Vittorio Romieri
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Soft Infrastructure
"In referral to land, “rural” and “infrastructural” are often regarded as opposites. The first is commonly defined by the lack of substantial development, the latter is the epicentre of our modern industrial society. Liberal policies focus on larger extractive industries, such as mining, intensive agriculture and deforestation. While those destructive forces have pushed rural populations to give up their land, education and jobs accessibility have been a motivation to migrate to urban areas (rural flights). As a result, rural areas are facing an increasing demographic decline, characterised by an aging, less educated, and less wealthy population. Rural areas became hostile environments, vulnerable to extreme natural disasters, criminal administration, and contamination. On the other hand, the speed of urban economics does not follow the constant rhythm of rural migration. ‘Slower’ economic incentives results in poorer services like healthcare, education and culture, the so called “Soft Infrastructure”.
The documentary is a propaganda tool against hard infrastructure seen as a public-private physical network necessary for the functioning of a modern, destructive, industrial society. The essence of soft infrastructure is providing people with those physical and non-physical services that maintain the necessary standards of a country, being them systems, facilities or institutions.An interesting context witness of this tension is the region of São Paulo, Brazil. In a moment of political uncertainty, where the land ownership debate has never been so prominent, two within many actors, Movemento Sem Teto do Centro and Movemento Sem Tera, are fighting respectively for the right to housing and land. While the first one fights for the right to occupy empty buildings and repair them to provide less privileged classes with a roof and basic services (by constitution), the second one has been fighting for 40 years for the right of agricultural land for those farmers seeing Brazilian land being taken and exploited by big landowners (latifundios). Their everyday fight is against governments, police, criminal organisations, private investors, gentrification and real estate speculation, climate change, and environmental destruction."