Descriptions
São Paulo is known for having some of the worst traffic in the world, with intense highways, roads, and streets that you can be stuck for hours in traffic with no alternative options to get to your destination. One of the groups that goes through these streets is delivery drivers, whether it be for food, office packages, or business-related material. These delivery drivers need to be fast, and can’t afford getting stuck in traffic on 4-wheel vehicles. Due to this, they use motorcycles as a default starting in the 1980s, called motoboys, and quickly became popular. It is estimated today that there are over 280,000 motoboys just in São Paulo. Despite this, it is one of the riskiest and least valued jobs in the city. To beat the clock, they accelerate in between cars (called “corridors”), often passing unseen by other drivers. This can cause the said driver to get angry and make it more risky for motoboys. It is estimated by the São Paulo Information System on Traffic Accidents that one motorcyclist dies every day in the city. Even with them being considered an “essential service,” their realities and struggles go mostly ignored by the rest of society. Many of them experience racist comments and prejudice due to most of them being black and poor.
In 2007, Spanish Artist Antoni Abad decided to create the Canal*MOTOBOY (Motoboy*Channel). It is a project of audiovisual mobile communication for the professional motorcyclist community of the city of São Paulo. He asked 12 motoboys in the city to use their mobile phones to document their everyday life. They took photos, recorded voice messages, and videos, “becoming storytellers of their own reality.” They would then be instructed to upload their production in real-time to the project, making it public. These images and videos would be tagged with related topics (accidents, corridors, parking lots, etc.). These would be uploaded as word clouds. It would give viewers a visual understanding of the most popular themes in a motoboy’s life. Each contribution was then geolocated and pinned on a map.
Soon, motoboys themselves started using this as a navigation aid. As this was before other navigational apps like Waze and GPS phones, it became popular. They would learn where there were accidents, floods, and traffic jams in the city, allowing them to change their routes accordingly. This project aimed at making motoboys’ practices and daily life visible and simultaneously influenced their urban mobility practices as well as their social lives. Motoboys do not have a physical office and are always on the move, they are often disconnected and placeless. But part of this app was to have regular in-person meetings, where the motoboys could come together to talk and share their experience. This allowed them not only to have a community online, but to have a community with other people in the same situations as them. Abad created Canal*Motoboys as part of a larger project called megafone.net, where, over 10 years, he worked with different marginalized communities across the globe in similar settings, inviting them to share their experiences and opinions.
Connection to Mobile Networked Creativity
Mobile Networked Creativity not only emerges from communities, but it can also create them. Abad created an environment where motoboys could develop a sense of community. It reflects how a marginalized and precarious community can use existing resources and materials in their creative practices to create connections and a community. At the same time, it allows motoboys to be visible to the public by sharing their daily struggles and to improve their day-to-day mobility in urban spaces.
Location
São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
To Learn More
- Editorial Staff, “One motorcyclist dies about every day in the capital of São Paulo as a result of a traffic accident,” A Vos do Motoboy newspaper (2023)
- Fabio R. Saez Sola, “Why do people hate motorcycle couriers?” from Disparada (2021)
- “Motorcycle Courier – Sao Paulo, SP,” Salário.
