Architect / Educator / Author
Buenos Aires, Argentina + Muncie, Indiana, U.S.
Submission: "9 People, 9 Scenarios"
In 2001, Argentina was an especially precarious place. When the country's economy collapsed in late December, banks in the financial district of Buenos Aires came under siege as panicked customers lost life savings. Steel walls quickly erected then to fortify glass lobbies now bear scars from customers' pounding and scratching as their life savings disappeared. It was the worst financial crisis in the nation's history. Argentina's unemployment rate stood at close to 25 percent. Nearly 60 percent of the nation's 36 million people were poor, and 10 million lived in extreme poverty, meaning they went hungry in a place that once considered itself the world's grainery.
A January 2002 currency devaluation made certain products-paper and copper among them-too expensive to import. The combination of millions more people without jobs living in extreme poverty and a sudden increase in the value of some common waste materials greatly increased the number of urban scavengers.
I saw Buenos Aires, 2003 and 2004, at night. The city, then, belongs to the cartoneros--the men, women, and children who are the city's garbage collectors or cardboard-collecting youth or cardboard men (depending on the translation)--who rip open bags of garbage outside front doors, hands fast through rubbish, hungry for cardboard, steel, and glass. Cautious too, not wanting to get cut or caught by overzealous police. In 2003, 10,000 cardboard collectors worked in the capital area of Buenos Aires and 30,000-40,000 in the greater metropolitan area. These human ghosts carry away the pizza box I set out, the wine and beer bottles from which we drank, the debris of a high consumer.
Ana de Brea is a life-long resident of Buenos Aires. In summer 2005 she photographed the lives and living conditions of nine of the unseen people of her city. These are people she had not seen herself, they hide so effectively. These "9 Scenarios" are presented and discussed by de Brea in Spanish, and summarized in English.
TODOS SOMOS CARTONEROS reads a banner outside the Retiro train station in Buenos Aires. "We Are All Cartoneros."
Ana de Brea is a professor, practitioner, and critical observer of architecture and design. She taught at several universities in Argentina and was among the founders of Paralelo 35 in Buenos Aires and Grupo R in Rosario. Her published works include Señores arquitectos . . . : diáloges con Mario Roberto Alvarez y Clorindo Testa (with Tomás Dagnino, 1999) and 10x50: terreno de arquitectura (2000). She joined the Department of Architecture at Ball State University in 2002, where she teaches studio, design communication, research methods, and design theory classes. Her most recent built work was completed in 2005; it is a holiday house in Pinamar, Argentina for her brother’s family.
"30,000-40,000 night scavengers in Buenos Aires"
Mary Milliken, “Buenos Aires Accommodates Army of Garbage Pickers,” FreeRepublic.com, March 26, 2003, HYPERLINK "http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/876720/posts" (accessed February 1, 2006).