Anna Kindgren and Carina Gunnars in cooperation with Ivaneti de Araujo from MSTC - Movimento Sem Teto do Centro (Movement of the roofless in Central Sao Paulo)
REPORT
OCKUPATION PAULA SOUZA, BARRIO DA LUZ, CENTRO:
Background
We visited an occupied building in Centro, Santos Dumont hotel - seven stories high with 33 rooms on every floor. The occupation is called occupation Paula Souza. The building is situated in the area Barrio da luz, also called Cracolandia close to Luz station - a railway station from 1901. The station burnt down 1940. After the second world war the trains were exchanged for other menas of transportation as airplanes and trucks. All this lead to that the station and the area around it became a slum. In the 1990 the station was renovated and the whole area is now beeing refurbished. Large investments are beeing done as a preparation for the planned new inter city railway between Rio and Sao Paulo.
Meetings and visits
After an interesting conversation with André Kobashi, from Grupo Risco (a group of architects and artists that formed 2004 who have among other things documented the situation for homless people in Sao Paulo), at our hotel some of us went together with him in his car to Barrio da Luz in central Sao Paulo.
The area felt run-down and raw. In front of the newly renovated station building there were six or seven riding policemen patrolling. We passed many people who where high on different drugs. We came to a building, diagonal to the station, with a closed huge metal gate. André knocked on the door. Inside sat an elderly man functioning as a guard or host.
Contrary to the favelas we have been visiting this man was not armed what we could see. We where let inside and another man followed us into a courtyard from where one could enter the building. Everything was clean and tidy but still, with our Swedish eyes, as a Dickensian scene. Grey and black. Children playing in the empty courtyard. At first we met a man who had opened a little second hand shop in a room on the ground floor. Behind a curtain, in the back of the room, he himself and his wife lived. Mostly people from Guatemala he said bought the furniture.
We went up the stairs which where tolerably lit by electrical wire ring that the residents had payed for themselves. The level of light like walking in hotel corridors when the light is off, finding the way through the light of the emergency exit signs only. Not a renovated hotel but a worn out, but still tidy and well organized.
The sound level was high from all the kids playing around in the stairwell. Some floors up we stopped by a door and the man who had accompanied us knocks. A newly awakened woman in her 30-ies opens the door. It is no one else then Ivaneti de Araujo, a woman leader for the occupation and one of the prominent figures of MSTC. She is also one of four central figures in the documentary "Dia de Festa" by Pablo Georgieff and Toni Venturi, which we will show during the exhibition in September 2008 in Stockholm.
Ivaneti tells about how the house is organized with a responsible person on every floor. Neither weapons, nor drugs or prostitution is allowed. Ivaneti is herself a mediator in possible conflicts that cannot be solved by the responsible persons on every floor.
The ground floor in the former hotel has been given over to other homeless people outside MSTC in solidarity with them. This occupation is an exception meaning it is shared by two movements MSTC, part of FLM (Frente de luta por moradia), and people from a movement called Forum de Corticos. In most cases every movement has its own occupation FLM have built a type of cellar booths without windows, to live in, which we pass on our way out.
In April 2008 we, Anna and Carina, got the opportunity to return to Brazil - Sao Paulo and Rio. We met André and Ivaneti again. At the office of MSTC in Centro we did another interview with Ivaneti. Our image of the area around Estaçao da luz was changed quite a bit. At our first visit we did not really have time to understand how far the gentrification of the area has already gone. We now visited the other side of the station where a newly renovated large art institution is located - Pinakoteka....
Links:
Instituto polis
www.polis.org.br
Grupo risco
www.gruporisco.org
City Tellers
www.otakulab.tv/works.html
Abandoned Skyskrapers in Sao Paulo
http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=119004
MST/MSTC
http://www.mst.org.br/mst/listagem.php?palavras=mstc
Links:
Related; Cities Centro - Sao Paolo - Brasil Project Report from visit to Rocinha by Anna Kindgren and Carina Gunnars