Energetic Redemption

Sick and wonder, Rio de Janeiro 2033. One year from the first solar tower. Since the beginning of the modern era, Rio de Janeiro has almost entirely sustained itself with the commerce of the mixture of various hydrocarbons, the most exploited and harmful fuel than ever: oil. In the last half century, the city was, often and repeatedly, theater of the worse environmental catastrophes, and the social disgust was persevered because the Brazilian population had never considered feasible any other alternative. Therefore, in the last year, the citizens have started to bring up several polemics due to the suspension of the old untouchable law of distribution of the royalties, in order to find some solutions to the problem of excessive economic disparity among the Brazilian municipalities. In the 1992 some ecologist approaches were tried through the Earth Summit, a lecture of the United Nations about the environment and development of modern cities. This summit focused on interlacements that characterized negatives aspects of modern society. Only in the 2012, after 20 years, there was a concern about this topic, but without a sensible solution. Indeed, all the problems remained unchanged and apparently unchangeable. Today, one year after the construction and the following start-up of the first solar tower in Rio, the sky seems to clear up in the future of Rio, the city of the sun. Indeed, the solar tower is a type of solar thermal power station, which uses heat to produce clean and green energy. “Motorized mirrors” (heliostats) were installed on all the roofs of Rio, a system that reflects solar light in direction of a tower, in which the temperature increases and the air, due to the heating, starts to going up. This creates a flow of air inside the tower, where are positioned a series of whirlwind that exploit the tide to produce energy. On the town hall there are mirrors, on churches there are mirrors, also on favela’ houses there are mirrors. Also the Redeemer Christ, the tallest and the greatest skyline’ s element among these solar towers, has become the symbol of this revolution, of this “ENERGETIC” REDEMPTION. Ruling classes and any other citizen, all of them have aimed this green revolution. In order to emphasize this social cooperation, the use of graffiti sketches over the walls of the city (an element that was already used and recognizable from Brazilian artists and citizens) has become the common “key” to understand the real aim of this project. They represent the new era, they communicate an anger from the past and some new hope for the future – sick and wonder – through some contaminated drawing styles related to the religion, custom and tradition of this city . These graffiti seems to be the perfect “preachers” for this turn, the turn of a city that , after one year from this new beginning, it still serves its past sentences of urban and social sick, but it is also projected toward a future of “cleaning up wonder”.