What does it mean to play with one’s own reality? In 1997, a group of adolescents began building a miniature scale model of their city, Rio de Janeiro, using materials collected from their hillside informal settlement, or favela. Within this mock-up known as Morrinho they created a role-playing game by manipulating and speaking through one-inch tall plastic avatars. Gameplay is animated not by an escapist or utopian impulse but rather by the conviction to depict reality. In recent years artists, tourists, and state institutions have valorized Morrinho as expressive culture, and its creators have traveled internationally as artists, replicating the model in other cities. Based on 18 months of fieldwork as both an avatar in Morrinho and human researcher in Rio de Janeiro, this talk recounts the peculiar history of the Morrinho project as a way of raising questions about the uses of cultural objects and the nature of imagination. In an era of immersive digital worlds, this lo-fi technology prompts us to consider the notion that humans have always been virtual beings.
The speaker is a writer-in-residence at the Library’s Wertheim Study, Alessandro Angelini, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. His dissertation is tentatively titled, “Model Favela: Youth and Second Nature in Rio de Janeiro.”
New York City, NY; NYC