Livroteca Brincante do Pina.
Community library, space for culture, popular education and gathering — run by Bode residents, sustained by donations, volunteering and, now, a shop of our own.
An initiative born from within the community.
Livroteca Brincante do Pina is a community-led, self-managed, non-profit initiative based in the Bode community, in the Pina neighbourhood, southern Recife. It functions as a community library and as a space for culture, popular education and gathering for children, teenagers, youth and families of the territory.
The Livroteca is not a public facility or an external NGO project: it was born from within the community, is led by residents, and is sustained by donations, volunteering and a shop of its own.
"Every book is a letter of liberation."
The Livroteca's story starts before the Livroteca itself. As a child, Ricardo Gomes Ferraz — Kcal — grew up in Bode in conditions of extreme precarity, emotionally supported by his grandmother's care. He started working at six years old to help at home.
The turning point was a chance encounter: inside a bag tossed on the beach, Kcal found a copy of The Hand and the Glove, by Machado de Assis. Reading that book worked as a summons: there he understood literature as a path to his own voice and his own place in the world.
From the age of twenty, driven by the desire to "free his people from ignorance and from the lack of access to culture", Kcal started collecting books. He turned his own stilt house in Bode into a space for sharing, reading and play with the neighbourhood's children — around 1997, this improvised collection was already recognised in the community as Livroteca Brincante do Pina.
In almost three decades, the Livroteca has become a reference for popular culture and community education in Recife. Today it holds a collection of around 8,000 books, around 120 registered children, a stable weekly programme and a network of local partners. It has weathered floods, fires, removal threats, the arrival of RioMar shopping mall, the building of Via Mangue, real-estate pressure and the pandemic — and remained inside the favela, never outside it.
"The favela isn't the media stereotype of crime — first and foremost, it's a nursery of artists."
Doctor of street philosophy.
Kcal is the name by which Ricardo Gomes Ferraz is known: poet, musician, cultural activist, Bode resident and the Livroteca's founder. He humorously describes himself as "doctor of street philosophy" — trained, in his own words, "at the international academy of letters, as of today".
His trajectory mixes music, poetry, writing, cultural mediation and daily work with the community's children and youth. Kcal is at the same time founder, leader and symbol of the Livroteca — but the project, over the years, has become a collective network of residents, volunteers, educators and partners who keep the space running.
A political choice: stay inside the favela
Over the years, Kcal has received offers to move the library to somewhere "safer", outside the favela. He has refused them all. For him, the Livroteca only makes sense where the people need it — and that means, literally, in Bode, in the middle of the community.
Library, workshops, music, cinema, mangrove.
At the heart of the Livroteca is the community library: lending, reading on site, reading mediation and storytelling. Around it runs a continuous programme of workshops, courses and cultural actions.
- Community library — lending, free reading, mediation, storytelling.
- Writing workshops led by Kcal — reading, poetic writing, building readers.
- Capoeira — regular classes for children and youth.
- Music — singing, instrumental practice, music education workshops.
- Circus — acrobatics, juggling, body expression.
- Drawing and visual arts — regular and one-off workshops.
- School support and literacy — for children of the community and for adult residents.
- Cine Bode — community cinema sessions on the courtyard.
- A Voz da Lama — podcast / community radio produced by the Livroteca.
- Environmental actions — boat rallies, cleanups and workshops around the mangrove and the Pina river.
- Joint actions with partner collectives — graffiti, vaccination campaigns, cultural projects.
Activities happen mainly in two spaces: the library/headquarters proper and the courtyard, which hosts capoeira, circus, music, cinema, events and collective actions.
Where the Livroteca happens.
Bode is one of the communities of the Pina neighbourhood, in southern Recife. It sits between the Pina river and the mangrove, and consists of a part on solid ground — streets, alleys and brick houses — and a part on stilt houses, wooden homes raised on piles over the tide and the mangrove. It is officially classified as a ZEIS (Special Zone of Social Interest), an urban planning category that recognises the popular settlement and, in theory, protects it from removal.
The community sits a few metres from the seafront, from the high-end residential towers and the gated condominiums that today make up the Pina landscape. Two major urban developments physically frame this surroundings: the RioMar shopping mall (2012) and Via Mangue (2014) — central pieces in the real-estate pressure and removals that mark Bode's recent history.
A black, young, culturally rich community
Recent surveys count about 25,000 residents in Bode. The population is mostly black and young. Income comes from fishing, informal work, local trade and precarious service jobs nearby. Pina has long been known as a territory of Afro-Brazilian communities: one of the branches of the Pernambuco candomblé nagô comes from here, and the region remains an important pole of maracatu, capoeira and popular culture.
Real-estate speculation and removals
Bode lives the typical contradiction of coastal favelas: a poor community embedded in one of the most valued areas of the city. Counting Via Mangue, the Pina urbanisation and the Pina River Linear Park together, more than a thousand families have been displaced from this stretch of Recife since 2012. The combination of fires, "urbanisation" and new luxury developments is read by residents, independent journalists and researchers as a soft removal: families leave by exhaustion, low compensation or temporary aid, and the land is absorbed into the neighbourhood's rising value.
Why Bode matters to the Livroteca
The Livroteca exists inside this context, not next to it. Every activity — library, capoeira, music, circus, drawing — happens in a territory where children and youth are simultaneously targets of state neglect and police violence; where families live under constant removal pressure; where Afro-Brazilian and popular culture is at once a source of identity and a target of erasure. Showing Bode on this site isn't backdrop — it's part of the mission.
Almost 30 years in Bode.
- Access to reading for generations of children in Bode, in an area historically without a nearby public library.
- A safe space for children and youth in a territory marked by urban and police violence.
- Cultural training — capoeira, music, circus, audiovisual — in a community where regular schools offer little or none of this.
- Community mobilisation: during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Livroteca organised the distribution of food and hygiene items to more than 300 Bode families.
- External visibility — features in the national press and a feature documentary that took part in the Rome Film Festival.
Three pillars, no stable funder.
The Livroteca receives no stable funding from government, companies or external NGOs. Its sustainability rests on three pillars — and each one has a dedicated page.