LA LIXEIRA - the invisibles' dignity

“Maputo, the capital city of Mozabimque, has one or may be two million inhabitants. A few neighborhoods have houses or more precisely brick shacks, some paved roads, mostly a wide range of huts without basic sanitation services, where day by day men, women and children scrape food together in slow and quiet despair-the only chance they have to survive. In Maputo, not exactly in the city centre or even on the outskirts, there is an area called the dump district, La Lixeira. The dump is a metaphysical scenario, metaphor of our world, so aseptically modern, a kind of reversed utopia of our fate. About 700 families dig their way through these new mines of modernism. La lixeira is the place where the tangible and the intangible waste, the human waste, combine together in a visual short circuit. Man himself is reduced to being rubbish. It is a paradigm of the economical, social and existential topographies of our Earth. A sort of peaceful camouflage of despair, a cruel inhumane condition lived by its protagonists with the levity, fatality and irony which are the features of these almost unworldly people. This is Roberto Galante’s honest and true report. Roberto is the creator and manager of educational workshops on photography, graphics and writing called ““A Mundzuku Ka Hina”“, a real school for the young people clinging onto survival in Maputo’s dump. ““A Mundzuku Ka Hina”” is a vocational training school which aims to aid in providing employment for the orphans and street children living there. Roberto dedicated the last ten years of his life to the children living on the landfill and to their human and professional development. He put forward a challenging project to kids who have been dealt a difficult hand in life, and otherwise wouldn’t be afforded the opportunity to work or fulfil their potential. The principle inspiring Roberto’s actions was to give skills and competences back to the invisible, the voiceless people , in order to let them express their own vision of the world and become the architects of the narration themselves. After Roberto’s death, in July 2019, the organisation has continued to pursue the path that he had carved. The workshop is now carried out by the oldest and most trained students of the school who tutor the youngest, nurturing the flame of their teacher’s passion for education and training.

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