Developed within the scope of Escola da Cidade’s Technical Council, the Contracondutas project seeks—with various political-pedagogical actions—to respond to part of the questions brought into the open by formal inspection and situations registered on the spot related to slavery at a large construction site in Guarulhos—Terminal 3 of the International Airport.
That being so, the Ministério Público do Trabalho [Public Ministry of Labor] of Guarulhos, allocated part of the monies of the Term of Adjustment of Conduct (TAC), imposed on a large construction company, to the Escola da Cidade Association, for the elaboration of a project that would problematize and impact the public debate on major infrastructure projects, migration and slave-like work in contemporaneity.
The Contracondutas project was conceived by an interdisciplinary team of professionals, with a one-year duration (May 2016 to May 2017), and operates as a device that intersects several of Escola da Cidade’s didactic-pedagogical activities—such as the Culture and Contemporary Reality Seminar, the program of Practical Training in Scientific and Experimental Research, the regular Means of Expression discipline that deals with the relations between Art and Architecture, and the Vertical Studio—, while also incorporating and stimulating academic, journalistic and artistic inquiries, launching public debate on the theme, as well as its repercussions on the city, social relations, territorial occupation, migratory flows, public policies and cultural productions. Among such actions, interventions of public interest were envisaged as an effective way to involve other agents in the debates and proposals for action.
A POLITICAL-PEDAGOGICAL CONSTRUCTION
Responsible for formulating collective constructions and fostering dialogue among heterogeneous publics, Contracondutas is a political-pedagogical project that articulates a network of over 250 individuals, and 15 socio-cultural and educational organizations, both actively participating in and amplifying the public debate on slave labor in contemporaneity and its specificities in civil construction. Multiple layers of studies, journalistic investigations, photographic essays, exhibitions, lectures, workshops, publications, and public interventions alternate among pedagogical activities and public programs in the cities of Guarulhos and São Paulo.
In addressing questions about socio-economic structures and systems that impact the processes in civil construction and means of production in the globalized world, the research-diagram seeks to open avenues for continuity, provoking the realignment of positions, and calling into question an array of conducts-counter-conducts: individual and collective, professional and academic, institutional and activist, cartographic and imagetic, in this way interweaving the practices of the law and architecture.