’s Eve packs out the Pontal beach with axé pop for families and young couples.

MIMO slotted neatly into the “mid-30s, disposable income, culturally curious, and, in the case of the men, bearded” bracket. The festival started out as a caravan of local musicians in 2004 in Olinda, near Recife, as the Mostra Internacional de Música em Olinda. Like Paraty, it is a colonial town big on history and culture. Today MIMO is also staged in Ouro Preto, another historic city in Minas Gerais state, but this was the first time it had ventured this far south.

It was a well-organised event with proper sounds and lights and corporate sponsors that were easy enough to ignore – bar the heavily-branded shed that a cellphone operator inexplicably constructed in front of a screen – and all shows are free, though some of the events held in indoor venues like churches require you to get a free ticket beforehand. And MIMO had the advantage that Brazilian audiences are very open to music that might be seen as too difficult for other countries. Perhaps this is cultural – both samba and bossa nova are considerably more complicated both musically and rhythmically than rock and roll.

There was much interest at MIMO in headliner Herbie Hancock, a jazz funk legend who filled the same main square with an instrumental show in which he performed with a percussionist, a bass player and a drummer, leaving him in charge of every other melody in the show, much of which he played on a keyboard he could carry around like an electric guitar. Thus demonstrating a musical ego as impressive as his repertoire.

If the crowd did chatter in Hancock’s quieter moments, they hooked back in for his career bookending hits ‘Cantaloupe Island’, a jazzy piano bar standard, and pioneering electro classic ‘Rockit’. And the same audience stayed on to see Brazilian rapper BNegão and his group Seletores de Frequência combine lazy funk grooves and an evocative jazz trumpet with live hip hop into the early hours.

Despite its sleepy appearance, Paraty is not scared of the odd late night out, as its carnival shows – the best bloco (mobile samba street party) in town, Paraty do Amanhã (Paraty of Tomorrow), heads out of the main square at 1am. And most of the audience even stood through BNegão’s ‘hardcore experiment’ with thrash metal, even though by now it was gone 3am.

MIMO also had early evening attractions, like the premiere of the film Olho Nu (Naked Eye) about the colourful Brazilian singer Ney Matogrosso, at which the artist himself appeared, and German multi-instrumentalist Stephan Micus both performing in a church and then hosting a Saturday morning workshop to explain his work.

All of which could make MIMO sound like hard work, when in fact it was just the right mix of culture, music and fun. Provided, that is, that Jordanian orchestras, hand-held keyboards, and hoola-hoop shadow dancing are your idea of a good time.

If you care about literature and/or Brazil , pay attention to FLIP this July – Dom Phillips

The Paraty International Literary Party (Festa Literária Internacional de Paraty), or FLIP, as Brazil’s biggest literary festival is known, announced its 2013 lineup in Rio last Thursday.

Palestinian poet Tamim Al-Barghouti and French novelist Michel Houellebecq are among the star turns. As is the former Brazilian culture minister and elder statesman of Brazilian music, Gilberto Gil (above), who will both perform at the opening show and debate a sociologist (though not, sadly, at the same time). Brit Geoff Dyer, American short story specialist/International Man Booker winner Lydia Davis and Brazilian singer Maria Bethânia also appear, though it could be argued the real attractions are the cobblestone charms and lush tropical coastline setting of Paraty itself. July 3-7. FLIP website in English

São Paulo’s Virada Cultural, a 24-hour mega-party featuring more than 900 acts, put the best and the worst of São Paulo on display last weekend. Despite headlines dominated by crime, Claire Rigby had a great time, alongside millions of others, and argues that these kinds of events should be a source of pride for the city.

By Claire Rigby

Headlines – “DEATHS, ROBBERIES AND MASS MUGGINGS MAR THE VIRADA CULTURAL” – “DEATHS AND MASS MUGGINGS: CULTURE LOSES OUT TO VIOLENCE” – “VIRADA OF THE MASS MUGGING” 

São Paulo’s population, waking up after another Virada Cultural, the city’s annual 24-hour cultural marathon, could be forgiven for shuddering with horror at São Paulo’s newspapers over their Monday morning coffee. But for millions of people who attended the festival downtown, the papers seemed to be talking about a parallel event. Not that the robberies, injuries, and even the shooting and death of a young man who ran after the thief who had taken his phone, didn’t take place.

They did; and there was definite tension in the air at times, especially in the early hours, when the mix of thousands of revelers, untold gallons of alcohol, and the carnavalesque all-night party – not to mention the smouldering social tensions that are the mark of every major city, not least São Paulo – took their toll.

But alongside the undoubtedly bad news, there was precious little good news to be read about the Virada Cultural (‘Cultural All-Nighter’), an event that brought an estimated total of 4 million people onto the streets over the course of 24 hours, starting at 6pm on the night of Saturday 20 May. Filling the streets of SP’s dilapidated, occasionally lovely Centro with music, art, dance and theatre, and with hundreds of official food stalls and unofficial beer-sellers, the ninth annual Virada set audiences washing up and down the town to watch shows by thousands of musicians – there were some 900 acts spread across 120 locations – and dancing through the night to everything from techno to samba, lambada and funk carioca.

Art projections filled the Vale de Anhangabaú, where artists and collectives had created 15 installations, including a bridge by BijaRi whose LED lighting glowed in response to the people crossing the valley on it. An art/activist installation Conjunto Vazio, by the collective CoLaboratório, projected Batcave-like lightning flashes onto empty buildings all over town, and under the Viaduto do Chá, grown men and women screamed in excitement as they flew through the air on immense swings attached to the viaduct overhead. Street performers, dancers and theatre companies attracted unlikely, ragtag audiences to their pop-up shows, roping in bystanders and parading them up and down the valley; and George Clinton and P. Funk played to a rapt crowd at 3am, as a tango orchestra struck up 500 metres away at a lonely Estação da Luz. The mesmerizing Gal Costa played a difficult, moving set of new music from her album Recanto; and as Sunday wore on, Racionais MCs, Brazil’s most powerful, important rap group, played a cathartic, euphoric, packed set, also featuring an impassioned speech by the group’s much revered leader, Mano Brown, in which he criticized crime during the event. The band’s previous appearance at the Virada, in 2007, had ended in confrontations between military police and fans that turned to rioting.

We walked the streets for most of the night and again on Sunday afternoon, joining audiences at stages all over the region, home to some of São Paulo’s most historic buildings, and criss-crossing the streets from one show to another, aided (if the light was good enough, and shining at the right angle), by the black, hard-to-read Virada maps and programmes, distributed in their thousands and displayed on structures erected at street corners. The city’s ubiquitous columns of cars were nowhere to be seen, and even some of the roughest of Centro’s troubled streets, which are also home to Cracolândia, an itinerant, crack-riddled no-man’s land, were busy with people strolling from place to place.

None of this is to pretend that all was well with the world at the Virada: it wasn’t. São Paulo is an immense, pressurised megacity with more social injustice and indeed, more rigidly delineated class segregation, than most. It also has a chronic crime and violence problem every night of the week. There’s no doubt about it: assorted pickpockets and muggers were having their own mini-festival of crime at the Virada, while at least one immense band of forty thieves organized a series of arrastões – mass muggings in which individuals or sections of the crowd are surrounded, robbed, and attacked if they resist. I saw a scuffle break out as we passed along Avenida Rio Branco around 3am; and I heard a pop-pop-pop, and saw people running, at what might or might not have been gunshots around the same time, a hundred yards on. (I don’t think it was gunshot, despite the stampede, but I note it here as a possibility.)

And yet as frightening as the contact with crime, violence and sheer drunken disorderliness must have been for anyone on the receiving end of it, it’s what sometimes happens at mass events, especially when mixed with alcohol – and especially when they bring haves and have-nots together in such a sudden, unaccustomed manner.

Super-sized street events always attract the kind of people who disrupt, fight and rob, even in much safer cities. It happens at London’s Notting Hill Carnival, and even, as Vincent Bevins, editor of this blog, points out, at San Francisco’s Gay Pride Parade.São Paulo, arguably, needs more Viradas, and more events like it – it’s what a new surge of street festivals is all about, most recently the Anhangabaú da Feliz Cidade festival that took place in May, as a kind of mini-precursor to the Virada. For every citizen who lost a phone to the thieves (even Senator Eduardo Suplicy wasn’t immune, taking to the stage before Saturday’s opening show by MPB queen Daniela Mercury to ask for his stolen credit cards and ID cards back – then patting his pockets to find his phone also missing) there were hundreds of thousands whose Viradas went off without incident.

I was struck by the overwhelmingly negative press coverage of what was in many ways, and for hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, a successful, enjoyable event. In a telling example of the press’s choice of focus, one headline in the newspaper Agora, a populist broadsheet, read MAYOR HADDAD ADMITS HE NEVER EXPECTED SO MUCH VIOLENCE, over a story in which the mayor, in office since January, also said, ‘From Friday through to Saturday the register of violent crime was identical to that from Saturday to Sunday’. Hardly inspiring words on the city’s problems, but a dash of perspective, albeit a sobering one, on Monday morning’s seemingly hysterical headlines. Describing the smooth running of the Virada’s 900 shows, with just two delayed or with other problems, the mayor went on, ‘What were of most concern was the question of [public] safety and the incidents that occurred above all between 2am and 6am. We had more reports than we’d predicted, but nothing out of the ordinary in an event with almost 4 million people.’

It’s tough to know what the media coverage means. Some have suggested the media may have been especially hard on the new PT mayor. Infographics showing levels of crime and violence at previous editions of the Virada seem to show more or less similar results. But beyond that, a whole tier of the city’s society (the same tier, in the main, who would never dream of attending a mass event attracting huge swathes of people from the city’s poor periphery, as the Virada does) may well have been  put off attending not only the Virada, but all manner of street celebrations and festivals – a growing and much celebrated tendency in São Paulo. Violence and crime are chronic problems. But they’re not a reason to abandon the streets any more than SP’s wealthy already have done. Events or even venues at which the classes mix are extremely few and far between in SP, as the city’s affluent areas and the vast periphery that surrounds them run on parallel tracks, in parallel realities. Moments like the Virada, filing the streets with people, huddled at the crossroads in the patchy streetlight, trying to make out what it says on the map, ought to be celebrated.

Marco Feliciano, a man accused of homophobia and racism, has bizarrely managed to take over as Brazil’s human rights commissioner. So the progressive movements coalescing on the streets of downtown São Paulo set up their own commission, above.

By Claire Rigby

‘Life’s too short to live in São Paulo’. So says a piece of graffiti currently doing the rounds on Tumblr. More than in most cities, there’s a powerful disconnect in SP between what happens on the street and what happens in the rest of people’s lives. In whole swathes of the city – in its more affluent areas especially – closed condominiums, car-loving Paulistanos and a sense of insecurity combine with who knows what other factors to make the streets a place you pass through, rather than somewhere to halt, hang out, and connect with other people.

Recently, though, a surge of interest in reclaiming the streets as a space for culture, parties and politics has given rise to a raft of interesting events and movements – Existe Amor em SP; BaixoCentro festival; Voodoohop and Santo Forte parties, to name but a few – and this coming Saturday, an open-air Anhangabaú da Feliz Cidade festival, in the heart of SP’s old Centro.

Except to the extent that reclaiming street space itself can be said to be political, SP’s ‘occupy the streets’  movement has thus far remained formally politically neutral, barring a flirtation in some quarters with the election campaign of SP’s current mayor, Fernando Haddad. But there are signs that the ‘occupy the streets’ common denominator of the various groups might coalesce into a more decisively political force.

Rights on

In one of the most powerful examples of that, last Thursday night at Praça Roosevelt – sometimes referred to as ‘Praça Rosa’, after the thousands-strong spontaneous festival that gave birth to the Existe Amor em SP movement last October (see ‘Coming up from the street‘), here on the From Brazil blog – a first meeting took place of the Extraordinary Commission on Human Rights and Minorities (Comissão Extraordinaria de Direitos Humanos e Minorias). To the clack-and-roll sound of skateboarders practicing in the square below, and accompanied by a stream of curious passers-by, walking their dogs and their babies in the square’s recently refurbished expanses, 200-300 people gathered for the newly formed Commission’s first ‘public audience’, as it was billed.

The Commission, a grassroots, autonomous body, sprang up in response to the appointment earlier this year of evangelical preacher Marco Feliciano as the president of Brazil’s Congressional Human Rights and Minorities Commission. The pastor’s appointment was about as logical as setting a fox to guard a henhouse, according to the Financial Times and the move’s many opponents, who were shocked off the internet into mobilising in a series of real-life protests nationwide, including two well-attended marches in São Paulo.

Feliciano is accused of rampant, out-of-the-closet homophobia: he has said that ‘love between people of the same sex leads to hatred, crime and rejection’, and claims that ‘many’ members of his congregation, affiliated to the Assembleia de Deus evangelical church, have stopped being gay as a result of spiritual assistance. In another oddly perverse commission appointment in March, the Mato Grosso soya baron Blairo Maggi was appointed president of the Congressional Environment commission, in a move that can be attributed, perhaps, to the wheeler-dealerism that goes in Brazil’s coalition-based politics – one party is given this commission position for that support; another is given control of this government department for backing for that set of policies.

Fox in the henhouse

Quite what someone like Marco Feliciano would want with leadership of the human rights commission started to become clear this week, when in one of his first actions as president of the commission, the pastor rushed through a proposal for the reversal of a 1999 prohibition on psychologists taking part in any treatments purporting to ‘treat’ or ‘cure’ homosexuality.

The nascent Extraordinary Commission on Human Rights and Minorities, while spurred into action by Feliciano’s appointment, is far from being all about the pastor, though: its first meeting was chaired by a lineup of speakers on subjects as diverse as is the remit of the formal Congressional committee: representatives from indigenous and black rights groups as well as the Existe Amor en SP movement sat alongside federal congressman and LGBT activist Jean Wyllys, and the much-loved cartoonist and transgender community figurehead, Laerte Coutinho.

An open mike attracted a stream of speakers, including from the trans community, the movement against the forcible internment of crack users downtown, and including an impassioned speech by the SP councilman Nabil Bonduki, on a new Bill to outlaw funk parties – outdoor, illegal raves held mainly in favelas.

Watch this space: the forces coalescing in opposition to Feliciano and his ilk look likely to branch out into ever more interesting political configurations and – sealed during the last moments of the Extraordinary Commission’s first session, in which congressman Wyllys planted a huge kiss on Laerte, to the crowd’s delight – ever more fruitful partnerships.

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The opening photo was taken from NINJA

Claire Rigby visits the stunning Casa de Vidro, one of many modernist masterpieces hidden in our tropical concrete jungle. If you’re lucky enough to be in São Paulo, get there. Photo above © Claire Rigby

By Claire Rigby

There’s no vista quite like São Paulo’s, with its long swathes of grey-and-white apartment blocks, punctuated by a few, all too few, exuberant architectural huzzahs. There’s the pink, metallic cylinder of the Instituto Tomie Ohtake – a novelty candy-cane as seen from far away, but a building of real, complex beauty seen from close up. Also by the architect Ruy Ohtake, there’s the Hotel Unique, shaped like an upturned slice of melon (no – really), where the walls of the outermost hotel rooms curve up and away in the strangest of manners. And there’s the MASP, Avenida Paulista’s massive, crouching art museum – a glassy box suspended under a colossal pair of bright red supports, created in 1968 by the architect Lina Bo Bardi.

The city’s rich modernist legacy, In which Bo Bardi played a pivotal part, takes a little longer to uncover than its more whimsical constructions – or at least, it did. São Paulo has never seemed of more interest, architecturally, following a cascade of features in the international press on the city’s modernist DNA – most recently in a perceptive FT piece this month by Edwin Heathcote. It includes a long section on the famous Casa de Vidro – the home Lina Bo Bardi created for herself and her husband soon after their arrival in Brazil from Italy, in 1946.

Few buildings have received more attention here recently than the exquisite modernist home, since having been closed for the best part of six years, the house is currently open for visits until the end of May. And with the house and garden taken over by a major, site-specific art exhibition, ‘The Insides are on the Outside’, this is the best possible chance to see the house at its best – and to enjoy the added layer of world-class art, created specifically in honour of the house and Bo Bardi’s legacy (find out more on the artworks here).

Resting on a set of impossibly slender columns, with its cool tones and glass walls the building has been lauded as one of the world’s finest modernist homes – a style seen to brilliant effect here in the tropics, where even the material, concrete, fares better than in colder climates.

When the house was finished in 1951, the plot of land it stands on had been part of a tea plantation, and was consequently bare of vegetation. Photographs from the period show Bo Bardi gazing from the wraparound windows onto faraway wooded hills, where today, high-rises line up shoulder to shoulder, just visible through breaks in the forest that now surrounds the house, tangled in green on every side, as Lina intended.

Bo Bardi arrived from Italy in 1946 with her husband Pietro Maria Bardi (see pencil-drawn cartoons of the couple, above, by Alexander Caldas). Pietro had been invited to create the São Paulo museum of art – the MASP, which was initially located in a downtown neoclassical building, on Rua Sete de Abril. The contrast between the war-torn world the couple left behind and a Brazil on the brink of modernism – Brasília was created in the period 1956-60 – proved a heady one for Lina. She became infatuated with the possibilities open to Brazil and in particular, throughout her life, with its rich tradition of folk art, much of which is on display in her home, including an immense iron-framed, papier machê goat sculpture from Bahia, in the space below the house. A recorded testimony given by the architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, played in the same space as part of the exhibition, praises her ability, as an outsider, to appreciate the best of Brazilian culture.

He cites a phrase from a samba, ‘Tu pisavas nos astros distraída‘ (‘you stepped on the stars, distracted’). ‘I think she [Lina] saw as like that,’ Mendes da Rocha says – ‘as people stepping on the stars absentmindedly, and wanted to tell us about the wonder that existed here. … If she had remained there in Europe with her erudition, she would certainly not have created this work. She might have produced a beautiful oeuvre, but never with this lyrical and poetic character, with this power.’

Climbing the stairs into the house, there’s a sense of vertigo as your gaze slips between the granite slabs that form the staircase. And inside, vertigo again as you admire the slender columns that punctuate the main space, piercing the blue mosaic floor – and as you realise these are the same pilotis holding up the entire front section of the house. Cool, calm and utterly understated, the house was created to approximate its inhabitants to nature, and to get out of the way in order to do so, rather than being ostentatiously beautiful.

Lina never wanted it to be ‘like a closed house that shies away from the storms and the rain’, as she wrote in a 1953 text in the magazine Habitat. It never was a closed house: the Bardis entertained and put up countless friends and acquaintances in the Glass House in the forty years they lived there, until their deaths in 1992 (Lina) and 1999 (Pietro, at the age of 99). And on a wet April afternoon last week, circulating through the house’s exquisite spaces and admiring the art inspired by it, with rain lashing the windows, the tangled green foliage outside dripping and swaying, and strangers’ children darting about, it felt wide open again. You should go.

Above, an image from the short film Feitiço, by Pedro Barateiro – at SESC Pompeia, where part of the exhibition, ‘The Insides are on the Outside’, also takes place. 

Brash Funk Carioca emerged in the 1990s from the illegal underworld of Rio’s favelas. Now, in a nod to North American rap traditions and Brazil’s new economic moment, a group of kids in São Paulo has hit it big using the music to celebrate conspicuous consumption.

By Dom Phillips

Wearing gold chains and baseball caps, two young men drive Lamborghinis past palm trees and up the driveway of a huge, white mansion. A bugle sounds. And the beats begin.

As does a luxurious party, in which Brazilian rappers Backdi and Bio G3 perform surrounded by women in short, figure-hugging outfits, while sipping champagne, gambling, and smoking big cigars.

This is the new video for their song ‘Vem Com Os Trutas’ – literally, ‘Come With The Trouts’, but ‘trout’ here is street slang for friends. Published on March 18, the clip has already been seen over 70,000 times on youtube.

And its depiction of an expensive lifestyle in which conspicuous consumption reigns supreme is another sign of how much one type of carioca funk, Brazil’s distinctive and hugely-popular, bass-driven hip hop dance music, has changed.

This is funk de ostentação, or ‘ostentation funk’, and it is, says Bio G3, made for a socially-mobile Brazil. “People are doing well. They stopped complaining,” Bio G3 – Cleber Alves, 29 – told From Brazil.

“A champagne já tá no gelo e as gatas tão na sofa,” the pair chant in the track: “The champagne is already on ice and the gatas (literally cats, but slang for hot girls) on the sofa.”

In one scene, Bio G3 gently kisses the enormous silver cross hanging on a pendant around his neck in the mansion’s bathrooms while a glamorous blonde watches entranced – though whether that’s by the rapper or the jewellery is, perhaps deliberately, left ambiguous.

Ostentation funk is last year’s hit, and there are hundreds of videos like this, in which expensive champagne is lovingly poured (close-up on the label); motorbikes and jet-skis are ridden; and pool parties are packed with curvy girls in bikinis dancing lasciviously.

The blue 100 real notes (worth $49) – the highest denomination in Brazil – feature heavily. This video by MC Guime, called ‘Plaque de 100’ (100 Plaque) has been seen 23 million times. In it, he flaunts a R$100 note with his face on it.

In this video for his track ‘É Fluxo’ (It’s Flow), São Paulo MC Nego Blue parties on his own private plane.

A cigar is lit with a R$100 note in this video for the track ‘Os Invejosos Vêm’ (The Envious Come) by Rio artist Menor de Chapa.

Carioca funk, or just funk, as the sound is often known, has been around for decades in various forms. In its current incarnation, as a brash, confrontational ghetto music, since at least the late 1990s. The sound is characterised by clattering, electronic beats, over which rappers, or MCs, deliver rhymes about sex, violence and life on the sharper end of Brazilian society.

“Rap, for Black America, is like our CNN,” Public Enemy vocalist Chuck D once remarked. As Brazilian hip hop is a much more specialist sound, concerned more with protest – a “manifesto”, as Bio G3 calls it – it is funk that fulfils this role in the country. Although, musically, the sound has more in common with the Miami Bass that inspired it, or with dancehall reggae.

Funk has long been associated with the Rio de Janeiro favelas it came from. But with funk de ostentação and its glorification of the conspicuous consumption that is so rife in Brazil, São Paulo seems to have stolen Rio’s funk thunder.

In ‘Vem Com Os Trutas’, Backdi and Bio G3 chant:

“São Paulo não é bagunça tem que manter o respeito/é selva da pedra, terra da garoa,” they add. “São Paulo is not a mess, it has to maintain respect/it’s the stone jungle, the land of drizzle.”

The city’s legendary work ethic even gets a mention when the rappers declare: “Nos temos dispozição de matar um leão por dia” – literally, they are ready to kill a lion every day, a phrase often used by entrepreneurs and workers to describe meeting the challenges of the working day.

“Consumption in São Paulo is bigger, the city is bigger,” said Bio G3. “Today, funk in Brazil is São Paulo, no doubt.”

This is all a long way from funk’s beginnings at illegal parties, or bailes, often run by drug gangs deep in Rio favelas where police rarely trod. British journalist Alex Bellos wrote about the scene in the magazine Mixmag in 2001, and returned to the subject in 2005 in this excellent Observer Music Monthly piece.

This Brazilian documentary Favela On Blast is one of a number of films made about the genre.

Initially despised by the Brazilian upper classes, funk soon took acquired a certain cachet: dangerous, edgy, ghetto. In 2005, it was even rather daringly played at the Christmas party of a famous, and very mainstream Brazilian television presenter I attended. Now it’s heard all over Brazil.

Wth ostentation funk, the style seems to have come full circle: Backdi and Bio G3 also have a song called ‘Classe A’, the term for the highest-income segment of Brazilian society. And there is even a documentary about ostentation funk.

Bio G3 used to do hip hop, but switched to funk eight years ago because he saw he could “reach a bigger public”. He claims to have invented ostentation funk in 2008 with an ode to his expensive sunglasses called ‘Bonde de Ju Ju’. But it is over the last 12 months that the style has caught fire.

“I didn’t imagine the impact it would have,” he said. “It became gigantic, it became mass, so today we represent this category.”

Brazil too has changed since funk first emerged from Rio’s favelas. Perhaps the music needed to change with it. As Vincent Bevins noted in his piece about class last week, around 40 million Brazilians rose out of poverty over the last decade – many of them into what is usually called classe C – or class C.

This is usually described as a new middle class. Though it could be argued that class C resembles more the British working class of the 1960s and 70s, as they bought their first washing machines, colour televisions and foreign holidays.

It is class c that drives Brazilian consumption, which in many ways drives the economy. As a result, the upper A and B classes have had to become used to the sight of Brazil’s nouveau riche on flights and in restaurants that were formerly reserved for the rich. A new reality they frequently complain about.

And while the Brazilian economy isn’t growing very much any more, people are still spending. The Central Bank said in March that family consumption would grow 3.5% this year, driven by credit and near-full employment. Sales of luxury imported cars, such a staple in ostentation funk videos, keep growing.

And ostentation funk, too, has crossed over from the music’s traditional fan-base in lower income groups to high society. Bio G3 has performed at upscale São Paulo clubs like Pink Elephant and Royale. “We are talking about consumption, and this began to please class A and class B, not just C and D,” he said.

Released in 2012, ‘Classe A’ was aimed in both directions.

“The song is about consumption, but not just consumption, it is also about attitude. To be class A, is not just a condition, it is a personality, a quality,” he explained.

In short, he seemed to be saying, it’s about having style. Albeit with a heavy dose of bling – ostentation like this is nothing new in American hip hop. Nor are some Brazilian funk artists adverse to simply nicking a few glossy scenes from US rap videos to insert into their own productions when their own production budgets don’t quite stretch to it.

There is social mobility too within the funk music industry. In 2005, Alex Bellos wrote about a Rio funkeiro whose hit had not provided a way out of the favela. When Rio MC Deize Tigrona recorded her hit ‘Injeção’ (Injection), in which a doctor’s injection serves as a thinly-disguised metaphor for anal sex, she was working as a maid.

Bio G3 was born in the poor, outer São Paulo suburb of Tiradentes but now owns three imported cars, including a BMW. “I bought a house for my parents, so I’m in a better condition than I was,” he said. “But it’s not the limit.”

All photos screen shots from “Classe A” and “Vem com os trutas”