The 21st RPS grantee Javier Alvarez

03/18/2020

We are pleased to announce that we are awarding three Reminders Photography Stronghold Grants from the 2019 first call of submissions from the December deadline as a result of three equally strong proposals from artists Javier Alvarez, David Steinberg and Tomasz Laczny.

Javier Alvarez’s proposal “PREDIO”, David Steinberg’s proposal “Ouroboros” and Tomasz Laczny’s proposal “Erna Helena Anja“ are the 21st grantees selected by our six commissioned judges: Andrei Polikanov, Erik Vroons, Emmeline Yong, Monica Allende, Peggy Sue Amison and Staton Winter.

We are now scheduling their exhibitions in 2021, more news later!

©︎ Javier Alvarez / PREDIO / the 21st RPS grantee

PREDIO 2013-2020

During the 90’s, workers and proletarian social movements began to break into abandoned buildings in São Paulo, Brazil. Today, there are more than 40 selfclaimed organizations that ‘squats’ in hundreds of abandoned properties, allowing families, immigrants, students, or workers in a homeless situation to live in these places.

On the 13 floors of the ‘Marconi’ squat, about 400 people accommodate in offices adapted into rooms of 50 to 100 sq ft, under the uncertainty of a decent housing solution. Within it, the notion of home (a space of emotional

relationships and identity) becomes as unstable as the memories and expectations of a steady future. Marconi is a place where life stories have common experiences of nostalgia and loss.

Several life testimonies from the residents of Marconi invite us to ask ourselves, how deep we can see within our cities, how do we deal with housing problems?

Who organizes? Where is the real crime in all this? To whom is it visible, and who is not?. ‘PREDIO’ encourages dialogue about an urban crisis within a South American historical context, and what we leave behind in our identity and collective memory.

In 2013, I started visiting the ‘Marconi’ building. During this process, I was invited to be a part of the community, living for periods of six up to eight weeks, two or three times a year. The full body of work consists of a series of photographs, video footage, interviews, archival material, and collages from a personal travel journal.