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1. What was your dream last night?

I think I was being chased by a gang of gangster clowns. We exchanged some heavy pie shooting and… wait, no, that was before. Last night it was something about butterflies in the ice-cream. They were singing tarantellas to me… no, wait… break-dancing camels. I was in the desert when… hmmm… Sorry, I seldom remember my dreams… Think those I said were actual events…

2. Next plans or ideas?

There’s a plan going on for a book with all the cartoons I published in my first year of collaboration with Ponto Final, a newspaper from Macau, the place where I’m living since 2009. Maybe we can organize an exhibit for the launching of the book, probably by the end of this year.

3. Your food today?

For lunch I’ll probably invent something with rice, eggs… and whatever I have in the fridge (I love creative cooking). For dinner, I hope I can make the time to go to a restaurant called Nga Tim (the best in Coloane village) and have my favorite spicy clams cooked with black beans in Macanese style. Let’s see how that goes…

4. Do you like your place or would you like to live somewhere else?

Both. I like very much the life I have in Macau. But I’d also like to try some other places in the future. The thing is that working at home (God bless the Internet), in theory I may live wherever I want. I don’t know where I’m going next. Maybe, New Zealand…

5. What was the huge mistake in your life you (unfortunately) never did?

I didn’t join a football team when I was a kid. Or a political party when I was a teenager. Today I could be a very rich man…

6. Who are your neighbors?

They are mainly Chinese. Some are locals, some from Hong Kong, Guangzhou and other parts of China. But there are also some friendly people from Portugal, Australia, USA and others. I can’t name them all, cause my building is 47 floors high (I live in the 45th). Each floor has six flats. You do the math…

7. Tell me the shortest joke you know

Berlusconi. The guy is a joke. Not a very funny one, sometimes. But pretty short.

8. Tell me the biggest prank you did on a friend.

Once I told a friend that if he did ride his bicicle in circles around the city he could actualy be transported to another dimension after 50 laps (don’t ask me where I got that from). He believed. He was about to finish the last lap, when I called him and said that was a joke. He was furious cause he had to pedal back. That was fun.

9. How to ruin your vacation?

I don’t want to give you ideas, but… if I’m on the beach and you perform a “rain dance” you may actually ruin my vacation. But not that many people can do it. Please, Native Americans, stay away from the beaches I go to.

10. In 1977 NASA has sent orbiters Voyager 1 and 2 into space which will never stop to fly through the universe by gravity. They contain the Voyager Golden Records with many testimonials of whole mankind, greetings in 55 languages introduced by US president Jimmy Carter (“This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings….”). The Golden Records with a lifespan of 500 million years at least are including drawings of a naked man and woman, detaild genitalia, many scientific graphics, sounds of planet earth and music by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart – and Chuck Berry: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3haYAbqKjA

Maybe aliens out there will be shocked in some million years! But in case such a NASA mission will be replayed: which (1) of your artworks should join it ?
This one (and I hope they have a good sense of humor): http://www.toonpool.com/cartoons/iPhone%204_87695

11. Please give us an answer to a question we didn’t ask!

My mom.

Credits go to Nicoleta Ionescu for conducting this interview.
Find all our “Letter from” interviews here:

Unemployment is everywere. Unemployment is a global problem, and it seems that it hits the hardest to those who fall the deepest. The financial crisis and the resulting firings caused several tragedies all over the world you can not laugh about.

This is where rodrigo’s cartoon »Unemployment« gets into the game, and you can laugh about rodrigo’s Unemployment – because he turned the modern amorphous monster into a classical ancient beast.

The day this cartoon was published on the website of the Portuguese newspaper Expresso, the local Teachers Union announced that 39,613 teachers would have no job for the new school year. That’s a big amount of people, all of them with their families suffering from it, but then again so little in a small country of this planet which is haunted by the global monster unemployment.

See this artist's profile on toonpool.com

According to the classical cartoon tradition, rodrigo chose a symbol for something incomprehensible, impalpable, non-explainable in all its complexity. If parents were asked by their child, »what’s unemployment?«, they might show this cartoon to their child.

p.s. Is it coincidental that one of the most popular German websites for job searchers is monster.de?

This cartoon on toonpool.com | This artist on toonpool.com

~

Arbeitslosigkeit ist überall. Arbeitslosigkeit ist ein globales Problem, und es scheint vor allem die am härtesten zu treffen, die am tiefsten fallen.
Die Finanzkrise und die daraus resultierten Entlassungen haben zu einigen Tragödien geführt, über die man nicht lachen kann.
Hier setzt rodrigo mit seinem Cartoon »Unemployment« an, und über rodrigos Arbeitslosigkeit kann man lachen – denn er macht aus dem modernen gestaltlosen Monster ein klassisch antikes Untier, das man anfassen kann.

An dem Tag, an dem dieser Cartoon in Portugal veröffentlicht wurde, gab die portugisische Teachers Union bekannt, dass es für 39,613 Lehrer keinen Arbeitsplatz im neuen Schuljahr geben würde. Das ist eine große Menge Menschen, allesamt mit ihren Familien, die darunter leiden, aber wiederum so verschwindend klein in einem kleinen Land auf der Erde, die von dem gigantischen Ungeheuer Arbeitslosigkeit heimgesucht wird.

Profil von diesem Künstler auf toonpool.com sehen

In klassischer Cartoon-Tradition wählte rodrigo ein Symbol für etwas Unfassbares, Ungreifbares, was in seiner Komplexität und Kompliziertheit kaum zu erklären ist. Sollten Eltern von ihrem Kind gefragt werden, “Was ist Arbeitlosigkeit?”, sie sollten dem Kind diesen Cartoon zeigen.

p.s. Ist es Zufall, dass eine der größten deutschen Websites für Jobsuchende monster.de heißt?

Dieser Cartoon auf toonpool.com | dieser Künstler auf toonpool.com