I started life in urban slums: public service advertisement for the Muquifu Museum (Brazil)

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Although Belo Horizonte Is one of the largest and richest Brazilian cities, a large percentage of its population still remains below the poverty line. Advertising agency Perfil252 recently presented a series of photographs showing the indigenous people and their modest homes.

The social project was created to popularize information about the activities of the local museum "Muquifu" ("Museum of Urban Escaped-slave Communities and Slums"), from the expositions of which you can learn about the life of urban communities. The slogan of the project: “You are history, you are culture, you are a museum” (“You are history, you are culture, you are museum”). It is noteworthy that all the pictures are not staged, people were photographed near the windows of their own houses.

The authors of the project provided each photo with a "story" to tell about the difficult living conditions of Brazilians. All windows look tiny, it seems as if the world for these people is limited by the four walls of the house.

A sign on one of the walls says that a firm is located in this slum, which does not generate income for its owner. In the second house there is a man who was never able to complete the renovation of his son's room, and the dilapidated window becomes a metaphor for his own “unfinished” life. In the third window is a woman, one of the few representatives of the community. As the sign on her house says, "every morning she sweeps the alleys that will one day turn to dust."

Among the photographs there is also a portrait of a worker who looks out of the window of a house under construction. He still does not have his own home, nor a son, he dreams of one and the other, but it is unlikely that his desires are destined to be realized. The future of this man is as hazy as that of the young woman renting a corner for her child. The last photo in the series is called Liberation, and it shows a guy peering through a barred window. He is waiting for the return of his mother, who will relieve him of the obligation to inspect his younger brother while she is not at home.

At first glance, these are simple and understandable stories, but at the same time it creates the feeling that all these people yearn for liberation from their homes, which have become real prison cells for them, from their poverty, which deprived them of the joys of life, from tiny windows from which it is impossible to see a huge world in its diversity.