A Tram for Santa Teresa!

"Um Bonde para Santa Teresa" mural Andréa Aires Imbiriba is a carioca mosaic and mural artist. For thirteen years she lived in the Amazon, in Santarém, Pará. During that time she taught Tourism and Environment classes and produced shows and events for visiting tourists. In 2005 she decided to change her life radically, devoting herself to the art of mosaic and teaching the technique in workshops at the city's public schools. In 2011 she returned to Rio de Janeiro and, still readjusting to urban life, she noticed how much the city had changed, losing much of its poetry. In the following years she moved to Petrópolis and then to Saquarema, in both cases seeking the calm of small towns and inspiration for her work. In 2016 she came back to Rio and decided to settle, but still felt the need to find a place with the spirit of small inland towns. Out of that restlessness and ambivalence of the senses, drawing on memories of her childhood and youth, came the idea of paying tribute to the little tram and to the neighbourhood of Santa Teresa. Having already taken part in other collective projects in other Brazilian cities and abroad, she considered carrying out her own mural project: a collective urban mosaic intervention titled "Um Bonde para Santa Teresa", in which various artists could take part by sending a mosaic piece with their own version of the traditional tram. The works would be mounted on a wall on one of the neighbourhood's streets, making up one large mural. In 2017 the project took shape and grew — with strong take-up from Brazilian artists from several states and even from other countries, such as Argentina, Germany, Chile, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, England and Ireland — gaining a blank 20-metre stretch of wall, given by a couple of local residents who supported the initiative. In July of that year, the artist moved to the neighbourhood of Santa Teresa. From idea to wall was a big leap. Even without sponsorship, the event had the support of artists and residents of the neighbourhood. Under the artist's curatorship, the project reached completion with 179 registered artists taking part and 238 mosaics installed at two points in Santa Teresa. Beyond paying tribute to the tram, the aim was to encourage interaction among mosaic artists and, above all, to draw attention to the importance of preserving memory and local culture and valuing tangible and intangible heritage — becoming also a call for the tram to run through the streets of Santa Teresa again, as it once did. After "Um Bonde para Santa Teresa", Andréa created two more collective mural projects. The first, in 2018, titled "Anjos Amorosos", proposed the collective composition of angel wings, installed elsewhere in the neighbourhood. The second, "Mural Santa Poética", carried out in December 2019, reproduced a mosaic panel from an illustration titled "Carnaval Sedutor" by her twin sister, the artist Karla Aires Imbiriba, who has lived for many years in Copenhagen, Denmark. That same year she produced the solo panel "354, A Casa", installed in February 2020 on the façade of a private home. In 2022 she made seven mosaics, a work titled "Aconchego Angelical", for the flower bed of the memorial to the victims of the tram no. 10 accident of August 2011. Also inspired by the image of the Santa Teresa tram, she devotes her hours to producing twenty-five mosaics to send to Paris, and to the "Jardim dos Anjos", still to be installed on the "Anjos Amorosos" mural. She also runs mosaic workshops in her studio. Motivated by Santa Teresa's vocation for tourism, she produces souvenirs on themes related to its greatest icon, the tram — cotton fabric bags, embroidery and mugs — shown at the neighbourhood's cultural events. It is worth noting that the places where the artist's murals are installed have become points constantly visited by tourists from Brazil and abroad, helping to boost tourism in the city of Rio de Janeiro.