Thursday, March 27th
Thursday morning we woke up to a beautiful Sao Paulo day – all sunshine and crisp air. Although we were all suffering from a late night on Wednesday, miraculously the entire group found their way to breakfast and onto the bus on time to go to the M’Boi Mirim neighborhood in Jardim Santo Antonio, a peripheral area of Sao Paulo. The bus ride was beautiful, for the parts of it that I was awake! As we neared our destination, we went past an enormous cemetery which contains a huge proportion of young people – a stark reminder of the violence constantly discussed in our forums and lectures in Brazil but never witnessed in our insulated, protected experience of the city.
When we arrived at our destination, we were given a warm welcome by our hosts, the group that runs the Projeto Sacolao das Artes, a community and arts center. The building is a cavernous Mercado, or market structure, which was recaptured by the municipality after it had been run for decades by a corrupt businessman. The space was enormous, mostly bare, and beautiful with potential. We listened to an introduction about the mission of the Projeto by the regional development director, Roberto Castro, and heard from various other project leaders about the efforts and ongoing projects of this exciting venture. Castro characterized the story of the building as one of “removal:” the building had originally represented the removal of the corporate or the profitable from the public sphere (since the Mercado had been built by the city, then run by private interests for private profits), and had recently been redeemed or reclaimed by its return to public space and public interests. Castro called this rehabilitation “conquering and empowering.” The projects that the group runs are impressive – dance sessions, movie screenings, theatre shows, etc. – but to my mind it was a bit unclear how exactly the community itself was involved – were they just the recipients, the audience, or were they truly participating and initiating? The ambiguity reminded me of Professor Muntadas’ discussion of “working for” versus “working with.” The presentation included an interesting review of urban site analysis by a young architect working with the Projeto named Luciana. The analysis was sophisticated and interesting, but I was surprised that it was almost presented as static complete information. Surely the one constant about urban conditions is change. I had the opportunity to talk to Luciana after our lunch and suggested the possibility of derive-style, situationist or psychogeographical site analysis with community members.
After the talk, a wonderful group of Brazilian performers came and did an amazing combination of oral poetry, exhibition dance, and dance lessons that included all of us. It was incredibly fun, if hot. Caitlin fortunately proved once again that some North Americans can actually dance. After dancing came a truly spectacular lunch prepared by the chefs at the Projeto. Our contribution for lunch was to help the center launch their community food initiative.
Throughout our visit, some local television guys were there filming the event. I was never quite clear what the program they were producing was, but after lunch I went over to do an interview with one of the TV guys. It was slightly bazaar – the questions the guy was asking seemed to have nothing to do with anything except eliciting random tourist enthusiasm for Sao Paulo. I’m sure that’s how it will look when the final program is spliced together and put on the air: airhead Harvard student thinks Brazilian food is fantastic!
After lunch, we chilled for a while, enjoying some informal music and dancing and conversation. The whole trip was thoroughly enjoyable – quite a different experience from our ‘safari’ through a favela on the previous day. Back on the bus, headed back towards a more central area of the city, it started to rain. It rained, hard, all the way to Ibirapuera Park, which is a spectacularly large collection of landscape and Oscar Niemeyer buildings. We were able to sneak in and see the Cicillo Matarazzo Pavilion, replete with partially intact Biennial Exhibition, and fortunately by the time we came out again the rain had metamorphosed into a rather atmospheric spitting. We went by the Oca (and some people went in, but I somehow missed the tour), and saw the Ibirapuera Auditorium, where we would return for a concert on Friday night. This building, I learned later, was a controversial recent project – part of the original Niemeyer master plan but not built until 2005.
Back on the bus, headed generally towards the Centro Univeritario Maria Antonia and an art opening, we managed to confuse the bus driver, who then panicked, drove down an impossibly small road, and almost contributed the bus as a permanent addition to the landscape. Fortunately we all escaped, including the bus, and had time for a quick bite to eat in a local café before the opening started. I had my standard ‘misto’ – ham and cheese – and some Skoll.
The opening was great, even though we were (or at least I was) incredibly tired. We had a talk to start things off with the co-curators, which was informative if slightly confusing (because I happened to be sitting on one of the pieces for the show, a bookcase/double-bench/storage cube, the contents of which needed some adjustment by one of the artists, which means I was slightly distracted although I could have of course got up, but I couldn’t move!). The opening started pretty slowly and then got swinging once Matthew and I decided to co-opt one of the pieces in the show (all somewhat fitting within the rubric of low-budget, multiple, relational-aesthetics work) which involved a photocopier. Soon we were creating our own art by making ripping out letters and words and photocopying them in limited editions. We got some great contributions from some other people attending the opening – pretty fun. After the opening, a bunch of us found our way to another café/bar, where Matthew and I continued the valiant effort with ripping words and patterns out of random stuff (thereby accidentally shredding the opening postcard) and I subjected the table to several rounds of ‘exquisite corpse.’ Looking back on it, the night was almost poetically sweet with nostalgic naïveté. Viva la Dada.
At some point, several of us (Matthew, Nestor, Claudia, Ian, Annatina, Caitlin and Chienchuan) decided to go back to our hotel and go swimming. During the course of this foolhardy (since it was cold and dark) but very fun proceeding, we learned that it was Matthew’s birthday at midnight, so we waited until midnight and warmed ourselves with some hilarious dancing lessons courtesy of our patient Columbian friends. And here my narrative goes dark – I went to bed. I profess full ignorance and innocence concerning later events.
