Everyday life, quebrada, and dreams: resistence throught gaze in photo collective activism

Abstract

This paper proposes to reflect on enunciative possibilities of contemporary collectives in urban peripheries in Brazil, based on the observation of DiCampana Foto Coletivo’s experience. Created in São Paulo in 2016, the collective of photographers draws its action by the proposal of forming a collection of new images with potential to show the periphery without the typical lenses that frame it in pejorative stereotypes. Phenomenological categories of time and space are triggered as a methodological path in an attempt to understand the formation of dreams and memories by the photographic fabrication of an everyday life for the quebradas (neighborhoods in Brazilian urban peripheries). The final analytical approach is in the way of interpreting the construction of a biographical space for the periphery in the political action of creating an imagery of the “periphery looked at by the periphery”. Thus, the photographic and activist practice is understood as practice of the self, with individual and collective composition.

Keywords:
periphery; photo activism; practices of the self; everyday life; biographical space