Br(az)illiant: Restructuring Shanty Towns For the Future. Yes, these are real … and yet entirely unreal at the same time. After traveling extensively through the shanty towns of Sao Paolo and Ro de Janeiro, Brazil, artist Dionisio Gonzalez has constructed a series of photographic collages that blend imagination and architecture, a kind of hyper-real Alice-in-Wonderland representation of the hodge-podge urban reality around him. His work is not just artistic or theoretical commentary – it is a semi-concrete vision for the possible restructuring of shanty towns. He has imagined and proposed a reuse of the spontaneous constructive elements of the existing structures in mass settlements to create controlled hybrid-but-functional communities of the future. Gonzlez tests out various configurations, scales and stylistic combinations in his compelling series of collages – in part an aesthetic exercise but also an attempt to take the real materials he has photographed and find new ways to recombine them for new purposes.
Inside Out. Edward Burtynsky [ Photographic Works ] Life in the slow line. Silence. Lilie-Mélo. Maïze. Camilla Engman.