my time capsule / Olívia Piemonte Ribeiro

Brazilian street marketsThe word “feira” (“fair” in English), dates back to Latin feria,ae, what means a “feast day”.

The street market in Brazil is a vibrant place, with intense social and cultural exchanges. It is full of colors and scents, to be lived and enjoyed. This kind of trade has existed in the country since our time as a colony, and as time went by it became a true symbol of the Brazilian Popular Culture.

The experience of going to a street market in Brazil is almost like watching a play, filled with complex and intriguing characters: the customers interaction and the sellers’ art of negotiating, who are natural communicators that break the barriers of social hierarchies in an unique and effortless way. Each person has his or her own story and a completely different backgrounds, but it is at the street market that they meet and interact in the center of a perfectly organized disorder, where everything happens and everybody socializes.

Therefore, I would like to put the Brazilian street market in a time capsule. It summarizes in a formidable way a precious part of the Brazilian Popular Culture: its bright and bold colors as well as its fruits, vegetables and flowers abundance completed with the genuine interaction of people from different social classes; all of that in an environment that reveals the creative strategies of popular selling, logistics and trading. It is a place that still keeps the effervescent and unpretentious spirit of a real market, which it is gradually disappearing as cities become increasingly cosmopolitan.