So, not long ago I came to live in the city of Rio de Janeiro, in this very very weird country of football, carnival, boobies, bums, thieves and samba – everything always ends in a samba, we say.
This city, where the Royal Family – the King of Portugal and all his super duper gang – lived in the colonial days; Rio that once was the capital of the Republic, and later became infested with violence, civil war, abandonment, finally loosing its cultural and economical hot spot to São Paulo, and its status as capital to Brasília. This is, obviously, resuming a few hundred years of history into less than a paragraph, but the point here is to show that the city once “had it all” – in here was build the first university of Fine Arts of Brasil, the first cultural centers: theaters, libraries – and although the fall was big, the city is still blessed with its own magnificence, and still radiates an aura that you cannot find anywhere else in the world but here.
Partially because of its natural beauty – its geography with the hills and greens and blues and sea – partially because of its people, a mix from every corner of the country, descendants of all of those who conquered us and were conquered by us, bringing and mixing cultures from all around the globe; partially from all the early cultural effervescence; but mainly from our resilience, this aura still remains. The resilience of the people that survive every day the social denial, the economical difficulties, the political unscrupulous lies and robberies, the lack of education, of attention, of funding, of interest, of common sense, of the most fundamental respect – the respect for life! We continue to push forward even than.
As a people, we are brave! And we transform this bravery into action – not the action of fighting for our right unfortunately, but into creation. We are creative people, one of the most creative, I dare to say, in the world. We use and abuse and distort and stretch the most fundamental power of the human being – the power of creation – into shaping new possibilities, new realities, new ways of expressing a full spectrum of emotions. And nowhere else in Brasil but in Rio de Janeiro this explosion of creativity is so rich and diverse, not even in São Paulo – because in here they have caos. They have history, and very deep scars. They have the sea to wash all away and the hills to project everything up into the infinite sky. And they have people that smile and dance the samba, even though the light in the end of the tunnel is still as far as yesterday, as last week, last year.
And I am now submerse in this place, still not breathing. I’m letting the water into the lungs, cause I wanna sink here.
I still don’t know where I am inside all this cultural mess, but I am happy just wandering around right now. I don’t think I need to determine what or who I am in here yet. Things will certainly change as I’ll keep on walking…