Urban Quilombo
Sebastián Liste
Getty Images Reportage
Winner of the 2012 Ville de Perpignan Rémi Ochlik Visa d'or Award
The project stands as a testimony to a place that no longer exists.
In 2003, dozens of families occupied the Galpao da Araujo Barreto, an abandoned chocolate factory in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. Before moving there, the families had lived in the dangerous streets of the city, but, tired of living with so much violence and despair, they came together and took over the deserted factory which was in ruins, making it their own home.
Since 2009, I have been documenting the community of Barreto. From my studies in sociology, I understood that it was a unique community, a vast subculture within the greater city which became one extended family. They created a microcosm where problems of drugs, prostitution and violence could be tackled with the support of the community.
Over the past decade, Brazil has become a paradigm of economic growth in Latin America, and for developing countries across the world. Yet at the same time, Brazil has become one of the most unequal societies in the world.
Barreto was a place where ideas, goods and services were exchanged, creating a bond and identity that helped the members of the community survive in a society that had marginalized them. Community life was a form of struggle and resistance – resistance to the society that saw them merely as a dysfunctional organ, excluding them from any normal role which citizens in a healthy society are entitled to have.
Three years ago I came to Barreto to see how communities formed as a survival mechanism in a fragmented society. Over the years, I have witnessed almost everything in the range of human experience: love, despair, betrayal, lust, passion, solidarity, friendship, empathy, conflict, forgiveness and a sense of family. But the most important thing was the strength of the community members, able to avoid disappearing into oblivion, fighting on despite being social outcasts, building a community with the ultimate goal of worthy survival, building a home, raising a family, and continuing the fight against the powers that oppress them.
Preview
The strength and courage of the community of Barreto came from the creativity of the members seeking new ways to subsist in abandoned industrial environments in the city. These actions which go against the established norms of society are much more than passing acts of rebellion. They are planting the seeds of new cultures of resistance, creating new relationships between human beings in society, and with their environment, so that they can survive. They have established new and different value systems, interpersonal relationships, and new codes and rules within society itself.
I made several trips between my first visit in 2009 and March 2011 when the government demolished the factory and evicted all the families. This was one of many attempts to clean up visible poverty in the center of Brazil’s cities, mainly because of international events to be held in the country over the next few years, e.g. the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. Brazil has come close to committing human rights violations with the continued, reckless efforts to remove favelas.
When the Barreto community was forcibly relocated, there were around 130 families living there, in an area approximately the size of a football field. While the physical site of Barreto no longer exists, the community lives on: the families now live together in the Jardim das Margaridas, a marginalized neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. The government moved them there, together with another 500 families from favelas around the city. The process of urban gentrification has become a common practice around the world as the transformation of city centers moves low-income communities out of neighborhoods with economic potential and appeal; these then become expensive, fashionable residential areas.
My main objective with this photo-essay was to document the emotional and physical ties between the families that comprise the Barreto community. The community stands as a metaphor, the symbolic point where the tragic disintegration of human life has combined perfectly with the magic realism of Latin America.
Sebastián Liste
