Jochen Becker
"Every ground floor is converted into a workshop."
On the cooperatives "Coopa-Roca" in Rio de Janeiro and "Nuevo Rumbo" in Buenos Aires *

Brand of "Coopa Rocca"

Aid Organisation`s magazine with women of the "Coopa Rocca"

fashion magazine with clothes of "Coopa Rocca"

Models with clothes of "Coopa Rocca"

Coopa-Roca - Cooperativa de Trabalho Artesanal e de Costura da Rocinha Ltda
Maria Teresa "Tetê" Romeiro Leal picks us up in her car to drive to South America's largest favela, Rocinha. The settlement grows up on a hill in the middle Rio de Janeiroe. Tetê lives in the noble southern quarter of Leblon.
While the service workers from the favela come in contact with intimate areas of Rio, working in private spaces and providing personal services, the residents of the privileged quarters are usually only familiar with the other side of the city from watching TV and reading the crime pages of the newspapers. They could book favela trips just like tourists. Despite the close proximity and mutual economic dependencies, the quarters are world's apart in terms of mental attitudes.

Tetê drives up the streets to a little car park with a municipal bus stop just around the corner, an emergency clinic providing basic medical care and goods being offered on the side of the street. This is the separating line between the official (villa) city and a labyrinth of informally built houses that can only be accessed on foot.

Tetê came to Rocinha for the first time around 25 years ago as a young sociology student and art teacher via the housekeeper of her parent's home - her father visited the favelas each Saturday as a doctor, her mother was a teacher and her sister founded an art school that emerged from community development work. Tetê started manufacturing quilt covers, shawls and scarves with a handful of women applying patchwork technique. They later developed more refined techniques to process fabric rests. Tetê leads us to the building of the "Coopa-Roca" along a steep route, which to me appears as a tangle of narrow paths, terraced and concreted by the local residents. Upon our arrival we are surprised to see so few sewing machines. It turns out that this is the cooperative's headquarters, where meetings are held, training takes place, accounting is done and business contracts are concluded.

The building offers a broad vista of the city. Tetê shows us the place in Rocinha where her future manufacturing building is to be located - if she can raise the required money. The "Coopa-Roca" connects with the new building the hope of leaving pure fashion prefabrication behind and entering into the field of design to then manufacture clothes entirely on their own. The fashion designer Carlos Miele supports them in this effort. The women have "dreamed" of what this could look like: It should have a lift and gaudy windows presenting the face of "Coopa-Roca" in bright colours, orange with red, which would form the basis for the blueprints of the renowned, befriended architect João Mauricio Pegorim. This would immediately create one of the largest workplaces in the district of Rocinha, which is otherwise characterized by small retail trade.

Furniture designers (Fernando Jaeger) and couturiers (Carlos Miele) have meanwhile become aware of "Coopa-Roca's" production. The design exhibition organized by Tetê titled "REtalhar" - the Portugese word combines patchwork and new design - served to "research the creative and economic potential of the techniques developed by the 'Coopa-Roca' craftswomen", as one could read in the self-presentation. "Especially the REtalhar shows have made it possible for the cooperative to pay four salaries (production manager, quality control manager, administration, general services manager)."

Since Rio's international fashion show in 1994, Tetê has been seeking contact to high culture and its money so that "Coopa-Roca" is not looked upon as being in a Third World folklore niche. Moreover, higher profits can be achieved with fashion products than with mass-produced articles. A patchwork-covered music CD box of the musician and Brazil's current Minister of Cultural Affairs, Gilberto Gil, has certainly contributed to the prestige of the cooperative. In additional to recognition and international invitations for the head, these orders also brought with them grants and project funds from NGOs, numerous press reports in fashion magazines, more appearances at cultural events, and not least reais.

Yet one can imagine the friction that occurs when, for example, Carlos Mile gives the seamstresses as a present a 500-euro bikini of his company "M. Officer" made from textiles they prefabricated. There are fashion photographs of tall models posing next to the seamstresses on the catwalk, although it must be pointed out that the women are extremely proud that their products are presented by them. On the other hand, the ethno-marketing of the apparent good deed, namely, the creation of jobs for the women and the pocketing of publicistic and cultural surplus value (1) in the process, is a point of conflict that had also influenced our preliminary discussions. For this reason, Hermann Hiller decided to utilize for his planned performance "Application Service" in Berlin everyday clothes such as kitchen overalls produced in piecework in Brandenburg and Asia, and have appliqués sewn on them just like the women of "Coopa-Roca" privately upgrade their mass-produced clothing with their own ornaments.

Hermann already knew the cooperative from an invitation by the project "Culture of the Favela" of the unconventional, former head of the Goethe Institute, Klaus Vetter, to develop an art project together with the "Coopa-Roca" over several weeks on site. Hermann provided the young seamstresses with sandwich dresses depicting their parents. The side of the frequently missing father optionally shows a second picture of the mother. The seamstresses shot the photos themselves, thus leading to the creation of seventeen unique mulher sanduiche (sandwich women), as the people working as advertising media in the city are called.

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