ONE: João Arthur Emmerich da Silva

João Arthur Emmerich da Silva

A challenge I overcame: Shyness

A dream for my future: To live with art

A hope for the global community: 

That people look one another in the eyes

 João is a poet and artist who is studying cinema at Floripa Uni UFSC.  I met him one evening on my way home from yoga, when my curiosity drew me to stop and ask what he was handing out to motorists stopped at the traffic lights.  It turns out he was selling photocopies of his poems laid out as collages over his designs.  I bought the one below, about Napoleon (I'll update with a translation soon).  An interested point to note on the language front is that João uses the ‘tu’ form for you rather than ‘você’.  In our Portuguese classes we are not taught the ‘tu’ form, as it is not used throughout Brazil, although it is common here in Santa Catarina, hence João’s using it.  (Incidentally this has been one of the biggest differences for me as a foreigner between learning Portuguese and learning Spansih - in Spanish 'tu' being a more casual version of 'you' and 'usted' being more formal. Here in the form of Brazilian P Portuguese I've been learning with Step 1 it is very simple: 'você' and its verb conjugations is used for all singular 'you's, formal or informal.)

 

I was really impressed by this innovative and creative way to make some cash as a student – João tells me he can make around 30-35 reais  (a bit more than a tenner) over the course of an afternoon spent at the traffic lights.  It also seems to give him a good motivation to keep creating, as the afternoon we met to take his photo in the uni woods he was heading home to make a new design after folk had been saying they’d already bought the ones he has.  He’s also starting a blog where he’ll upload them, so once I have the address I’ll update this post so keep an eye out.

João, foi um prazer conhecer a você e a seu trabalho... me inspirou com sua maneira producir e distribuir seus dizenhos e poesia, vou pretender levar essa práctica para meus estudantes das oficinas de arte em elgum momento!

Obrigada para dividir aquelo tempo conmigo, e sorte em todos seus estudios, arte e poeseia. 

:-)