After 4 years of University I was questioning the role of the architect and its relevance, I was sure that it was a dead occupation.

Then I came to Brazil. Main reason: to see how people without urban planners, engineers’ structures and architects' design, deals with cities. And, differently from what western thoughts would suggest, cities works anyway.

After the first months of adapting and learning the language I started perceiving the real nature of the problems of a continuously colonized country. I started seeing the social injustices going on every day and I started realize how much Europe, in some way very different, could learn from those places.

What impressed me the most was the different meaning we give to common words, the meaning of the words is not something imposed, universal, it is dynamic, it changes. It changes accordingly to the culture, the society, the problems, the politics and the politicians. If words change so much, the rest of the elements composing our everyday life can just change as much. This shift in mean¬ings was essential to me, and it is something very often unseen by the people that should deal with it, that should deal with differences and people. Architects as one of them.

So what initially seemed to me ugly, unbelievably messy and chaotic, drastically changed perspective. I saw' beauty where I was not trained to see it, I saw humanity in places you do not expect to find.

Far from being romantic, I just abandoned my western European interpretative filters to observe before judging, and to focus back the lenses on people.

What we usually call minorities arc, most of the time, the weak majorities. I want to focus on these majorities.