News from Brazil

We’ve been in Vitoria for a very busy week, now.  We’ve met dozens of people, have hardly stopped working (apart from the odd bottle of Brahma, to help with composition) and our heads have been buzzing.  We’ve mainly been working with the Catraeiros group (see previous posts), due to being able to organise them a bit more easily than others we want to work with.  Things are pretty busy in town, what with the Espirito Mundo Festival, as well as a dance festival, all happening right now.

We began the process by meeting our group at the Catraeiros landing place in Pao – a broken-down concrete shelter, tagged and smelling strongly of piss, dwarfed by the ships coming in and out of the port.  The first part of the process is internal, reflective – to generate images and emotions we then make into our interventions (if you want to know how – you’ll have to pay us!)- here’s some pictures – with a few random ones from the weekend thrown in -

The second part of the process took the group into the old town to work in a more external way – which was quite challenging – especially as we expected it to be busy in town, it being Saturday, only to find that most people head back to the suburbs at the weekend and there weren’t too many people about.  It still went well, though and, heads buzzing, we went our separate ways to sit with what we had learned.  Two days later we got the group together again to process further, resulting in this -

The results were amazing, you could almost see people’s heads expanding.  They were amazed in what we had managed to achieve in a few days, saying that they wouldn’t believe it was possible without months of research and development.  We’ve really refined our techniques over the years, bringing in influences from all of the work we have done, all the people we have worked with and the process is now really tight and focused.  Each time of course it is different, and responds well to different contexts – often we have to rethink the process halfway through, in response to the results, and I think this is where our skill and experience really come to the fore. It’s funny, but we rarely get the chance to work like this back home in Blighty, possibly because we generally have more time – but we are determined to try and work like this more often.

We still want to keep the results secret for now, at least until after the weekend, but we should be able to post something up before we return next week.  As ever, watch this space.