by Jota Mombaça
I live in North-east Brazil. In a city that I call Natown. The sun is constantly burning over our heads. The waterside is taken up by hotels, luxury buildings, kiosks, restaurants and clubs. I live where you spend vacation. A city from the tropics, built as a tourist paradise. This implies, most obviously, an organization of urban space focused on sanitized areas – where the tourists go – to the detriment of other parts of the city, that are increasingly more precarious. But there are also less obvious consequences. Throughout this text, I would like to reflect on how the tourist character of my town interferes with the cultural politics aimed at local artistic production, by regulating the types of projects that get, or don’t get public funding, as well as their visibility and conditions for continuity…
Read the rest of the article in the Transnational Dialogues Journal 2014 (pp. 26-29, PORTUGUESE, CHINESE and ENGLISH).
Jota Mombaça is a writer, performer and autonomous researcher. He is a participant in Transnational Dialogues 2014.
[Cover photo “Ao lumpenproletariado do i-mundo” by Camila Melo]