A dream of phantoms

Rio, a city of opposites, like one body with two souls. Asfalto against morro, the city it’s a leopard skin where favelas try to find vital air in-between the legally urbanized areas. In a sort of chemical reaction, the two so-created populations are blend during the day-time surrounded by concrete and asphalt but split when night falls and it’s time to return back to origins. Work, production, pleasant tourists’ smiles and joy of life are shared shamelessly in the sun-light kissed boulevards and squares. Only in dirty shadow pain, sickness and starvation are allowed to be shown as a real life’s condition. Nowadays nearly 2 million people experience misery as a sin to be hidden within piled brick walls, subdued to teens’ gang wills and the prejudices of the police forces. From the city center you may have seen thousands of electrical bulbs sparkling like wisps from a distance, between the compact blocks of the multiple stories buildings. Imagine that one day these phantoms starts to move from their secret forts and invade the city, occupying any kind of surface: roof tops, plazas, facades, terraces, beaches. If before you couldn’t nearly hear their voices, now they are shouting into your ears; they hang your backs, they climb upon your heads, they tickle your toes. It’s not possible to avoid their eyes anymore. A new kind of society can be established, where different kind of people shares not only stairs, corridors, electrical wires and plumbing pipes, but also tears and suffering: because being society means also shear the tragic aspects of life. Brick and concrete chick to chick create a new urban scenario where everything’s exposed to the world’s eyes without sin or shame. Nowadays there’s not practical space to operate inside the ghettos and working upon them means just replicate the system of horizontal distances in a vertical way. Spreading favelas tries to dirty the aseptic wealthy districts and involve the well-educated cariocas in the new neighbors’ precariousness. On the other hand, without destroying favelas’ social structure rich of joy and families’ solidarity, favelados get closer to where life is regulated, taught or healed, leaving bullets and collapses to past. Old relations can be reinforced: the employee and the employer, the prostitute and her guest, the drug dealer and his disciples, the preacher and the people in need, the sick and the healer, the law’s guardian and the wrongdoer, can finally show off their interdependency free from the preconceptions cage.