Hailing from Olinda, in the state of Pernambuco, Nilson Garrido, the 50-year-old former boxer, teacher and coach on São Paulo’s small boxing circuit found his greatest challenge in the centre of São Paulo: to resocialise through sport the poor, marginalised people who live there. His wife, the social worker Cora Oliveira who is the co-founder of this scheme, is fighting to achieve this aim by taking care of its social aspects.

Firstly, in Vale do Anhangabaú; then, in Bexiga, and now in Brás, the Cora Garrido Boxe Centre, or Projeto Viver, is an unusual mix of social institution, gymnasium, sports and martial arts school, which seeks to attract people in situations of extreme social vulnerability – mainly the homeless, former addicts and prisoners, people who collect recyclable material, children and teenagers at risk – and to promote actions to bring about social reintegration through sport, acting in situ, below viaducts – residual, amorphous and disconnected spaces bequeathed by the territorial incongruity of the city’s road systems.

Even though the gymnasiums have been successively closed down by the municipal government, they re-establish themselves with makeshift equipment. Fridges or lorry tyres are transformed into sand bags, lorry axles used as barbells and shock absorbers converted into strength-training equipment, becoming the tools for the unorthodox training techniques Garrido used during his time as a coach.
Projecto Viver is a not-for-profit scheme, which receives no public contributions (except for sporadic donations of equipment, books and computers), has no private members and has held out for two years with great skill and dexterity. Its desire: to bring together places and people, refuse and rules, in incredible combinations and collages, with the aim of “recycling human beings”.