about garAges

Abstract

about garAges is a documentary about the spatiality of the urban periphery. The film explores how people appropriate this space and how these individual actions will come to informally compose another space, unpredictable and radically distinct from the originally built one. The technique used in the movie shows, in an articulated way, the en route camera and plan images, thus composing a description of the systemic dimension of the city. The city is understood as a spatial system, a giant net of articulated courses where even the most subtle modifications tend to affect people's lives in a radical way. The film deals with the process of dereliction of a large housing complex, large enough to constitute itself as a city district. The film shows how this dereliction process, taken as something negative in common sense, converts itself, in that place, in opportunity and driving force of a spectacular spatial, social and economical transformation occurred over the course of two decades. The scenario is the Rubem Berta housing complex, situated in the northern zone of Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.