A GAMBIOLOGIA DA SEVIROLOGIA THE ART AND SCIENCE OF MAKING DO: LÉU BRITTO

As the proverb goes: when life gives you lemons, make a lemonade.

- LEU BRITTO

That is precisely what I show in the photographic essay “A gambiologia da sevirologia” (The art and science of making do): how the population from the outskirts developed strategies to survive and adapt to the adversities in a setting of deprivation.

A quick fix for us – and I include myself, as I was born in a favela, Monte Azul, which was never synonymous with doing things poorly.

Quite the opposite: it is doing what you can to adapt and reach a goal. Overcoming the barriers imposed by the absence of public power has given the impoverished populace the capacity to make do with what they have at hand, or at their feet, to achieve better structural conditions, without expecting anything from governmental agencies.

If there is no swimming pool, the people will create one. If there is no bike lane, we ride our bikes where we can. When the truck with construction materials cannot get to a shack at the center of the favela, the neighbor will load it into the trunk of his car and help carry the cinder blocks. There are countless examples from the daily life in the outskirts to which naturalist Charles Darwin’s sentence applies:

“It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the smartest, but rather the most susceptible to change.” In this aspect, we are experts!

In her book Child of the Dark: The Diary of Maria de Jesus – to date, a best seller in countless countries –black and semiliterate writer Maria Carolina de Jesus wrote: