{"id":410,"date":"2015-12-05T05:08:32","date_gmt":"2015-12-05T08:08:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lanchonete.org\/2015\/12\/2015-8-lanchonete-org-on-embedded-residency-iii-cultural-centers-in-occupations\/"},"modified":"2021-04-27T15:52:25","modified_gmt":"2021-04-27T18:52:25","slug":"2015-8-lanchonete-org-on-embedded-residency-iii-cultural-centers-in-occupations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lanchonete.org\/en\/2015\/12\/2015-8-lanchonete-org-on-embedded-residency-iii-cultural-centers-in-occupations\/","title":{"rendered":"Residency Unlimited blog: Cultural Centers in Occupations (3 of 3)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lanchonete.org<\/a>\u00a0is an artist-led progressive cultural platform focused on how people live and work in, share and survive the contemporary city with the Center of S\u00e3o Paulo as our outlook. It gets its name from the ubiquitous lunch counters\u2014convivial, fluorescent-lit, open-walled, laborious, points of commerce\u2014that populate almost every street corner. One of its members, Todd Lanier Lester blogged regularly for\u00a0Residency Unlimited<\/a>\u00a0DIALOGUES over the course of the five-year project.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

View video interviews here.<\/a><\/p>\n

by Todd Lanier Lester<\/p>\n

In the third part of the series on \u2018Embedded Residency\u2019 (see part one<\/a> and two<\/a>), I will discuss the role of a cultural center inside a housing occupation. To do this, I draw from experiences of Lanchonete.org working with the S\u00e3o Jo\u00e3o Occupation since 2011, sharing what we\u2019ve learned in the process of hosting artist residents therein and, importantly, the function of the cultural center to a broader housing movement.<\/p>\n

I first got to know the Cultural Center at S\u00e3o Jo\u00e3o in 2011 when the artists Paula Z. Segal and SWOON came to S\u00e3o Paulo to participate in the De Dentro \/ De Fora<\/em> exhibition at MASP, and one of the side projects they made was a set of wheat paste collages (featured image) on the first floor of Hotel Columbia Palace (a.k.a. Occupation S\u00e3o Jo\u00e3o). At that time, the 1st<\/sup> floor space was already evolving into the Cultural Center at S\u00e3o Jo\u00e3o, and the space was built out around those two collages (you could say) under the oversight of Nazar\u00e9 Brasil, who heads up the cultural program of Occupation S\u00e3o Jo\u00e3o along with Mildo Ferreira, Daniel Santiago and many other moradores<\/em>. When the collages were first installed, it was an early moment after the community there had recently occupied the building.<\/p>\n

Since our introduction in 2011, Lanchonete.org has collaborated with Cultural Center at S\u00e3o Jo\u00e3o in a variety of ways, including a book drive to help expand their library (Piv\u00f4, October 2012); public programming during the 2013 Architecture Biennial<\/a>; an artist engagement and residency program that has hosted Jakub Szcz\u0119sny (Poland) and Pepe Dayaw (Philippines\/Germany); designing and implementing a community garden; and a project cycle during which we co-produced one of their monthly Caf\u00e9 Imaginario events<\/a> on the theme of \u2018home\u2019 (March 2014), made\u00a0a strategic introduction to the human rights organization, WITNESS<\/a>\u00a0(for usage of its forced eviction campaign tools), and produced\/installed an exhibition of their family portraits by local photographer, Leandro Viana<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In a recent workshop at the Cultural Center, occupation leader, Antonia Nascimento explained why the Cultural Center is so important within an occupation:<\/p>\n