Located in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Maré is a complex made up of 16 slums and over 140,000 residents. In addition to precarious housing conditions, health racism and other denied rights, the population suffers from police repression almost daily. The operations are violent, injure human rights and make their victims – often innocent: in 2019 alone, Complexo da Maré faced almost 300 hours of police operations, with one person killed every 8 hours.

The campaign "To live, one must be alive" was created to show that the lives of the residents of Complexo da Maré matter. In a reality of a lot of violence, our objective was to raise awareness and humanize the population that lives in the slums The main challenge was to develop actions that would inform the population about their rights in police approaches, but also draw the attention of the rest of the city to the repression suffered by these people. Based on that, we decided to use the right to dream as the basis of the campaign: in addition to needing to be alive to live, the population of Maré has the right to dream and to make their dreams come true.

With the concept in mind, we carried out a first step: collecting dreams that would be used as inputs for the campaign, in which we interviewed different residents of Complexo da Maré. From there, the visual identity of the campaign was born from the power of the concept phrase created for the action. The composition between the hands and the concept gains weight with a bold, sans serif font, expanding the previous versions of the actions that already used the shade of green as its unique color – facilitating the identification of police officers in interactions with the community. An orange color reinforces the urgent tone of the message, while the black and white photos focused on the face of the residents brings us closer to those persons. All of this was combined with bold blocks of color and also an illustration of the combined with an illustration of the Complexo da Maré map that aims to awaken a sense of belonging to the people of the community.

One of the main objectives was to engage the population in using the campaign materials. To this end, pieces and actions were created that had adherence between different types of people, with different levels of engagement. We produced a booklet with people's rights during a police approach, which was also adapted for social media; stickers to stick on the doors of houses, so that people could complete the sentence “the dream of those who live here is:”; posters were scattered around the city, with dreams of residents of Maré; an exhibition was set in Complexo da Maré; a kite festival, involving children and teenagers in a moment of fun; and, as the main piece, a video with people from Maré telling their dreams and the greatest difficulties faced in the face of police violence and repression.

The campaign was officially launched on International Human Rights Day, with coverage by two of the main Brazilian news channels. In addition, the project was presented in Brasília to federal deputies and to the Federal Supreme Court, with the objective to pressure the authorities to create a plan to reduce police lethality and control human rights violations committed by police forces in the slums and peripheries of Rio de Janeiro.