Afro-Brazilian Legacy And The Struggle For the Right To The City

by Miriane Peregrino

Mon 17 Feb, 2020

On the eve of the 2016 Olympics, residents and activists of Vila Autódromo, in west Rio de Janeiro, coordinated yet another act of resistance against the forced evictions to which they were being subjected: the creation of the Evictions Museum. This new space was arose as a tool to fight for the right to the city and as a counter-narrative to the official story of the mega sporting events taking place in Rio de Janeiro at that time. Of the 780 families living in the community at the start of the evictions led by the city, today only 20 remain.

Initiative for the museum came from activist and museologist, Thainã de Medeiros, and it was backed by a university extension project, coordinated by professor and architect Diana Bogado, through Memory Workshops, carried out with residents of the community at the time of the evictions. Pedro Henrique Netto was one of the students who participated in the project, having attended the workshops that gave rise to the museum.

He created the sculpture Vila de Todos os Santos (All Saints Community), a tribute to Heloísa Helena Berto, also known as Mãe Luizinha de Nanã, and to the candomblé terreiro she maintained in the Vila Autódromo community. For months, the Casa de Nanã terreiro was cut off by billboards and barriers inside the Olympic Park, with no electricity or water, until the city government finally decreed its eviction and demolition in February 2016. “The title of the work was a way of trying to show that Vila Autódromo was a place for everyone, no matter their religion, ethnicity, race. For the sculpture, I thought about creating a circular space with bricks that I found close to the place where Dona Helena’s house was located,” says architect Nunes Netto, also a practitioner of religions of African origin. “This circular space served to represent Dona Helena’s resistance, while the circle also symbolized the candomblé meetings that took place at Casa de Nanã,” he adds.

Memory Sites

Vila de Todos os Santos by Nunes Netto is one of seven sculptures that comprised the inaugural exhibition of the Evictions Museum. In 2017, some pieces of rubble from the museum were donated to Rio de Janeiro’s National Historical Museum. In 2018, residents unveiled a new walking tour, which today includes more than 18 signs identifying sites of memory for the community. All of them include the museum’s motto: “memory cannot be evicted”. One of the signs along the route refers to the “Memory Workshops” that gave rise to the project: “Over the course of the struggle for the community’s right to remain, the initial sculptures, some of which were removed, gradually deteriorated and other activities emerged. We are a living museum.”

Vila de Todos os Santos, Nunes Netto. Evictions Museum. Press Photo.

Another site stands out on the new tour: the “Ruins of the Home of Senhor Adão”. A resident of Vila Autódromo, Adão Almeida Oliveira was a pai de santo, or candomblé priest, and died just months after leaving the community. This memory site alludes not only to the pioneering spirit of Senhor Adão, one of the community’s first residents, but also to his terreiro (part of the Kanjerê Nation variation), as well as a tribute to former residents who, like him, died some time after the evictions. According to Mavilim Oliveira, Senhor Adão’s son and a former resident of Vila Autódromo, his father’s religion was a family tradition and came from his great-grandparents, Africans enslaved in Brazil.

Afro-Brazilian Legacy

Sandra Maria, a local resident and co-founder of the Evictions Museum, points out that the entire community’s origins are, in fact, connected to an Afro-Brazilian legacy: “Favelas are part of the Afro-Brazilian legacy. After abolition, [newly freed slaves] occupied the abandoned areas of the city and part of downtown as well. Then, when those tenements were torn down, the population went up into the hills. The favela began there, so the entire area of Vila Autódromo is part of this Afro-Brazilian legacy, as are all the favelas in Brazil.”

Many of the signs on the new Evictions Museum tour say “fought and remained”. The museum has assembled documents, reports, theses and dissertations on Vila Autódromo on its website and continues, through contact with other communities that have also been or are going through the forced eviction process, to fight for the right to the city. Its development, dynamics and the pieces on display make it an important space for memory and contemporary Afro-Brazilian art in Rio de Janeiro.

Miriane Peregrino is a researcher, journalist, and cultural producer. In 2013 she started “Literatura Comunica!”, in which she develops projects to encourage reading and the visual arts in popular spaces. She has a doctorate in Comparative Literature from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and studied abroad at Agostinho Neto University, in Angola. Currently, she is conducting research at the University of Mannheim, Germany.

Translated from Portuguese by Zoë Perry