At the crossroads, three women with their histories and ancestries seek to overcome the challenge with a necessary padê: the construction of a narrative that attempts to purge from the epistemic rubble certain questions born from observing how people reacted to the fact that a "chic favela dweller" received an international award. The case (and tale) in question is the award in the "Houses" category of ArchDaily's international Building of the Year 2023, which was granted to "Kdu's Shack"—a house that expresses planning, design, exposed concrete, exposed brick, beauty, and poetry, but... From its inception, it has been a house "out of place"—and this caused discomfort. In this text, we address these (dis)comforts and materialities; the disputes over narratives; what is "out of place" and who does the classifying; territory; design; aesthetics; gingas; the delegitimization of self-discourse, and other intersections.
The framework takes the form of questions raised from what we have absorbed, digested, and now return, reorganized, to the world. Some might say we are writing an essay utilizing the poetics of Derridean deconstruction or Deleuzian rhizomatics, but we prefer the idea of weaving a narrative informed by the "pedagogy of the crossroads" (Rufino, 2019). At the center of this crossroads sits an architecture prize, surrounded by a buzz that transcends the field. Viewed as "newsworthy" within the narrative battles of the attention economy, it follows the standard formula of "character and location"—fueling chatter about this public figure who (still) lives in the favela, and his house. Avoiding this trap, and claiming the "right to opacity" for someone who has already been overexposed, we invoke Glissant and leave the "chic favela dweller" in his award-winning house, getting on with his life.
To begin, we start with the territory: a favela. Within the complex processes of (re)constructing regimes of representation, the favela is burdened by an imaginary that frames it as a "dangerous territory," a "violent place of violence," a "site of moral degradation and marginality," a "territory of poverty." The effects of this socio-discursive territorialization are material and real. In other words, operations in the favela are based on the assumption that violence is spatialized there (Machado da Silva, 2008).
