On my way home late-late Monday night (part of which was spent viewing La Rabbia di Pasolini, a reconstruction of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1962 essay film),  I was surprised to board the Dundas W. streetcar and find the driver sitting behind a plexiglass partition. The driver was gruff, bearded, burly guy — the sight of this bear-sized man squeezed inside a protective box on an otherwise empty streetcar seemed both comic and like another instance of Toronto’s over reaction to safety concerns. (It also made me feel like a potential threat.) Had I missed something while I was away? Via iPhone I status-posted to Facebook something reflecting my incredulity.

Some Fb ranting ensued —  starting from general comments re: the TTC,  on to what Toronto lacks for dynamism, social fluidity and everyday engagement. The recent G20 shenanigans figure, as does a recap of the thinking that went into the development of Toronto’s St. Lawrence neighbourhood. Here it is, mostly unedited, in its rough, epistolary form. (NB: Greg Spencer is a post-doctoral fellow at the Munk Centre for International Studies, specializing in economic geography.)

Christopher Frey: Has anyone seen the new plexiglass barriers on streetcars to protect the driver? Is this a late night precaution or has the TTC lost its bloody mind? Are we so savage?

Greg Spencer: A TTC driver is assaulted every day of the year. So yes, we are.

This seems part of a larger pattern so typical of Toronto, a city that over-reacts on the side of caution/safety, irregardless of the affect on how we socialize with one another… There are smarter solutions… this is ridiculous. Especially when TTC service can be so shitty, and the system as a whole is so behind other cities’ metros. (Why are we so late in implementing pre-paid pass cards for example?) … After spending so much time in other cities, especially Rio, & using public transit daily, I’ve developed a keen sense for what keeps Toronto from being a really vibrant, interesting place: social fluidity, quotidian engagements with people outside yr usual circle, plus what brian fawcett once called safety nazis. public transit is an important space where we’re forced to interact with our fellow citizens, and the people who work for the city we live in… In some symbolic & behavioural way the glass partition just altered the way I interact with Toronto.

Greg Spencer: http://www3.ttc.ca/Jobs/transit_operator_drivers_recruitment.jsp

Teresa Morrow: I think nice liberals like me are fence sitters when it comes to authority and the enforcement of rules. I deplore the guy who punches the bus-driver, and I grouch and curse about TTC employees and their smug and callous ways. Ditto re: the cops. And we have a lot of people in our city who are outsiders for one reason or another. Whether that means they don’t give a shit about the rules, or are afraid to get involved lest they become the victim of authorities that can be racist & discriminatory… I feel like we are civil people resisting our own strong undercurrent of antipathy.

Greg Spencer: Very true – way too many people take way too many things for granted. We love to complain and yet we do very little. We wear our political choices on our sleeves like it’s some kind of status symbol but we tend to put very little actual thought or action into our ‘beliefs’. I feel that there is a real lack of knowledge about the political/governance process. Part of this is the fault of our political class which does a horrible job at communicating with the public and part of it is a lack of true engagement on the part of citizens. The result is shrill voices on both ends of the political spectrum spewing conspiracy theories that people are all too eager to accept. We are very fortunate to live in a country with very strong public institutions but I do worry about their adaptability and resiliency in the face of rapid societal change.

Christopher Frey: When it comes to burden of proof, sometimes it seems conspiracy theories get an easier ride than traditional media. People mistake plausibility for proof.

Greg Spencer: Chris’ earlier point about atomization is very important. In a large diverse society where everyone has access to specialized media that is congruent with their own set of beliefs what is the glue that holds society together? How can people chastise others they believe are ‘wrong’ when people have very different ideas of what ‘wrong’ is?

Ken Dobb: Who are you people? And how did this discussion end up among the usual inconsequential chatter on my Facebook page?

This discussion reminds me of the theorizing that preceded the development of my neighbourhood – St. Lawrence. The designers of the neighbourhood were taken with the findings – then popular – of the urban theorist W.H. Whyte. Whyte’s findings indicated that fencing off space had the counter-intuitive consequence of actually increasing violence and street crime in public spaces. What worked, he claimed, was having private individuals invested in public spaces – eyes on the street. It’s why we have medium rise buildings with residential units that open directly onto the streets. And to a large extent, this theory seems to have worked in this neighbourhood where – despite its social composition, on-street criminal occurences have been roughly on a par with those of Rosedale, at least until recently.

I agree with Chris that the plexiglass shields are an abomination, an abomination that just might have the counter-intuitive effect of worsening the incidences of violence on public transit. If something is happening in the driver’s space behind the glass shield, what interest do I have to leave my space to intervene?

Came across this while preparing for my assignment in Brasília last week (more to come on that later): the digital typeface Utopia, which, according to its makers, “portrays the mixture between the modernist architecture of Oscar Niemeyer and informal occupation of the urban space that shapes major Brazilian cities.”

And in poster format:

At the outset of World War II, several Latin American countries had fairly close ties with Nazi Germany, among them Brazil. Or at least they were avowedly neutral. Although the United States hadn’t yet entered the war, in early 1941 the State Department convinced Walt Disney and his collaborators to tour South America (underwriting the excursion), with the purposes of creating films that would curry favour with the governments and peoples of Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Peru. Four films were produced, the last in the series being “Aquarela do Brasil” (Watercolour of Brazil), which introduces the recurring character of José Carioca. José shows Donald Duck around Rio and gets him staggeringly drunk.

In 1942, Brazil entered the war on the Allied side, the only South American nation to dispatch troops to Europe. Like the U.S. and Canada, it also shunted its Japanese, German and Italian immigrants in internment camps.

I’ve already filled an entire notepad here in Rio, trying to keep track of all the Brazilian-Portuguese colloquialisms and portmanteaus that are relentlessly shared with me, a good number of them either derived from or alluding to anatomical parts and sex acts. Perhaps my polling has been distorted by the circle of carioca friends I keep. Nonetheless, a brief internet survey of the relevant academic literature scientifically confirms that the Brazilian genius for carnally-obsessed linguistic invention is nonpareil. (Thus, I will be needing many more notepads.)

There are, of course, plenty of other non-sexual idioms that are commonly used, the best of them possessing etymologies and back-stories that, in a few words, and what image they convey, neatly summarize entire episodes in Brazilian popular history.

One such story begins twenty-two years ago, when marijuana traffickers on board the Solano Star fishing trawler spotted a Brazilian coast guard vessel on the way to intercept them. They pitched their cargo into the ocean: more than 20,000 kilograms of maconha, all of it sealed in 1.25 kg tins, that would never make it to its intended destination in the U.S.

Within days the cans, about 15,000 of them, started washing ashore, lofted by the tides over a vast swath of shoreline between Rio de Janeiro and Santa Catarina. The surfers couldn’t believe their luck, and those fishermen quick to realize what was happening allegedly made fortunes. As word of mouth spread, scores of people arrived on the beaches at night to scavenge for flotsammed ocean-bud. This went on for a few weeks, some of the littoral’s glaneurs patiently acquiring stocks sufficient to last a lifetime.

As this new, unexpected supply of maconha, supposedly of African origin, circulated widely among cariocas, it acquired a legendary reputation for its high-grade quality.

Those months in 1988 famously became known as the verão da lata — the summer of the can. For the maconha had arrived at a portentous moment. Brazil was struggling with hyperinflation and the failure of the cruzado plan to bring it in check; intensifying workers’ strikes had paralyzed industry; the military dictatorship was teetering, its weaknesses picked at by the Diretas Já mass movement that demanded direct elections;  and a former leftist guerrilla named Fernando Gabeira, convicted in the kidnapping of the U.S. ambassador, made national headlines when he returned from exile and showed up at the beach in a very wee crochet thong (it was actually a woman’s bikini bottom, his cousin’s).

A Brazilian blogger writes: “In an effervescent moment at the beginning of 1988, the one thing that came was the least expected.” The summer of 1988 has become a part of Brazilian pop mythology in the same way the summer of 1977 did for New Yorkers — when so many era-defining events and the arrival of new cultural trends were compressed into mere weeks.

“Da Lata”, which means “from the tin”, was quickly transfigured into an all-purpose synonym for “It’s good!” (or “muito bom” in everyday Portuguese). Eg. “Did you like the restaurant?” — “Da Lata!” The expression became a fixture in popular culture, widely referenced in television and music. Its use is a little archaic today, but you still hear it said occasionally, even among some young people who don’t know where the expression came from. But for those who are old enough to have lived through the verão da lata, it’s remains a shared code in the collective experience.

Thanks to Fernando Frezza for help with this post.

Photo: Sundeep Bali

In rural West Africa, the tree serves as communal gathering place. A baobab or mango tree, say, sometimes flowering there alone, several hundred metres or more from its closest neighbour; and beneath it, sheltered from the Sahelian heat, there will be a school class, or elders debating a development proposal, or men politicking, or women assembling to complain of their men’s politicking. And sometimes a tree is simply something in whose shade you drink, eat and tell stories.

I came back to this image of the tree as nourishing community architecture when I first encountered photographs of Sanjeev Shankar’s public art piece Jugaad (picture above). Commissioned for the 2008 48°C Public.Art.Ecology festival in New Delhi, Jugaad was a 750-sq foot shade canopy fashioned from a thousand oil cans lashed together, installed with halogens, suspended over pulleys and fastened to the ground with steel cables. The skins of the oil cans were punctured with holes, and the lids applied with a locally available pink pigment called gulal.

The piece was produced in collaboration with the residents of Rajokri, an urban village on the outskirts of Delhi. For Shankar it was an opportunity to further his explorations in the recycling and re-purposing of used materials — rendering art out of what was once garbage — while engaging in a deeply personal process with the villagers.

Photo: Adam Roney

A commonplace Hindi term, jugaad describes everyday acts of innovation. As Shankar tells it: “A guy with 10 rupees has a dream to own a tractor or a television. He’ll start thinking in a radically inventive manner to get it, and do so with whatever means or resources he has at hand.” It’s an attitude toward life that is synonymous with the inspired re-purposing of discarded goods, the social art of getting things done (& sometimes bending the rules of officialdom along the way), and more particularly the ubiquitous, low-tech motor vehicles jerry-rigged from a cart and diesel engine that are the primary means for getting around much of rural India. Jugaad is a survival strategy, more about process than outcome — the hustling, resourceful, quasi-spiritual Hindi equivalent of Nike’s “Just Do it.”

Vikas Swarup, author of the novel upon which the film Slumdog Millionaire was based, said in a New York Times article that jugaad provided the central theme for his story, and calls it “the spirit of India.”

My phone recently had water damage and I gave it to the Nokia dealer. He said, “No can do. Can’t be fixed. Just buy a new phone.” If that had happened in India, some local guy in a little shop would have cloned an old Samsung or Motorola or whatever, and five minutes later, “Here you are Mr. Swarup, it works!” They would never say it cannot be done. Jugaad is the spirit of whatever-it-takes.

The 28-year-old Shankar was trained as an architect/designer, but nowadays works mostly on projects that challenge the conventions of his vocation, focusing especially on how art and craft can be used to examine the way humans make decisions about living and consuming. In previous initiatives he explored the unique role of the street food vendors in the social and economic fabric of Indian cities, hypothesized “the design of a green, intelligent, modular and structural ‘brick’ which has specific native plants or seeds integrated with it,” and, while living with tribes on the Indian-Burmese border developed cane and bamboo craft-products inspired by Naga culture. He also developed what he calls “Culture Specific Footwear” — dashingly hybrid modern-traditional shoes.

The far-ranging purview of his work may betray a certain intellectual unruliness, but core themes emerge: sustainability, biomimetics, emergent technologies, the dynamics of social change, ingenuity in the face of limited resources, and the necessary viability of craft cultures. Somehow he manages to eloquently mash many if not all of these interests into singular articulations.

Tell me how the Jugaad project got started.

Sanjeev Shankar: For me it began with the process of simply documenting lives. Taking photographs of people, or using film, I’m always interested how people make decisions about living and consuming, how the planet is evolving…never as part of an agenda. Just as part of my interest in spending time with people.

I’m baffled by the extremes that India in particular brings out most vividly. Drive for two hours and the differences are shocking. The city [as we think of it] is a Western idea. In India you had villages and the city just grew up around them. For example, in Delhi you’ll still come across buffaloes. There’s a sense of time and space that is very different.

So I was simply taking pictures and I ended up with a series related to the oil can. Most things in India tend to get re-used at every single stage, but the oil can was a kind of dirty symbol of waste which should not be touched or tampered with. It was usually discarded as waste, or used as a container to hold waste, filthy stuff.

There was a seed, or a germ, to do something. Find out what happens to the oil can. I kept stalking the oil can! It took me to some really crazy places… So that was my trigger, I felt this may not be the only way it could be used. And while I was playing with this idea, it evolved into something that engaged a lot of people. It went from one extreme, where people in Rajokri] would give the oil can to me for free, to how the whole village became excited and tried charging me more for the oil cans than they were previously worth.

Once the seed for the project was planted, you knew you wanted to involve a community, to make it collaborative. What was your process?

I didn’t know how we would do it, but I trusted the deep instinct and power of crowd behaviour. Where the whole community gets involved, everyone is engaged and stimulating everyone else. This started happening somehow.

That kind of challenge fascinates me. When you have a purpose but have to involve everyone to communicate and manifest something tangible, something that goes beyond yourself, the “I”, and really get people into it.

You had the idea to call the project “Jugaad” only part-way through the collaboration process. What is jugaad?

Jugaad is a Hindi term that means attaining any objective with whatever resources you have at hand. There’s a guy with 10 rupees who has a dream to own a tractor or television. He will go about thinking in a radically innovative manner to get what he wants and to do it only with whatever resources he has. It results in some absolutely insane innovation and inventions. Because money is not an issue. It takes you onto a journey.

It’s a normal and accepted way to go about life, where you say, ‘Bro’, let’s do jugaad.’ A ‘let’s do it’ attitude — no matter what happens we have to get this done. And that also results in camaraderie.

But the title [for the project] came later while brainstorming with a friend. I started with my concerns: recycling; what does it mean to re-purpose; when one thing dies and it becomes something else; and how do you involve people.

The term jugaad is a lovely way to relate to everyone. In these urban villages the language is different. You’re working with people not integrated into city life. I’m an outsider. There had to be a way without language, a way they could understand and appreciate. It’s body language, the way you conduct yourself, create a deeper purpose beyond the economy of it. Once people began to appreciate it, there was a domino effect. The word spread. Suddenly there are 100 people working and brainstorming, and I become just one part of the process.

How difficult was it to get people on-board with the idea?

It wasn’t easy at first. Sometimes there was resistance. No one understood what [the project] would become. They had the mindset the oil can was waste, so it goes to the dump, why touch it!

It’s one thing to talk about recycling in boardrooms, richly dressed, but it’s a totally different challenge to be working in some communities, because no one is going to listen to you, no matter how many articles we write. So my toughest challenge was how to engage people out of this circle of exchanges happening, when their main priority is survival, getting their daily meal, eating their daily bread. And a sizable population on this planet falls in this bracket.

What sort of role did you play? How do you encourage innovation and creativity in this situation?

There was a lot of back and forth, trial and error, and experimentation. We hadn’t even tested the material so we’d know how to work with it. A lot of village politics got into it, which you just had to accept. Sometimes you just have to give it up. You can’t dictate, you become one element in the whole collage. You learn to go with the flow then at very crucial junctures make sure the river takes an important course or reaches its destination.

Toward the end everything started tying together. Aside from issues of recycling, re-purposing, re-use, it also explored issues of human behaviour, as in when does something become beautiful. Our idea of beauty often comes from a deep sense of evolutionary instinct. In architecture or design parlance you want to rationalize it, make sure it’s functional — that’s the way we judge if something is beautiful. I knew this piece would have rustic aesthetics, but [other than that] I had no idea.

I always try to question whether design should be about “less” or should design be about “more”. Indian movies and traditional aesthetics is so much about celebrating through more, maximizing stuff. I love this dichotomy or tension between minimalism and maximalism. It’s boring if you have to insist on one way or the other. Can we fuse them to create a new entity? When do we stop fighting for our ideas and come up with something genuinely powerful and new.

Other projects of yours have been craft-based, and you’ve written about the relationship between designers and craftspeople. Now that you’ve completed this Jugaad project, where’s your thinking on craft now?

The relationship between design/art and craft is very important to our times, especially in India. There are millions of people here who are brilliant craftsmen; we still have to acknowledge and celebrate that. Unlike the West, we have living crafts. They’re not on the way out. You have to accept that and not look down upon it. They don’t need us, we need them.

Once you live in that life, where work is not devoid of play, you realize craft is an extension of life. It is seamlessly intertwined. Where you sing and you eat and make motors and just happen to create extraordinary shoes as an outcome of your daily routine. That’s a different process compared to a modern way of looking at life, work and play as distinct activities. Japan is a unique place that appears to strike a balance between craft and modernity.

In recent years, there’s been an explosion in discourse around the notion of design as an instrument of social change. I’m thinking of people like Bruce Mau and Cameron Sinclair (Architecture for Humanity), both their work and things they’ve said, this sensibility, as Sinclair says, you must “Design like you give a damn.” There are many others now talking this way and it almost has the critical mass of a movement. At its best this mindset can be the trigger for some really innovative, sustainable ideas; at its worst it smacks of a kind of simple-minded utopianism that promises lasting change it can’t really deliver on its own. Do you believe your work can be transformative, and that change will be lasting?

I’m glad you asked that question… On one side, I don’t know whether it’s prudent to be decisively judgmental that something or everything has to last! If something has to die it will die, and nature will take its own course.

But the other side of me wants it to survive and grow and so I go out and sow seeds, meeting every single person who I feel could be touched by the project and contribute to something deeper. Sowing seeds is important, whether the seed becomes a tree, a fruit, a small plant, or that seed flies out to another country and gets embedded there is something beyond me. Life takes its own course.

In the West there’s this urge to control, give definite answers. Such trends are now seen elsewhere
too. Through my journeys I’ve realized not every question has an answer. No single initiative can change the world. Remarkable people have triggered movements, but there’s always something deep and beyond that remarkable person at play. We need to acknowledge that we’re always trying to rationalize, post-analyze what’s happening.

I’m born in the East, so I’m used to the Hindu philosophy of letting things happen. You accept death, you don’t fight it. It’s not a full-stop. Such belief is at the core of life itself. Everything which comes has to go; you live life in manner where you leave no trace, or you may leave a trace but it doesn’t look like a trace.

Every input from media tells us we can change things. It’s nice to think that way, but perhaps we also need to give space. Initiate, yes; but include a variable which gives space to the other person and to the other life form, which acknowledges their presence, and which tells us we must not go beyond a certain line.

I’m always playing with these two opposite ideas and somehow it results in something.

There’s an on-going interest in biomorphism, bio-mimicry in your work. Where does that come from?

I was born in a south India hill station called Wellington. Every year my father would take me to the hills and we would lose ourselves in the forest. We’d run up to the top, chase each other and purposefully get lost. It made me learn about being in nature and becoming one with it.

Later, as an adult, this one time I was [sleeping] in a rainforest and I felt like I was losing the edge of my body. It was a phenomenal, magical experience. It makes you realize we create all these distinctions. When I lost the feeling of the extremities of my body I started feeling everything is the same, and everything is nothing, and nothing is everything, which started connecting me with everything else. There’s a level of communication and intelligence going on in the world of plants and animals that we don’t understand. That are so evolved and deep we have few answers for how things work.

As I’ve only experienced the Jugaad installation through images on the internet, I wonder how it actually looked being there.

It was pretty crazy. There were strong winds at one point and the whole thing started moving. There were strange sounds coming out of it. It looked like a spaceship, like an outer-worldly creature. People [looking at it] had this insane look on their face. What is this? Where has it arrived from? It swayed like a ship in the middle of the ocean. I did not expect it to be so cool.

Are you still in touch with the people of Rajokri?

Yes, I still talk with them. But now our conversations go beyond the oil cans or jugaad. I guess it is the making of yet another journey.

“The eye of infinity is the sea free of pain.” Graffiti on a wall in Lapa, Rio de Janeiro.

1. In Rio, after the war, Polish Jews earned a reputation for being the most attractive and adept of the city’s (female) prostitutes. They were even celebrated in famous sambas of the day. (Lyrics to come.) Legend has it they arrived in Brazil via a white slave trafficking ring.

2. Madonna’s current boyfriend is a Brazilian model named Jesus Pinto da Luz — a name that translates as Jesus with the Cock of Light. I’m told that the building in Glória I’m presently living in was where Jesus spent part of his childhood.

3. It’s believed the Tupinambà Indians, original inhabitants of the area around Guanabara Bay that is now Rio, inspired Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, Michel de Montaigne’s famous essay ‘On the Cannibals’, and a succession of eighteenth century French thinkers including Rousseau and his ‘Theory of Natural Man’ (although, contrary to received wisdom, Rousseau never actually used the expression “noble savage”).

4. A young Oscar Niemeyer was among the architects who submitted design proposals for Maracana Stadium — built to host the 1950 World Cup. Niemeyer’s idea was to construct the stands at street level with the playing field forty feet below. As the area around Maracana is prone to flooding during the rainy season, the pitch would have been frequently transformed into a swimming pool. Rio chronicler Ruy Castro: “Faced with this possibility, Brazilian football would have had to adjust — perhaps it would have been played with flippers instead of boots — and it would have been very different from the game that in the future would give us Garrincha, Pelé, Toastao, Zico, and Romario. We might not have become five-times champions of the world. As the writer and journalist Sérgio Augusto said, at the outside we might have become five-times champion in water polo.”

Alex Molotkow sends along this addendum, regarding point 1…

From “Anglo-Jewry and the Jewish International Traffic in Prostitution, 1885-1914″ by Lloyd P. Gartner:
“Constantinople, Bombay, Alexandria, and Rio de Janeiro were other destinations at various times, but Buenos Aires was long the main terminal for Jewish prostitutes. Jewish girls, it was reported, were the most in demand and fetched the highest prices from the merchants of prostitution overseas.”

What follows is the first quarter or so of a chapter (still in progress) that lands somewhere in the middle of the book. Hence, the ‘interlude’. The chapter pokes around issues of tourism and globalization, with references to ‘authenticity’ and historical urbanity. Note that Pelourinho means pillory, or whipping post. This is the old district of Salvador where many of its slaves were quartered, and as the name suggests, bought, sold and brutally flogged. -Cf.

*

SALVADOR DA BAHIA, BRAZIL

The favela chief was on the other side of the door, barking threats at us and stamping his feet. Andre hollered back while I sat on a stool, watching him gesture crudely at the angry man we couldn’t see. Because Andre’s room had no ceiling of its own, their shouting bounded off the corrugated iron sheeting that roofed the entire building, flooding the landing, the stairway and probably the street below with their argument.

The chief didn’t like the idea of me hanging around on his turf.

Andre flung open the door and charged onto the landing. He pulled the door shut behind him so I wouldn’t get a look at the other man. They argued with each other for a minute more, until everything was tranquilo. Andre came back inside and locked the door.

“It sounds like I should go,” I said.

“No, you can stay,” he said. “Everything is cool now.” Andre changed the discs in his CD player, and out came thumping, robotic dancehall reggae. He retrieved a pair of modish, ladies’ wraparound sunglasses from the pocket of his shiny sweatpants and mounted them on his head. He re-adjusted the Velcro straps of the fiberglass brace on his left forearm — the by-product of a recent scrap — and then articulated himself into some kung fu, or maybe it was capoeira, or Brazilian ju-jitsu, pose. A very futuristic, The Matrix meets Shaolin Monk, cyborgian assassin. He liked that I was watching him.

We’d met on the street only an hour before. My first night in Salvador, I was wandering the lesser-lit, dodgier streets of the historic Pelourinho district, the city’s old centre. Jumbled, sloping cobblestone lane ways, pastel coloured Portuguese colonial buildings dating back to the seventeenth century in various states of disrepair, baroque churches and convents. It was already late when Andre approached me, like so many others had — costumed Baiana ladies in their big hoop skirts and turbans, crack-afflicted kids — trying to vend some kitschy, beaded Candomblé jewelry. Somehow we got to talking, parked on a curb, Andre suggesting we speak in French, because that was better than his English. After a half-hour of chatter, he invited me back to his place — “in the favela.” He said he was a respected man there and that we’d encounter no problems. “Come, see how I live. I live with my sister. It’s not far from here.” I was feeling lonely and a little reckless, so I didn’t think twice about going along. I followed Andre as he tried to conceal a limp.

It wasn’t a favela in the usual sense. Rather than a shantytown jerry-rigged whole out of brick, poured concrete, rebar, timber and iron sheeting, Andre’s favela was set within the façade of an old colonial manse, on the run-down edges of the Pelourinho. The police had put up barricades at either end of the block to ward tourists off from gamboling this way. At the ground floor, there was a tavern that spilled onto the street. The insides of the original building had been gutted, substituted with a warren of perilous, roughly slabbed cement stairways and landings, the available space divvied up into clammy, single room apartments. Most of the old windows had been bricked-in.

Andre wanted me to make myself at home.

“Take off your shirt,” he said. Or ordered more like, tugging the basketball jersey he wore over his head and pitching it into the corner. His black, rawboned torso was lashed with a hatchwork of scars, as though he had rolled across a bed of sharp coral. He pivoted to one side and then the other, modeling his stab wounds. I was about to ask how he got them, when he rolled back his shoulders and said blandly, “Le crime.” He insisted I take some pictures, but I didn’t have my camera with me.

“Come on, take off your shirt,” he said again.

“But, why?” I asked.

“It’s too hot in here.”

“Really Andre, I’m okay.”

“You don’t want to take off your shirt?”

“No.”

Andre paced agitatedly in the small room. Was he devising a plan? Expecting someone? Working off excess energies? His limp rhymed with the downbeat of the music. I asked him to sit down and chill. He was making me nervous.

Before all the shouting had started, Andre had dispatched his sister, Christiana, to fetch us some more wine. When the shouting was done she reappeared with two plastic bottles of sacchariferous, Brazilian plonk. While Andre poured the wine into plastic cups, Christiana dutifully set about tidying the place for the visitor’s benefit. The room was no larger than 10 x 6 feet, with an adjoining shower stall that also housed a toilet. Christiana crouched down with a wire brush and pushed all the dust and grime into an open drainpipe. Andre made a toast to friendship and rubbed the wine drops from his fingertips across his chest, the matted curlicues of hair painted shiny. (It was then I noticed how much he looked like the ubiquitously shirtless, Nigerian Afrobeat bandleader Fela Kuti.) There was a rectangle of discarded carpet in one corner, which was where they both slept. Clothes were neatly folded on two racks of wire shelving salvaged from the rubbish pile; half of an old door lain atop the racks provided a counter top. Two empty propane gas canisters supported a wooden bench against one wall. I kept to the stool. The walls were painted egg-yolk yellow, but for the many craters and cracks where the grey mortar showed through. The walls had been randomly tagged with small Spiderman decals.

Done tidying, Christiana dragged a Styrofoam cooler out from the shower stall. I must have watched her for a few shakes too many, Andre noticing this. “Do you like my sister,” he asked, encouraged at the prospect that I might. “Sure,” I said. “But not in the way you’re thinking.”

Christiana put a camp stove on the bench and lit the gas with a match. She retrieved some slabs of bacon from the cooler and a bag of farofa. When she asked Andre to get her the knife, he got down on his knees and rummaged underneath the wire shelving, which is where they kept it hid — why it was necessary to keep the knife hidden I didn’t ask. After ten seconds of feeling around he pulled out a ten-inch homemade cutlass and handed it to her. She sliced the bacon strips into bite-sized cubes on the bench, and threw them into a pan with some butter. Then she dashed in the farofa, mixing it all together with a fork.

As Christiana made supper, Andre started pacing again, occasionally punching the air and striking capoeira poses. But there wasn’t much room to move. “Outside, with more space I will show my capoeira,” he said. He mumbled something to his sister in Portuguese, she said something back and he interpreted. “She thinks I should be serious about capoeira, that I can teach.” There was little chance of that, I thought. The Pelô was full of chiseled street hustlers putting on faux-capoeira displays; the tourists usually didn’t know well enough that these were simply showmen, not properly affiliated with any escola, just repeating gestures they’d picked up as kids, with more showy athleticism than refined technique.

After the close-quartered capoeira display, Andre pretended to fire lasers from the arm with the brace and declared, “I am modern man!”

Christiana spun a finger around her ear and said, “He is a crazy man.” But she obviously adored him, too. They were tight. Whatever she asked him to do, he did it.

We ate, the bacon fat and manioc pellets soaking up the booze. Andre finally sat down and inhaled his dinner like an underfed soldier spooning madly into his rations. I asked about his life of crime.

“A little everything. Stealing, selling drugs, sometimes I have to fight someone. I get money for this.”

Christiana picked out enough of the words in French that she felt the need to reproach him. “Don’t tell him everything! You will make him leave.”

“It’s okay, I am done with crime,” he said. “I promise. No more.” Then he repeated this in Portuguese for her benefit.

“What will you do for money,” I asked. The beaded trinkets and ribbons he was trying to sell me were pretty much worthless.

“I will find something,” he said.

After finishing two helpings of the bacon, Andre stood up, put his shirt back on, and hit me up for some money. “To pay for the wine,” he explained. I gave him some bills, but Andre kept his hand out, saying “we” needed more, many more Reais apparently than what the foul wine might have cost. “Do you trust me? You must trust me,” he said. He went out again. (He was forever disappearing and rematerializing, like a gangland fairy.) I figured some of the money was going to the favela chief to placate him — my tourist fee, the charge for my safe passage.

Andre had left me alone with his sister, which was, I also figured, purposeful. He’d leered at me before closing the door behind him.

Christiana and I tried talking in Portuguese. I understood the first thing she said: “He’s crazy, but he is a good man.” Out of necessity, I kept my questions simple. How long had she lived here? About a year. Did she like it? Yes, it was better than the favela she grew up in, where their mother still lived. Better how? When it rained, it didn’t flood here on the third floor. The electricity was reliable. And it was more fun living in Pelô, there were always foreigners around, which meant money. Isn’t this place small for you and your brother? Maybe, she liked to be independent, but was glad to have her brother here. They were a team. What about work? At that she embarked on a long explanation. I understood none of it, although I nodded as if I did.

When Andre came back, he told me to stay where I was and ducked into the shower stall with his sister. They drew shut the green curtain. Their voices turned into low-frequency murmurs. I heard a flint strike and quickly the room filled with the crack cocaine tang of burning condom and rotten grapefruit. After a few minutes they emerged, Christiana burping up a brume of smoke, then shoving the pipe between some clothes on the wire shelving.

“Let’s go,” Andre said. “We’ll have a drink, downstairs.”

The crack must’ve had some curative properties because Andre’s limp was gone. He leaped down the steps two at a time.

At the tavern, a chorus went up as Andre circulated. Middle-aged women giggled and stroked his biceps affectionately. The men gruffly clasped his hand, leaned in close and bumped shoulders with him. So Andre was a respected man! He had, as they say, social capital. Arms were extended to me in greeting. I was offered one date, and then another. I felt almost a part of the fold. Andre ordered beers for Christiana and I. Where were these people from, I asked. From all over the northeast, he said, the northeast was very poor, the poorest in Brazil. The northeast is a place you leave, you come to Salvador, or Amazônia, or all the way south to Sao Paulo. It was always this way. The Pelô, he said, was a good place to come to forget about what you left behind. A woman came up to me then, one of those who had offered a date, and showed off a gimpy leg, stippled with scar tissue. A car accident, Andre explained. I bought her a drink and she put the leg away.

When it was time for me to leave, Andre followed me out of the tavern and into the street. What are you doing tomorrow, and the next day, he asked. I didn’t know yet. “Come look for me,” he said. As I walked away he grabbed a rubber ball off the street and threw it up against one of the sealed-off windows on the building’s façade. Then he ran to catch it as it ricocheted back to earth.

*

I was staying only a few blocks from where Andre lived, on a side street just outside the Pelô, where a row of hotels catered to sojourns mostly of the hourly-charge variety. They had promising names such as Hotel Paris and Hotel Don Juan, and signs that welcomed check-ins at any hour. I had been assured that my hotel was a proper pousada — it was cheap and a little shabby, without air-con but family-run; a sign advised that guests were not permitted in the rooms. Perhaps it was for this reason that the hotel was almost always empty. During my two weeks there, only three other rooms were ever occupied. I had the place to myself. The pousada’s staff either ignored me or rendered themselves mostly invisible. I imagined them dissolving into secret cubby-holes or well shafts like in a Murakami novel. But I had some company: every night, a transvestite trawled the streets below, usually in the rain, picking through the trash bags left for morning pick-up. She serenaded herself in a garbled, sandpapery basso profundo, the incantation of Ruy Barbosa street.

It seemed the rains had shadowed me from Manaus. Wicked downpours, worse than normal for this, the wettest season, were falling across much of Brazil’s northeast, causing floods and deaths in the favelas from mudslides. The daily showers curtailed my usual happy habit of the full-day walkabout. (And Brazilians, I found, tend not to get up to very much when it does rain.) My first couple days in Salvador had left me a little miserable. I enjoyed the clove-infused cachaça at O Cravinho; I spent an evening with the Argentine percussionist and composer Ramiro Musotto, who studied traditional Bahian rhythms from local masters and expounded on same like a giddy, pot-addled mathematician. For once I was more or less a tourist, I had come here as a break between researches elsewhere, with no assignments, no pre-arranged purpose or interviews. I am, however, a lousy tourist. I never know what to do with myself.

Every day I thought: I could go to the beach! But it was almost always raining, or about to.

So, I kept drifting back to the Pelô, drawn to its rough and tumble floating world, its ransacked evanescence, making friends with artisans, shop owners and general hangers-around. At least it was the off-season, which meant the neighborhood was less thick with tourists than normal, although in turn that meant the touts, hustlers, street waifs and hookers seemed to outnumber everyone else. The worst I got it was when some young woman fell in beside me one night as I was trotting between bars. She began nattering at me in Spanish, because she assumed I was Argentine. I mostly ignored her. Then she followed me into a packed bar and began screaming that I owed her money in front of the other patrons. The bartender ejected her, but she stayed outside on the sidewalk for a while, still frantically yelling at me through the big wooden doors.

Then, an hour later, I could find myself having the time of my life in a scuzzy hole-in-the-wall, jammed with locals dancing to old-school samba de roda, in the embrace of a lovely 27-year-old mullata beautician with whom I could barely communicate a few sentences.

Which pretty much summed up the Pelô, spurning or haranguing you one minute, then pulling you in so tightly and with such sweetness the next that you never want to leave.

…

Check out BA contributor Tyler Stiem’s awesome essay on Liberia, “Goodbye, Babylon King”, in the current issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Vladimir Arkhipov collects the art of everyday ingenuity: a power charger made from a recycled Polaroid cartridge; a barbell bracketed by elevator counterweights; an abacus repurposed into a back-massager; a short-wave radio receiver constructed from metal scrap; a water boiler jerry-rigged from a pair of razor blades, wire and an A/C plug. All of their component parts previously used.

For more than fifteen years, Arkhipov has been assembling this archive of “post-material folklore”, idiosyncratic DIY tools and toys fashioned mostly by casual inventors in and around the Moscow area. Though he’s reluctant to ascribe the word “art” to these self-made “thingumajigs”, he treasures their accidental poetry in the service of function.

The archive began in 1994, when Arkhipov realized his own conceptual art had little relevance amid the upheaval of the post-Soviet meltdown. As he says, “I still thought of myself as an artist, I just wasn’t making anything.”  Then, while visiting a friend’s dacha, he noticed a coat hook that had been made from a toothbrush warped over a flame. “It was so simple, but it struck me right away. I knew it was important.” For decades, Russians living under communism, cut-off from Western disposable consumer culture, had been fashioning functional objects from such cast-off items as light shades, plastic bottles and onion bags.

Arkhipov remembered his own father’s inventions, among them a TV antenna made from a set of aluminum forks. “Things like these had been around me all my life but were almost invisible to the naked eye.”

In recent years, Arkhipov has been invited to take his enthusiasm for “post-material folklore” on the road. But rather than deliver his Russian objects to galleries in Brazil, Ireland, England and Spain, he spends a few weeks in advance of his exhibitions hunting for local examples of self-made objects. He always discovers something. Like the gas mask a professor in Sao Paolo had created from a coffee canister and funnel—on days the smog was unbearable, the professor filled the canister with essential oils and breathed into it instead of the air soggy with particulates.

Each object tells a local story, in terms of the materials recycled and the uses to which they are put. The Russian pieces, for example, show off the manifold benefits of a Soviet-era technical education. But Arkhipov ultimately holds to a more phenomenological, quasi-mystical appreciation for the ingenuity that post-folk culture represents.

Arkhipov’s collection has been featured in two books: Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts (Fuel Publishing) and Born out of Necessity, 105 Thingumajigs and Their Creator’s Voices (Typolygon)

I spoke with Arkhipov at his friend’s suburban Moscow apartment, in November 2008.

What’s your criteria for including pieces in the archive?

The objects must be functional, visually interesting, one-of-a-kind and not for sale. They must also have an author, someone who can talk about their creation. The form must be unique, unlike anything else. I usually believe the author if he says it’s unique. The less the author thinks about what he’s made, the more interesting it is for the art. Because it’s more pure, not aesthetically loaded. I think things that man makes only for himself can have aesthetic qualities that are not in things made for sale.

Any piece’s uniqueness is usually a coincidence of time, place and the creator. I never know which house will yield an interesting discovery, it’s always accidental.

Commode made from a stool by Alexei Tikhonov; Shovel made from a road-sign by Vladimir Antipov.

How did you find the first piece in the collection?

I went to a friend’s dacha outside Moscow to help him build a stove. As he was unpacking things I went into the attic. There were some old coats hanging up and when I took them off I noticed the hook — it was made from a toothbrush warped over a flame. Such a small thing! I guess it was a coincidence, because at that moment I was able to see this hook for what it was. It was something important.

It was the answer to the questions that had been brewing in me about what to do next. I decided to start collecting things like this hook. Because usually I saw these things separately, one here at this house, another there, I never thought about it. These self-made tools, gadgets, had been around me all my life, but were an unexplored part of material culture. We just took them for granted.

I wanted to collect them in one place and have the opportunity to reflect on these objects and what story they told. Within a year I put on the first exhibition.

The pieces you collect are, by necessity, tied into the material reality of where they’re made. When you saw that tooth-brush hook, when you began the archive, what were the conditions like in Russia?

After the USSR collapsed, 1993 was the most difficult year for our country. After that everything changed. The social and economic divisions started becoming more stratified, more extreme.

Some of my friends got very rich, and they lost their interest in art. They were more interested in Ferraris and luxury cars. And others didn’t have any money. They couldn’t afford to be interested in anything. The art I was making became irrelevant and unnecessary. I think it was true of all art in this period.

As an artist, the 1990s were the period of looking for an audience, trying to find who is the spectator. Eventually, as some people made money, the art began to develop again, but according to the laws of bourgeois art. It was something shocking and kitschy. It wasn’t interesting to me.

Footbridge made from a bed by an unknown author.

During this time you still thought of yourself as an artist, not yet a curator.

I still thought of myself as an artist, but I wasn’t making anything. I had an apartment in a small town that I rented out for income. Instead, I lived with friends in these condemned houses in Moscow, like a squat. I didn’t need much money to live here. Now where we squatted is the most luxurious part of Moscow, the Kutuzovsky Prospekt.

When I had to make some money I did construction work. It was my dream to have enough money to stop working and just make art.

Here’s a classic story from those times: I was owed a lot of money by this construction company. But it was run by criminals. When I finished my work I never got my last, largest sum. My problem is that I didn’t have what Russians call a ‘roof’ — the people who can look out for you, protect you. In short, I didn’t get the money. I wasn’t the only one. A large group of builders got fucked. You need the courage to shoot people. I didn’t have this quality. Russian business has no recourse for people like me!

Summer shower made by Alexander.

Now that your collection is being noticed outside Russia, art critics and curators tend to appreciate it as either a critique of consumer culture, or as a sociological catalogue of the deprivations suffered here in the immediate post-Soviet era. What do you think about that?

I accept that but only up to a point. I think the more specialized your labour, the less ingenious you become. Consumer societies can lose contact with the material world, with tactile things and the process of creating them. Because if you have money, you need something, you can buy it. But the poor man is more attentive to the details of everyday life. For them this attentiveness is the guarantee of survival.

These pieces do say something about where and when they were made. In Soviet times there was a unique material culture. Because the whole cycle of production, from beginning to end, it was done here. Our technologies and products developed in parallel, but differently than the West. There are certain things that are Soviet-standard that you would never find in the West.

But when I look at these things together, there’s no big difference between the communist and the post-communist times. Yes, they can say a little about when and where they were made, but we should also be careful not to make too much of it.

I prefer to look at it as a phenomenon of contemporary culture — not sociologically, but phenomenologically. For example, I compare these pieces to a sort of folklore by calling it material folklore. But there’s no real tradition of this, not in any conscious sense, you’re not closely following what a whole body of people has done before you. These things are sporadic, occasional. You can’t understand all the why, where, and how, but you can admire them, appreciate their ingenuity. You may even appreciate how they look, although they weren’t necessarily made to look good.

What do you mean by phenomenologically?

These things are traces of the creative force in man. Creativity belongs to everyone, but everyone is different, so the manifestations, expressions of it are different. Some men have a facility with words, others with sound or numbers. And there are others who still understand the world with their hands. Those last people are the people who interest me the most.