Imagine walking down a busy, metropolitan street and suddenly looking up to see a huge, hyper dimensional photograph of a person staring down at you. Street artist Raquel Brust has been introducing this kind of experience in So Paulo, Brazil since 2008 with Projeto Giganto, which she describes as “a hyper dimensional photography intervention project that uses the urban scene and the city's architecture as a platform for photographic exhibition.”
Brust takes black-and-white photographs of Brazilian residents, prints them in huge dimensions, and glues them to public spaces all over the city. The subjects of her photos are usually elderly people who live in the rural countryside of Brazil, people who will probably never be able to travel to the city that their portraits are exhibited in because of factors like health, age, distance, or cost. The project is a lesson in contrasts–contrasts between old and young, urban and rural life, modernization and tradition, and so on.
The artist was inspired to create Giganto because of her own experience of feeling overwhelmed and anonymous upon moving to the sprawling metropolis of So Paulo. “I wanted to shut my ears and myself off from the outside world,” she says, “I couldn't stand the noise, the chaos–everything going on all at once.” With Giganto, she says she seeks to “create an odd dialog with the environment” and to generate “a reflection about the life in the city and its scary structures.”
Projeto Giganto Website
via [Design Lust, German-American Abroad]
