Maurício Hora
Once upon a time, favela was the name of a plant. Cnidoscolus quercifolius, rough and thorny, native to the dry hills of Bahia.
The word attached itself to low-income communities in the late 1890s, when veterans of the Canudos War and freed slaves built a camp on a hillside in Rio and named it after the plant that covered the hills they had just arrived from.
The person who taught me this was my dear friend Maurício Hora. He was born on that hill, Morro da Providência, which was once called Morro da Favela and had to find a new name for itself after the old one spread to every other similar community in Brazil.
Maurício is a photographer and a community leader. He started out delivering newspapers, got curious about the newsroom cameras, and became one of the first people to photograph a favela from the inside, with all of it at once: the traffic, the friendships, the beauty, the violence, the ordinary afternoons. He was the first person from Providência to visit Canudos, and he made a photo essay about the trip. With the French artist JR he founded Casa Amarela, the only cultural center in Providência, which has received Madonna and Pharrell Williams and a long line of politicians and entrepreneurs. Meanwhile parts of Providência can only be reached by climbing hundreds of steps. Maurício spends a lot of his time pressing the government or organizing his peers to build basic infrastructure, like massive water tanks, so people don’t have to carry buckets up those steps on their backs anymore. His life is told in the graphic novel Picture a Favela, by André Diniz.
I met him because of my Visible Memories project. Maurício was the reason why my work at the historical Pedra do Sal lasted at all. He is one of the founders of Quilombo da Pedra do Sal, and he invited me to be part of his collective studio, where I had my painting corner for two years, a space called Imaginary Zone. I participated in his meetings with public officials, patrons, activist groups, and community gatherings. I created oil and spray painting works based on his photographs as an act of appreciation for how much I learned from him.
The pictures the paintings were made from.
In 2020, I showed him how GANs worked and told him why I believed it was going to disrupt the lives of professional photographers. He understood immediately what it meant. Then he gave me a terabyte of his work to train a model as an experiment. My plan was to write an article on technology and inequality, but my trials did not work so well. To train a good StyleGAN2 image back then, it was important to have thousands of images with very similar compositions, and Maurício’s photos were too diverse for that. I did write a first draft that worked mostly as a preliminary version to my article Copyright Storm, which used Instagram photos from storm chasing photographers.
A walk through the latent space of the model trained on Maurício’s archive. Thirty seconds, no sound.
In 2023 I went back to his photographs with open source generative models, Stable Diffusion with ControlNet, and pushed them through style after style. The same building on the left, the same hill falling away to the right, and then Kandinsky, then watercolor, then cut paper, then Mestre Vitalino style, then something with Saturn in the sky. I wanted to make a book about the history and the future of favelas with him. Another project that I did not finish.
We have been friends for over fifteen years and I would like the next fifteen to be busier. Once Mars College is properly structured, it’s my dream to bring Maurício and people from Providência to the desert for training, and send Martians to Casa Amarela.
Maurício Hora
The unfinished 2020 article, his own photographs, the cultural center he founded with JR, and the project on this site that brought us together.
The 2020 draft, as a PDF ⇢ His photographs on Flickr ⇢ Maurício Hora Fotografia ⇢ Casa Amarela, with JR ⇢ JR ⇢ Visible Memories ⇢