|
 The Helvécia community in Brazil is essentially black. But the group from the district of Nova Viçosa, in the far south of the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia, received their name due to a farm in the region that belonged to a Swiss citizen.
Helvetia is what the Romans called part of Switzerland. Legend tells that the abolition of slavery in Brazil, which happened on May 13, 1888, took one year to get to the region, as it is so hidden from the rest of the world.
When the slaves discovered, they kicked the landlords out. What those first slaves did not know was that one day their descendants would export handicraft typical of the community... and to Switzerland.
The person who told us all that was designer Paula Dib, a 30-year-old granddaughter of Syrians, whose work is to find talents, cultures and traditions in the hinterland and in the outskirts of large cities.
Her office, Trans.forma Design, is in São Paulo, in the southeast of the country. But her work extends to Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Pernambuco and wherever she may be called. Paula is usually sought by companies seeking social responsibility labels and by enterprises interested in working with communities living in the areas surrounding their factories.
This is the case with Suzano, a pulp and paper holding, and the work with the Helvécia quilombola community. The term "quilombola" refers to a community originated from a slave settlement. The company has a paper factory in the region and got in contact with Trans.forma to diagnose the potentials of that community.
"We first studied the history of that group, their traditions, roots, the kind of work developed, the material used, where the work takes place, the feelings and stories that are part of the lives of these people," explained the designer. After that the designer sees what can be improved, what kind of material may be added and how to finish the product ideally.
When Dib arrived at Helvécia, two years ago, there was little production, the traditions were almost dormant due to the distance from large capitals (the settlement is almost one thousand kilometers away from state capital Salvador), and also due to the lack of opportunity.
Today there is an organized group, called Arte Helvécia, which works mainly with chips of wood and seeds, and which offers an entire line of products that range from fruit trays to lighting fixtures. Arte Helvécia currently exports to a decoration shop in Switzerland. According to Dib, there are interested clients in England and France.
Her work at the "Afro-Swiss" village in southern Bahia is coming to an end - explains the artist, who is now getting ready to diagnose an Indian tribe in Pernambuco, also in the Northeast, at the request of a German group, her newest client. Apart from companies, Paula is sought by NGOs, city halls and associations of friends, among others.
When she was in her last year in product design-college, Paula did not know exactly what she would do. But she knew what she didn't want to do. "I did not want to go and work for a large company, to develop new objects. Generating more consumer goods did not make sense. I wanted to make use of what already exists."
For inspiration, she packed a backpack and travelled around the Northeast of Brazil. In two months, she visited cities in Bahia, Alagoas and Rio Grande do Norte. The idea was to see the technical varieties, to see how artisans adapted the materials they had.
"It was a very empirical trip," she recalls. When she returned to São Paulo, she started working with urban residues in communities in the outskirts of the city. Little by little, her work started attracting attention. In 2003, she created Trans.forma Design.
At the end of last year, Dib received the Young Design Entrepreneur of the Year award, from the British Council. She first defeated her competitors in the Brazilian phase and then went on to defeat ten finalists from around the world.
If the trip to England crowned her work, it also generated fruit for the projects she is now developing. She made use of her trip to London to show the work and pictures of the Helvécia and São José communities, the latter being another community she works with in Bahia. From there came the contacts that began exports.
If her profession teaches her more and more about the Brazilian roots, with the Arabs she has not stayed much in contact. "Ever since my grandmother died, much of the tradition has been lost. She was the matriarch, it was she who spoke Arabic with her children and maintained the family united," she explained. "But, somehow, something is always left within us."
Learn more:
www.transformadesign.com.br
Paula Dib - pauladib@gmail.com
Anba - www.anba.com.br
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.