A Tale of Two Cities

"SINCE THE MID-1990s, unsheltered Brazilians, known as the sem teto,or roofless, have organized to seize abandoned buildings and transform them into rudimentary housing. São Paulo, the most populous city in the Americas, has become the symbolic epicenter of this housing struggle, if only for the cruel irony of having more vacant dwellings than unsheltered people. In its center, from which the well-to-do have long decamped,"

"The FLM's slogan-"Occupy, Resist, Construct, Dwell!"-is echoed in the title of the current exhibition "Construction, Occupation" at UCLA's Fowler Museum, curated by Juliana Caffé, Yudi Rafael, and Alex Ungprateeb Flynn. The simplification of this rallying cry points to the exhibition's sagacious curatorial focus. Rather than implausibly narrate the vicissitudes of a complex sociopolitical movement propelled by a large network of collectives in a country as vast and varied as Brazil,"

Since the mid-1990s unsheltered Brazilians known as the sem teto have organized to seize abandoned buildings and transform them into rudimentary housing. São Paulo contains more vacant dwellings than unsheltered people, prompting squatters to revitalize decrepit downtown high-rises. The Homeless Movement of the Center (MSTC), affiliated with the Front Line of the Struggle for Housing (FLM), has occupied Hotel Cambridge and 9 de Julho. The FLM slogan "Occupy, Resist, Construct, Dwell!" frames an exhibition titled "Construction, Occupation" at UCLA's Fowler Museum, which centers art and activism tied to those buildings. The works propose housing strategies and expose forces—authoritarianism, corporate greed, systemic racism, and the co-option of modernism—that oppose equitable urban inhabitation.

Read at Artforum