Brazilian Adventures Part 2

So I’ve finally returned from working on the brilliant, challenging and mindblowing project Recife: Playable City Sprint.

I wrote two blog posts about it here, and there are two lovely little films we made about the work we made here;

Telescope For A Beautiful City.

On the opening night of the exhibition, I had a really lovely surprise: In walked the grandson, the youngest, of a dynasty of artists from Olinda. He came and found me, and I was over the moon, and I pulled him along to see the final Telescopes to a Beautiful City – to show him the design. My portuguese is terrible, but I wanted to show him how inspired we’d been by his family’s work. I hadn’t expected to see them again, and didn’t think I’d get the chance to acknowledge it. But Lourenço came with his friends to both days of the exhibition and all the talks!

On our first evening in Olinda, me and a couple of the english contingent had come across this fantastic little woodblock printing studio. We got talking to Paul (one of the artists) and Lourenço (The grandson) and found out that it was their family studio – selling work from is grandmother, aunt and uncle. We talked for ages, looking at the work before we wandered back off into the balmy evening.

I didn’t think much of it – but we were talking with our group a day or two later, and it came up in conversation. The style is called Xilo Gravula, and it’s very specific to the Pernambuco region. We really liked it as a group and I started creating design aesthetics based on it – making covers for the telescope based on the folk stories Thaís was writing up: A sheet of fruit, and rows of Dutch houses and cottages and finally, in the full black and white style the view from Marko Zero, with the street venders, and boats and sculpture park on the reef.

For me, this is what the sprint is really about:
Being open to discoveries – asking stupid questions so you can find out more, understanding the cultural relevance of something, and then being given permission to try yourself.

The fact that I got to complete the cycle, showing the person who’d introduced me to the style in the first place, was just incredible. The fact that he came along with friends and they participated in the whole weekend is amazing.