Favela Painting

Favela Painting by Haas&Hahn

The Favela Painting project was initiated by Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn (Haas&Hahn) back in 2005 and started with a mural in a favela in Rio de Janeiro.
Over the years Favela Painting has grown into a social enterprise that initiates and produces projects, creating visual interventions in unexpected places all over the world. The main ambition is to catalyze social improvement, together with the local community.

They currently have (ongoing) projects in a.o. Rio de Janeiro, Port-au-Prince, Philadelphia, Curaçao and Amsterdam. In 2016 Haas&Hann went to a refugee camp in Skaramangas in Greece and painted a large design on the ground together with refugees. They continued with this concept and are now painting the grey walls of the Bijlmer Bajes, an old prison in Amsterdam, currently a home for asylum seekers. For this project Favela Painting have teamed up with the residents of the asylum center. 

As part of the exhibition ‘Solution or Utopia? Design for refugees’ Favela Painting was commissioned by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam to design a mural for one of the rooms in the exhibit. The mural was realised together with the paint crew of Favela Painting, many of which are refugees from various nations that have come through the Asylum Center in Amsterdam.