São Paulo

Last week we told you about the work of Mundano, a Brazilian street artist who recently was in a show in Brooklyn.

We were so enamored with the idea of another BKLYN, as cheesy as that may sound to you, that we wanted to know more about our cousin on the Tropic of Capricorn.  So we started asking Mundano what it’s like there, how’s it similar, how’s it different, and what about the street art there.

This week Mundano comes back to talk to us about his neighborhood in the largest city in Brazil, São Paulo.  Before he get’s going lemme tell you that according to my very professional online research — NYC sold São Paulo some old trolley cars in the 1930’s for the city’s rail system.  And guess what name was emblazoned across the front of the front car?  Brooklyn.  So people started calling the neighborhood at the end of the trolley line by that name! I don’t know how accurate this is, but it sounds good.

And now, onto our guest to talk about similarities and differences between the two BK’s. 

Sit down and get ready for some skooling! Oh, you already are sitting down.

Below is Mundano’s article about Brooklin & Brooklyn;

The Brazilian Brooklin was named after the American Brooklyn but ours is spelled with an “i”.  The neighborhood here is mostly residential, but in the last 10 years the area has grown really fast, and now it’s also got a big financial center with high modern office buildings.

A view of the Brooklin favela in the foreground in the shadow of the skyscrapers next door. (image Mundano)

One signal of this fast growth is that the goverment is kicking our favela (slum) that was here before to another place.  Basically they are trying to “clean up” the area – as if moving the poorest people to a different area was a real solution to the problem.

(image Mundano)

The similarities between both of the BKs are that they both have a river and a great bridge that goes across it and both have a great deal of street art.

The bridge called Ponte Octavio Frias de Oliveira in Sao Paulo

Read more about “Ponte Octavio Frias de Oliveira“

The differences of the street art scene here and there is that here we have the “pixaçao” which is really aggressive and fast writing, so the population started to see graffiti as a solution for that. 
photo credit: Brocco Lee

Here is a picture with a style of graffiti called “Pixação”

Because of that you can get authorized walls to paint on.  Also, here we use much more housepaint than spray, because of the expensive price of a spray can.

Other thing is that here we have different references of culture so in a neighborhood like Brooklin you can see a great variety of grafitti styles, but here the “street law” is don’t paint over another graffiti or pixação.

This is an example of conversations on the street between graff writers in Brooklyn (image Mundano)

On the other hand, the NY Brooklyn has a lot of things that we don’t see here, like lots of tags and bombs on cars, the interaction between the artists on the streets.

Skewville makes a commentary on a piece by Elbow Toe (photo Jaime Rojo)

Also there are a lot of paste-ups and 3-D installations in Brooklyn. That is rare here.

And here Mundano speaks about his video:

I painted the lips with a big brush and housepaint and all the rest was painted with spray paint. The gate is near by the end of the Av. Paulista, the most well known avenue of São Paulo. I´m really happy that my creature is still there watching the people and the problems of the city, and also turning the streets more colorful!
>>>>    >>>>>   > > >>> >

Thank you to Mundano for taking the time and making the effort to educate his Brooklyn peeps about his neighborhood called Brooklin. A special thank you to his girlfriend Camila, who helped with the text translation, and who also appears in the video.

Mundano’s Flickr Page is Here