Are We All One?
Street Art Break in VR
Indigenous people from five continents were celebrated in the World’s Largest Street Art Mural, near the port area in Rio, when Brazil hosted the Olympics in 2016.
“Ethnicities” is the work of Eduardo Kobra, who began tagging at the age of eleven in Sao Paulo and developed a distinctive style that he has showcased all over the world. He saw this mural as a celebration of cultural identity and also a way to bring us altogether as one.
We are diverse and we are one.
Many people hold these two views at once — there are surface as well as deep ways we are different, and also surface and deep ways we have much in common. This messy and complicated reality makes it easy to pick out examples of anything, because that’s kind of the point.
Not everyone thinks we are all one. Some people think that the Huli people, for example, with their body decorations and head dresses are not quite the same as, well, people who don’t make themselves look that way.
Showing an aspect of our differences on a gigantic mural is a way to celebrate indigenous people. It produces visual images in the brain that are charged for extra weight.
It does not show that we are all one. It may even reinforce the idea that we are not all one among people already predisposed to view humanity through a filter of Being-Like-Me. Varying reactions is not a reason to pull back on diversity. It is a reason to express diversity with awareness and appreciation of the ways it can be perceived.
Because The Olympics is a global event, a relatively large number of 360 degree images were not only recorded but uploaded to the Street View database. They can be still be downloaded and used in Virtual Reality to recreate the feeling of being present at the mural, to an extent.
I recently hosted an event in AltspaceVR which used some of those uploaded images from 2016 to bring back the mural.
Street Art Break with Tom is a weekly event. I chose Rio, and Kobra’s work there, because during the event, in January, 2023, Bolsonaro supporters were still demonstrating and attacking in the nation’s capital, Brasilia, about a ten hour drive from Rio.
Brazil is deeply divided as to whether or not we are all one, as are many countries. Brazil’s actions carry additional significance because of the crucial role of the Amazon rain forest, within its national borders, in regulating the composition of the air we all breathe.
About half the country supports Bolsonaro, who explicitly states that we are not all one in at least two ways:
- we are not all one people — some who are not like us can be displaced from their land
- we are not all one family of nations — Brazil can do what it deems necessary within its borders regardless of its impact on other nations
The people who attended the VR Street Art event in Rio loved the murals. Some people were aware of the on-going violence in Brazil and its implications for indigenous people and the rest of us. Most were not.
Celebrative street art doesn’t change minds and it is not meant to. I see it more as reinforcement for people who are predisposed to feel good about who or what is being celebrated.
I am not very knowledgeable about indigenous people. I’m not even sure how much longer the term, ‘indigenous people’ will be useful, if it still is.
Street Art cannot carry the burden of transforming neighborhoods or individual minds all by itself. Celebrating people who exist outside the main nation state system that dominates the planet has to be one aspect of a broader campaign or it is a superficial celebration.
That sounds obvious, but in some cities, street art projects are the splashy public face of neighborhood beautification with nothing substantive beneath the new nicer look.
Same with a People. I did enough research to show that even though there are people continuing some of the traditions today, the Tapajos People of Brazil are Extinct.
There are fragments of their writing system we cannot read. The Tapajos River is named after them. A Tapajos woman is the center of the mural.
She may be the last of the Tapajos but I hope I am wrong.
Tom’s work has not appeared in The New York Times, New Yorker Magazine, The New Republic, the New England Journal of Medicine, or anything New at all.
He only publishes in obscure journals and, once upon a time, PBS Program Guides. Otherwise he just gives his work a URL and sends it packing on the web at places like Medium and Sub-Stack, where he enjoys a modest following.
