During the ’90s, workers and proletarian social movements began to break into abandoned buildings in São Paulo, Brazil. Today, there are more than 40 self-claimed 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.