Dionisiogonzlez

Dionosio González mixes both traditional photographic techniques and digital composition to produce a beautiful body of work that draws attention to and, metaphorically, makes visible the invisible inhabitants of Brazil’s shanty towns or favelas.
The favelas themselves are an ad hoc accumulation of shacks and houses built without official approval or planning that co-exist in intimate proximity to the great city of São Paolo. The inhabitants of these “illegal settlements” or “temporary autonomous zones,” as the radical social philosopher Hakim Bey would call them, number in the hundreds of thousands and include a mixture of workers, the unemployed, and gang members who manage to exist on the fringes of “official society.” Densely populated and often without electricity, plumbing, or sewage services that the city usually provides, they have recently become the subject of government attempts to “clean up its image,” to fight crime and poverty, and to provide better houses and jobs for those living in this constantly evolving network of ramshackle structures.
González approaches his radical Cartografia from a humanist standpoint by first recognizing that the government’s approach to urban removal did not take into account the wishes and desires of the inhabitants of the favelas themselves. For him, the Cingapura Project “failed, because among many other irregularities, it was a project that did not implement a plan for urban development and architecture, that did not address the involvement of the residents, and that abandoned the completed housing to deterioration, insular deterioration as the favelas grew around a vertical building cast among the shanties.” The state seeks to create “order and progress,” as Brazil’s motto insists, to reduce poverty and crime while turning the inhabitants into taxpaying citizens. This ordering inevitably requires cataloging, defining property lines, assigning names and numbers so as to incorporate the “zones” into defined, taxable districts. González writes, taking a page from Bey, “There was also intent to ambush: the intent to catalog all of the landless, lawless, submerged, and invisible into the system; in other words, to prescribe a certain type of morality for them because they were given the use of a predefined space.”
González would rather prefer to see an updating of the Cingapura Project, “a personal proposal of sustainable architecture,” that alters yet accepts “the preexisting shanties, but in a way that is sensitive to the habits and customs of the inhabitants, inhabitants who, on the other hand, have lived in these settlements for decades.” It is a radical, organic vision of community.
González sets about providing images for his revolutionary settlement that photographically depicts an ”intervention that mimics or attends to those ‘shantified’ resources, respecting their randomness and disparity, but making them more hygienic and structurally consolidated around their characteristic lack of distinction between public and private.” Thus González opposes the vertical structures of proposed government housing with a series of digitally manipulated panoramic images up to nine meters long that incorporate improvements in infrastructure. He inserts photographs on modern conveniences, cubicles and containers for living, more solid building materials, etc. His images are infinitely expandable horizontally as he reflects his desire to see a society in flux, albeit a more healthy and sustainable one.
His images represent an architecture of “an attentive ‘natural’ mobility for that unplanned growth of urban development.” Ultimately, his visual manifesto, if carried out, would “make it possible to generate a business fabric around marginal neighborhoods with minimal possibilities for sustainability. In turn, each neighborhood would be identified by the building or group of buildings that would give it an identity without harming its way of life, but would increase its social integration, and would, in a certain way, become its emblem, or even is aesthetic identifier.” His is an artistic, political photography of another order. For him, “this interior voyage . . . was done photographically with digital interference from an idea as simple as it is perfectly feasible.” It asks the question, “Why not indeed?”