Faculty member travels abroad to spark creativity
Amber Davis
-Asst. Art & Life Editor-
Summer vacation is a time to kick off the shoes and waste several days until fall. But that was not the case for Michael Swoboda, graphic communications professor at STLCC-Meramec. Swoboda packed his bags and flew to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to explore potential projects with his colleague, Fernando Carvalho.
“Our idea was for me to go there – since Fernando lives and teaches at the local University in Rio and to identify some little or large possible projects. So we can use our design expertise to help them out,” Swoboda said.
Spontaneous ideas and reconnecting with an old friend is how this plan all started to go to Rio.
“[Carvalho and I met at] University of Notre Dame and we loved collaborating ideas. He is more of a product designer or an industrial designer and I’m more of a graphic designer. So, we can blend our skills together. Earlier this summer I knew I was going to have a couple of weeks between the summer semester and fall semester. So I gave him a call over Skype, and we just reconnected. It was just an idea that came out of thin air,” Swoboda said.
Rio is the second largest city in Brazil and is home to some low-class communities, which are divided by a wall from the wealthy, in the city. These low class communities are better known as Favelas, where Swoboda spent most of his time in Rio.
“It was really an eye opening experience. Rio is just a humongous city; it has about 19 million people living there, just seeing that… there is just nothing like it,” Swoboda said. “Rio is just this city of great diversion income levels. It houses some of the poorest people and places in the world and some of the richest places in the world.”
Swoboda documented his journey with several pictures showing how the Favelas lifestyle is. Swoboda captured several low class houses, cramped together clinging on the side of a steep cliff overlooking the Atlantic. Other photos Swoboda documented showed how kids playing on a community center’s roof top.
“The top floor of their community center lets these kids use it as a playground, so to speak. Which in the photo, you can see it just has a small soccer court. An idea we thought was to project shows and films on a wall on top of this building of this community center space there,” Swoboda said.
Sightseeing and coming up with potential projects is not the only thing Swoboda had on his to do list. Carvalho, Swoboda’s colleague, is a graphic design professor at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-RIO). He let Swoboda speak in one of his classes to show his students what graphic design is like in the United States and other techniques that they might not know about.
“I gave a lecture at a university and then I worked within a design class one day with [Carvalho] and his colleague. I was lending my advice about graphic design. And some of the students were interested in what graphic design was like in the United States,” Swoboda said.
Swoboda said the students were overjoyed by what he had to say.
“The lecture I gave was very interactive and some of the students came up energetically as I demonstrated a technique or a style. It was a class size of 35 students and they all almost spoke English pretty well – that helped, because Portuguese in itself is a very difficult language,” Swoboda said.
Having an outsider from Rio lecture in a classroom, Swoboda said he believed it was good for the students. Being a guest speaker allowed Swoboda to teach different styles and ideas.
“it’s just like here, where it’s nice to have visiting scholars or people from the same field come and give their opinions, ideas and their experiences. It helps the students grow in a more dynamic way,” Swoboda said.
Swoboda and Fernando are still collaborating ideas about potential projects they would like to conduct in Rio. But for now, Swoboda’s journey was an experience he would never forget.
“To be able to travel [to Rio] is just fulfilling (especially for a designer who is looking to fortify their mind and heart with interesting experiences and visual ideas),” he said. “It was just really invigorating; [Rio is] a big burly complicated city. It has great coastal with mountains. Also, it has very grimy urban situations. It was cool. I was glad I did it.”
