Viva Cazuza!

A few days before I left for England, I was walking down a street in the neighbourhood of Laranjeiras. There was a large overpass/flyover just off to the right and on the side there was some pretty nice, colourful graffiti.

What is it with eyes on pyramids? I guess the illuminati made it to Rio.

I rather like this chubby fellow, the work of Mateu Velasco.

If I were being hyper-critical I would suggest that the placement of the apostrophe is’nt quite right…

OK, so that was nice – some colourful graffiti that seemed photo-worthy. Then I looked to my left and saw this:

Blank. Untouched. Not one image, stencil, poster or scrawl. This is pretty much unheard of in Rio.

What a puzzling sight! I like Laranjeiras, it’s a really nice neighbourhood, but it is very unusual to see such a long wall without a single mark on it. And clearly this area is popular with graffiti artists. So why had they so pointedly left this wall alone?

We found the answer a little further along:

Graffiti Artists: Donate the value of a can of spray paint in milk for a child with AIDS.

We thus discovered that we were outside a home for children who have HIV and AIDS. Sociedade Viva Cazuza (SVC) is an NGO that was setup in 1990 in memory of the legendary rock singer-songwriter Cazuza, who died of AIDS that year at the age of just 32. As stated on their website, the society’s aim is to:

Provide assistance to needy children infected with the Aids virus, assist adult patients under Rio’s municipal care system, disseminate scientific information about HIV/Aids, as well as clearing issues to health professionals or layman. 

Cazuza in his prime – a good looking guy. There are some quite shocking photos of him that were taken in the last year of his life, but I expect he would rather be remembered like this.

Cazuza was a big deal during his lifetime and it is said that he did a lot for the public perception of HIV and AIDS when he admitted he had the virus in 1989. [The organisation closed its activities in 2020, so links, etc are no longer function] There’s a really lovely video (with subtitles) on SVC’s website which explains the roots of the charity and what they’re doing today. It’s a shame that the actual video is rather small (you may have to squint a bit when reading the subtitles) but it’s really worth watching – check it out. If you’re interested in making a donation, I noticed that people living in Brasil can buy t-shirts and other merchandise from the website’s Shop page. I’ve also written to ask if there is a way for people from other countries to donate – I’ll let you know if they get back to me.

In these days when it seems that almost nothing is off-limits, it’s a bit of a relief to see that not one idiot has touched that wall. I wonder if any of the grafiteiros have donated the cost of a can of paint – I’d like to think so.