Playground for Life
I’ve become a scout when I was 10 years old, and I’ve been one over the following 15 years of my life. As a mirror of that personal experience, the Portuguese scouts are the main subject of these photographs showing young territories dominated by the educational spectrum of fantasy.
The country’s first scout group was created in 1912 and Portugal has nowadays 80.000 scouts. Their basic educational and ideological core is very similar to what scouts do and advocate in the rest of the world. Scouts are nowadays the largest youth organization in the world, counting as many as 50 million members, five times the population of my own country. They are meant to serve the constructive ideal of peace and brotherhood among humankind.
They were founded within the structures of fantasy and imagination as means of reaching greater educational goals. At the same time scouts play, camp, sing, discus, swim, hike or cook, they are not only learning and putting in practise basic structures of our group societies as they’re developing individual skills.
The world of scouts is embedded in rituals, symbols and codes whose roots often come from the world of tribes where it was originally founded. You can see those influences in the uniforms as well as in the imaginary and sometimes bizarre environments created by the scouts while they’re living their staged rituals. These photographs are part of a long-therm project made in the past 7 years in the Portuguese territory.
PROJECTO COMPLETO:
Playground for Life
I’ve become a scout when I was 10 years old, and I’ve been one over the following 15 years of my life. As a mirror of that personal experience, the Portuguese scouts are the main subject of these photographs showing young territories dominated by the educ