Casa do Povo Casa do Povo
Casa do Povo is a cultural centre that revisits and reinvents notions of culture, community and memory. It was founded and is still run by the progressive Jewish community in São Paulo, Brazil. Opened in 1953, it established itself as a living monument to the memory of the millions of Jews murdered during the Second World War. Casa do Povo’s neighbourhood, Bom Retiro has historically received different waves of immigrant groups, including Greeks, Koreans, and Bolivians, among others – and they are all active and welcome participants in the house’s activities. In Casa do Povo, memory serves as a basis for the imagination and construction of a better future based on tolerance, diversity, human rights, and redistribution.
Literally “The People’s House”, Casa do Povo has flexible hours and no fixed events schedule, adapting to the needs of each project in order to attend to neighbourhood associations as well as unconventional artistic proposals. Its interdisciplinary, process-based programming and socially-engaged activities see art as a critical tool in an ongoing process of social transformation. In this endeavour, the audience is not a target, but rather an active participant who, in addition to visiting, can also propose activities, making the space a locale for encounters, development and experimentation: a living monument, a place where to remember is to act.
