“How different. Exotic,” commented one women as she watched a group of almost 50 people — mostly young and black, many wearing bright fabrics with African designs — stroll through the Shopping Leblon mall.
Through his environmental, social justice organization, Instituto-E, Dr. Oskar Metsavaht, the creative director behind ethical fashion brand, Osklen, joined forces with Rainer Nolvak, founder of international civic sanitation movement, Let's Do it and Umer Pter, head of External Relations and Estonian delegate at the Rio+20 U.N.
In its thirteenth year, the annual Miss Talavera Bruce beauty pageant is held in unlikely surroundings: a women’s prison in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Instituto Penal Talavera is the only maximum-security women’s prison in the city with inmates serving life sentences for murder, fraud and drug trafficking.
An artist in Brazil, who remains anonymous, placed red blindfolds on the eyes of statues across the city of Rio de Janeiro to protest the country's political crisis.
At Carnival, Where Challenging Normal Is the Norm
By NADIA SUSSMAN and TAYLOR BARNES
New York Times MARCH 2, 2014
RIO DE JANEIRO — Standing high atop a truck rigged with speakers, André da Silva Lisboa cried out to hundreds of drummers, dancers and costumed revelers gathering in the sun-drenched avenue below.
“Carnival has arrived,” shouted Mr. da Silva Lisboa, 38, a samba singer. “Come to the streets! We’re freaking out!”
"A week-long party characterizes Brazil’s Carnival, the Mardi Gras of the southern hemisphere. Celebrations and parades are held throughout the country, most notably in the city of Rio de Janeiro and the Brazilian states of Bahia and Pernambuco. Carnival celebrations vary in length and content, depending on the area.
From a Universe of Trash, Recycling Art and Hope
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
“We are not pickers of garbage; we are pickers of recyclable materials,” Tião, an impoverished Brazilian catadore, or trash picker, declares to a talk-show host in Lucy Walker’s inspiring documentary “Waste Land.”
A site-specific art intervention intended as a call to action in response to Brazil's water crisis. Strategically planned to coincide with UN World Water Day, Gota D'Agua gathered onlookers around an abandoned Olympic size swimming pool at the foot of Edificio Raposo Lopes, a towering luxury condominium building situated on a steep incline overlooking Rio de Janeiro.
At Rio+20 we present a bread tank with a garden inside to underline the realistic possibility of eradicating hunger and extreme poverty by redirecting military spending.
Artists in Rio de Janeiro have staged a pop-up street show to protest against the closure by the new far-right state government of an exhibition because of a performance attacking dictatorship-era torture.
Over the course of 3 years, from 2006 until 2009, the production team behind the film Wasteland (2010), also known as "Lixo Extraordinário" followed Brazilian, Brooklyn-based mixed-media artist, Vik Muniz, as he traveled back to Brazil to create self portraits with the catadores (tr. garbage pickers) of Jardim Gramacho, one of the largest city dumps in the Americas.