We purpose in this article go through the ins and outs of the field research we did, in the city of Rio de Janeiro, with children living in favela of Mangueira and members of her Samba School. Focus on theoretical developments in forged a collective research methodology in which, having the image as support and subject of a thorough investigation, we let ourselves be guided by routes that we did with some of these children in the assembly of dispositifs (drawings, stories and video) that made it possible to trace an imagined cartography of Mangueira. Apprentices of cartographers, we followed the children, our guides, in the maze of its favela, we let us be affected by the intensity of a color, the fragility of a word, the poetry of a story, compose with them a kaleidoscope, always precarious, about to swing in the direction of other images.
child; favela; cartography; violence; image