WORDS: Damian Platt
PHOTOGRAPHY: JR
“The woman is the gateway to a country. If the women are OK, then it means that society has a chance of being OK too.” So says JR, the Parisian street artist, who arrived with his team in Rio de Janeiro in August 2008 to work on the
Brazilian leg of WOMEN, an international project in which he takes portraits and then pastes them in giant black and white format on the side of buildings, buses, empty swimming pools and rooftops. He calls them photo-graffs, a nod to his days as a graffiti writer in Paris.
To date, WOMEN has launched photographic “interventions” in Liberia, India, Cambodia, Kenya, Sudan and Sierra Leone. In Brazil, JR decided to cover the side of a favela with a wall of its women’s eyes and faces that can be seen from all over the city.
The word favela is a word many people know, but its roots lie in a place now called Providência, a morro (hill) that sits overlooking the city docks behind Rio’s Central Station, made famous by the Walter Salles film of the same name. It is here, where the word favela was born, that JR is going to work.
Read on in SHOOK 006.
Read on in SHOOK 006.
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