Issue #15, Place Submissions - Giovana Schluter
To celebrate Issue #15, Place, we asked photographers about their notion of place and how it has impacted their work physically, mentally, and emotionally. Over the next few weeks until September 18th, we will be posting some of the wonderful responses that we’ve gotten. Stay tuned on our Instagram & Twitter at @museemagazine to see if your work makes the cut.
© Giovana Schluter
© Giovana Schluter
© Giovana Schluter
Artist Statement:
Paradise Garden, located 60 miles away from São Paulo, is one of many gated communities in the Brazilian Southeast and home to a part of my family. A house in such a development is the standard investment for upper middle class families who, running away from cities that are considered to be failed, wish to return to “a simple life” in the countryside. Gated communities became common around Brazil’s major cities in the 1970’s — along with the first shopping malls —, and haven’t stopped spreading ever since. Just in the year of 2012, the number of land allotments (largely dedicated to gated communities) in the State of São Paulo increased 27%. As similiar as the Brazilian variety might be to American suburbs, here a new element was made ubiquitous - the imperative desire to keep strangers out using heavily enforced walls and checkpoints. In Paradise Garden, guards carry guns and wear bullet proof vests. Residents are biometrically identified, and visitors need to be authorized and present a photo ID. In Brazil’s profoundly stratified society, violence is an endemic phenomenon as well as the object of a widespread social paranoia. Fear feeds the growth of such housing developments, that attract equals and leave any unpleasantness on the other side of the walls, existing in absolute disconnection to anything that is around it. What happens inside is a strange detachment between elements — everything is in its proper place, but houses, shrubs, roads and even people seem somewhat surreal. Paradise Garden is conceived as an ideal place, and yet, it is no place in particular. It is a patchwork of the individual hopes and dreams of a middle class who turned its back to civic spaces and the public realm as a whole. This work intends to remove the veil of exoticism that covers the visual common sense about Brazil and to examine the brutality of the no-places contemporary architecture and urban planning have generated.
view the artists website below:
http://www.giovanaschluter.com
