TODD LESTER

LOCAL INSIGHT GLOBAL IMPACT - LIGI

Todd is the founder of Launchonete, a site-specific artist residency & human mobility project, with an underlying focus on alternative economies, currencies and exchange. It is a constructive critique of the growing /vague-ing residency sector; a contemplation on gentrification as a way of life, one that is related to globalization, commodification, and the idea of brazilianification, a term used to describe process in which the middle class disappears, and the gulf between the upper and lower classes widens; an observatory on artist mobility’s relation to human mobility (and vice versa); station of witness and workplace … the panopticon remixed.

Lanchonete is a five-year project with the second half of that period being a site-specific inhabitation of a typical lanchonete in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In the mean time, the evolving concept will take the form of itinerant Feijoada (or Saturday lunch) and manifest as a discussion on the economy periodically at various art events, cultural gatherings and key moments, on average one Saturday a quarter for the next three years.