Maré from the Inside is an interactive visual and textual exhibit developed through the collaboration of Brazilian and U.S.-based artists, activists, and academics. It offers rarely captured views into the lives of residents in Complexo da Maré, a group of 16 contiguous favelas (informal and impoverished working-class neighborhoods) in Rio de Janeiro. The exhibit demonstrates the diversity and creativity of the citizens of these communities while exposing the barriers favela residents confront in their everyday lives. In doing so, Maré from the Inside challenges long-standing and powerful stigmatizing narratives and suggests the need for a fresh set of political and cultural strategies capable of breaking the cycles of exclusion and marginalization experienced by favela communities.
The exhibit is comprised of 30 family portraits, 26 street photographs, interviews with 4 of the photographed families, and 3 documentary films. The photographs draw from the experiences and reflections of Antonello Veneri, an Italian photojournalist, and Henrique Gomes, a cultural producer and resident of Complexo da Maré. The artists collaborated with 30 families to create an intimate visual representation of their homes. Together, the portraits capture the diverse human, familial, and urban identities of the Maré community in a respectful and non-fetishized way. Accompanying the portraits are 30 additional street photographs curated by Gomes and taken by Veneri during a period of significant social change when the Brazilian military occupied Maré for 15 months ahead of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. The exhibit’s photographs are joined by three short documentary films entitled Occupation, Girl’s Life, and Headbanging in the House of God, which depict daily life in Maré and wrestle with ideas of race, religion, and violence.
The exhibition, on display at the UVA School of Architecture's Elmaleh Gallery is accompanied by a gallery talk held on Friday, March 25, 2022 at 5pm (ET).
This roundtable, titled "Urban [In]formality, Social Resilience, and Social Imaginaries", reflects on how the exhibit highlights the agential character of a population often targeted with discrimination, how a misleading social imaginary mediates possibilities in communities it affects, how difficult it can be for communities popularly tagged as “less than” to be heard in public policy circles, and how they must work doubly hard to be “seen.” Since many communities are being similarly targeted in the U.S. this topic is not only salient for Brazil but also for the global community.
