São Paulo

James Trainor

US editor of frieze

Thirty-six hours into my first visit to Brazil I sit down in my São Paulo hotel room and thumb through my notebook, puzzling over a stream of non sequiturs, observations and lists. I begin to realize I may be the latest in a long line of gringos who, having ventured south of ‘the line’, unsuspectingly freighted with received ideas about the exotic tropics, have been overwhelmed by a far richer reality: a land dogged by its own messily beautiful and disturbing paradoxes. Later, at São Paulo’s oldest museum, the Pinacoteca do Estado, I would see an exhibition about how foreign mariner-artists and naturalist-explorers had variously interpreted the ‘marvellous possessions’ of this alien land and would recall the truism that you can catalogue all the flora and fauna in the world and still have no idea about what it is you are looking at.

Megacites, as defined by the National Geographic Society, are population centres with more than 10 million inhabitants; the hitherto hypothetical entities known as hypercities (more than 20 million) are no longer the stuff of futurist speculation. São Paulo, an urban behemoth lurching into the 21st century, is thought to have recently crossed that threshold, although accurate census data are scarce.

Piranesian in its entangled turmoil, São Paulo is defined by movement, sulphurous congestion and a brutal and denatured topo-graphy. Private helicopters dart and buzz like dragonflies, alighting on cantilevered helipads perched precariously on skyscrapers, while down below bulletproof sedans ferry the city’s anxious élite from place to place. Even 80 years ago Le Corbusier, flying over the city during his famous visit in 1929, ‘discovered the chaos of its streets – crossing above and below each other – and the quite unbelievable diameter of the city […] It rises […] and is built on top of itself due to the irresistible pressures of business.’ Seemingly dumbfounded, he declared: ‘You have a real traffic crisis here!’1 One wonders what Le Corbusier would make of the city’s sprawling favelas, its slums and shantytowns: vast quadrants of the city that are bureaucratically and politically invisible. According to Forbes magazine, São Paulo, the financial and industrial juggernaut of Brazil and the largest middle-class consumer market in Latin America, accounts for 40 percent of the county’s GDP – in a city where 20 percent of the metropolis is composed of favelas.

In a taxi on the main route from the airport I passed one such example of mass ‘auto-construction’ spilling down a hillside like a huge lava flow of dispossessed tenaciousness. Taking advantage of São Paulo’s apocalyptic traffic jams, local men gingerly made their way through the cars, selling everything and anything: children’s kites, batteries, plastic pinwheels, brightly coloured sweets, mesh baskets and mobile phone chargers. It was the first of many examples I would come across of the peculiarly Brazilian concept of gambiarra, a Portuguese term for ‘making do’ with on-the-fly grace and resourcefulness.

One paulista I spoke to likened this dexterity in living to a certain limberness in the hips, a resilience as vital in samba as in life. In a society long accustomed to minimal assistance from the state, operating outside officialdom has become a characteristic not only of the poor but of art and popular culture at large. It was visible in Brazilian avant-garde practices from the start – most obviously in the work of 1960s’ and ’70s’ artists such as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, and in successive generations of artists influenced by the Neo-Concretists and Tropicálists, including Marepe, Jarbas Lopes and Paulo Nenflídio. Inspired by the ability of the country’s disenfranchised to fashion useful contraptions from what others throw away, Nenflídio, for example, has cobbled devices together from wood and metal scraps to make things – usually musical – that shouldn’t work but do: a hand-cranked Heavy Metal barrel organ, a wooden shortwave radio, a piano-like contraption that not only runs on wind power generated by weathervanes but which also translates the random gusts powering it into electric signals that become musical notes.

In the favelas that surround São Paulo ingenuity is also a political act. Homesteading with scavenged cinderblocks and corrugated tin in the vacuum opened up by government inaction is one thing. Illegally tapping into the local power grid and water supply is another: it is an act of defiance and of self-empowerment. When artist Rubens Mano was invited to create a number of installations for the Oficina Cultural Oswald de Andrade, the centrepiece of the series was Calçada (Pavement, 1999), in which he ran a live electrical line from inside the 19th-century building to outlets on the pavement. No explanation was given, and none was needed – Mano was offering the cultural institution’s electrical power to the people for free. Unsurprisingly, the work was an immediate hit. A new provisional economy sprang up, with one enterprising record salesman using the conduit to power his portable record-player so that customers could better enjoy his Pop, Tropicália and Samba discs. More than merely a neat conceptual exchange, Mano was facilitating ‘autophagia’ (self-devouring): a way for the city to feed itself by feeding on itself, consuming and producing at the same time.

Mano’s interventions are part of a discernible thread running through the contemporary history of Sampa (as São Paulo is nick-named), where what is public and what is private are always a matter of contention. For many artists the street is where much that is unresolved and contradictory in Brazilian society plays itself out. In Sampa the streetscape is a mutable material. This was true for the artist-activists known as Grupo 3NÓS3, who, in defiance of the US-backed military regime that seized power in 1964, infamously ‘bagged’ the heads of nearly all the city’s public statues on the morning of 27 April 1979. To the junta’s embarrassment the overnight transformation was covered in the morning press as a news item. ‘Seja marginal; seja herói’ (‘Be an outlaw; be a hero’), Oiticica had declared, and many artists seemed to agree.

Echoes of this legacy of dissatisfaction are perceptible in the acti-vities of younger artists such as Renata Lucas and Marcelo Cidade, whose work unfolds as a series of experiments with the characteristics of a city unsure of its spatial and social boundaries. For one intervention, In/Out (2001), Cidade (whose last name translates as ‘city’) carefully excavated the mosaic tiles from sidewalks in the city. Reinstalled in a gallery, they seemed to revel in the quaint absurdity of reducing something as unintelligible as the surrounding urban labyrinth to a simple geometric glyph, a decorative symbolic map reproduced ad infinitum mile after mile along the city’s main arteries.

A more socially empowering form of artistic engagement shows itself in the projects of Mônica Nador, who helped form the Jardim Míriam Arte Clube (JAMAC), a non-profit associations that works with community groups in the city’s impoverished peripheries to foster new public art forms (some using a repertoire of traditional motifs borrowed from the rural regions from which many of the poor migrate) on the walls of slum dwellings. Last year JAMAC was invited to extend the reach of the 27th São Paulo Biennial to the edges of the city, but rather than ‘decorate’ the houses Nador encouraged residents to claim art as one instrument among many available for mobilization and communal self-invention.

In a city where public space is so neglected,the underground metro system is a puzzling aberration, infinitely better cared for than the bedlam under which it burrows. One sign of the complex contradictions of Sampa culture is that the vending machines on the train platforms that are used in the US to dispense sweets and drinks also sell serious literature – I spied books by Che Guevara, Friedrich Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), a copy of the Brazilian Civil Code and, appropriately, a neatly bound edition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762).

Few people outside Brazil realize that São Paulo served as an incubator for the more progressive instincts of the country’s Modernist artists, writers, architects, urbanists and city planners. In the pros-perous years before and after World War II, a Utopian vision of a tropical Modernist city rising out of a confused colonial past seemed a realizable goal, one advanced by architects such as Oscar Niemeyer and Lina Bo Bardi, Lucio Costa and João Vilanova Artigas, and landscape designers such as Roberto Burle Marx, whose lush geometric gardens were studies in the balance between control and chaos. Sampa was a testing ground for various strains of free-thinking Modernism, reconstituted to suit a distinctly Brazilian sense of space and way of living rather than merely being transplanted: free-form and organic, often embracing nature and natural principles rather than the machine as a model. Far from importing European Modernism, Brazilian avant-gardists adopted the strategy of ‘cannibalization’, consuming the influence of the colonizer before the colonizer consumed the colonized.

The idea is traceable to the radical declarations of Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade, whose Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil (Manifesto of Brazilwood Poetry, 1924) proposed a ‘poetry for export’, a strategy for artistic decolonization upending the hierarchies of the powerful and powerless. In his Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibalist Manifesto, 1928) Andrade suggested that Brazil could avoid cultural bondage by ingesting external cultures as a way of gaining their power without diluting its own. (Latin-American Modernists were fascinated by tales of tribal cannibalism, both real and fantastic.) The idea of constructive cannibalization was one that persisted in leftist cultural strategies during the military repression of the 1960s and ’70s: in fact, the musician-activist Caetano Veloso, speaking for a generation of pop renegades that included Os Mutantes and Gilberto Gil, wrote that ‘the idea of cultural cannibalism fitted us, the Tropicálists, like a glove. We were “eating” The Beatles and Jimi Hendrix.’2

But while the city of enlightened tropical urbanism – housing blocks with masses suspended over open breezeways, free-form plantings, walls of vertical wood blinds, beautiful decorative ceramic brises-soleil and elaborate mosaics – is occasionally visible, it was overtaken by incremental failures to live up to the promise. The sunny future imagined in the 1950s succumbed to the repression of the 1960s and ’70s and the economic disasters and neo-liberalism that followed. Today the disparity between inconceivably rich and unimaginably poor is creating a new cityscape. A simmering low-grade siege mentality has become an everyday fact of life, and as a result the city is gradually obscuring its confidence behind multiple layers of improvised urban fortification and strategies of avoidance. Sampa is increasingly segmented, festooned with surveillance cameras and a boggling variety of gates, barriers, photoelectric tripwires and enclosures defended by an army of private security guards. If left unchecked, warns Brazilian anthropologist Teresa P.R. Caldeira, this metastasizing de facto topography of exclusion and suspicion will lead inevitably to the implosion of modern public life and the values of civil society.3

This evolving mess, which nobody planned and no one wants, is the crux of Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain’s Utopia font. Trained as graphic designers and practising as artists, the duo have created a pictographic alphabet (which can be downloaded from their website4) in which the upper case is represented by silhouetted glyphs of Niemeyer or Niemeyeresque architectural icons and the lower case by some of the more grimly prosaic elements of contemporary Sampa. Using the font, typing even the most harmless text can become an exercise in creating unintended disorder and blight. In the end, the reality of the street scrimmage between public and private trumps the best intentions of any planner.

All this has exacerbated what Ivo Mesquita, the former director of the Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM) and now curator of contemporary projects at the revitalized Pinocateca do Estado, refers to as a persistent lack of usable public space in urban Brazil. When I met Mesquita in the museum’s lush outdoor patio, he said that ‘the idea of a “common” is alien to Brazil’, admitting that the closest thing that Sampa has is the Parque do Ibirapuera, the gardens designed by Burle Marx in 1954 for Niemeyer’s complex of cultural pavilions which is home to the world’s second-oldest international art biennial, and one of the few places where people from across the social spectrum can mingle, stroll, lie on the grass and gather as citizens. The deficit in flexible space (and its democratizing effect) is mirrored by a general lack of obligation among the country’s wealthiest to support the arts or foster a home-grown tradition of private cultural initiatives. Instead of creating foundations or invigorating the city’s most important art institutions, one frustrated critic tells me, the élite prefer to jockey for slots on the trustee boards of internationally prestigious North American or European institutions. While the vitality of Brazilian art has been long recognized internationally, the affluent seem less interested in giving anything back to the public at home. It’s part, laments this same critic, of ‘the same old New World inferiority complex’. Recently it was announced that the Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Art, regarded as one of the country’s most im-portant private collections of Brazilian Geometric Abstraction, had been sold to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

Nearly all the artists, curators, dealers and writers I spoke to be-moaned the dearth of funding, whether in the form of state support, corporate sponsorship or private endowments. The gradual disappointment with the reform-minded Lula government and its lack of cultural reorganization is reflected in the appointment of musician Gilberto Gil – who was gaoled and exiled by the military in the 1970s – as minister of culture, seen by some as a fitting symbolic move and by others as an empty gesture: under Gil’s well-intentioned guidance the government has funded sectors of the culture industry that hardly need any help (such as the healthy Brazilian Pop-music sector) to the exclusion of the visual arts. While big commercial entities such as Banco do Brasil have created their own corporate spaces for art exhibitions around the city, their programmes are as uneven as their leadership. Meanwhile, financial support for non-profit and alternative spaces is harder to come by. Instead, commercial galleries such as Galeria Vermelho, housed in a complex of small buildings around a courtyard in Higienópolis (a verdant high-rise district, whose name translates as ‘city of hygiene’), are acting as unconventional art spaces, hosting performances, lectures, screenings and serious curated shows, creating convivial meeting grounds for artists and the general public.

Paradoxically, though, the problems that bedevil the art world in Brazil also foster its attributes, such as the sense of adaptive improvisation in the face of uncertainty; perhaps the jaded professionalism of New York or London can blunt creativity as well as nurture it. Aware of what is happening around the globe, the citizens of Sampa are still happy to cannibalize and hybridize, continually to redefine their own experience of Brazilian-ness without being consumed by the outside world and its expectations. Paulistanos will continue to ‘botanize the asphalt’ in ways Walter Benjamin never would have dreamt. One night, before returning to New York, I stood on a São Paulo roof-top, beneath a hazy vault of unfamiliar stars, and gazed with bewilderment at this fathomless urban universe. ‘This is the city of the future,’ I blurted with a stoner’s awe. ‘No,’ I was politely corrected by one native Paulista, ‘this is the city of now.’

Ana Paula Cohen

A writer and co-founder of the project ‘istmo-flexible archive’, and co-curator of the Encuentro Internacional de Medellín 2007. She was born and lives in São Paulo.

‘From now on, I’ll describe the cities to you, […] in your journeys you will see if they exist.’ [...] ‘And yet I have constructed in my mind a model city from which all possible cities can be deduced,’ Kublai [Khan] said. ‘It contains everything corresponding to the norm. Since the cities that exist diverge in varying degree from the norm, I need only foresee the exceptions to the norm and calculate the most probable combinations.’

‘I have also thought of a model city from which I deduce all the others,’ Marco [Polo] answered. ‘It is a city made only of exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions. If such a city is the most improbable, by reducing the number of abnormal elements, we increase the probability that the city really exists. So I have only to subtract exceptions from my model, and in whatever direction I proceed, I will arrive at one of the cities which, always as an exception, exist. But I cannot force my operation beyond a certain limit: I would achieve cities too probable to be real.’

-Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1974

São Paulo is a megalopolis in a constant state of transformation. As the paulista urban historian Benedito Lima de Toledo has written, the city’s present-day chaos – its complex, intertwining structures and accretions and disjointed aggregate layers – are the result of its having been completely demolished and rebuilt twice within 100 years. This process resulted in three different cities. The colonial city of the late 19th century, with 20,000 inhabitants, was transformed into a modern European-style metropolis in the 1910s and 1920s, with a population of 580,000. Then, when the urban emphasis changed to a progressive ‘technicist’ project in the 1930s (population 1.6 million), the car quickly took precedence over the pedestrian, a trend that continues to shape the expansion of the city today (population 21 million). From the 1930s on, gardens and open spaces were systematically sacrificed to traffic flow and parking.

While the majority of South American capitals were founded on the model of European urbanization practised by Spanish colonials, with a plaza mayor at their nucleus, comprising town hall, church and other fixed architectural elements, the Portuguese colonists in Brazil demonstrated no such inclination for planning. São Paulo’s relation to its past is therefore quite different from that of the major European or North American capitals, as well as those in Spanish-speaking Latin America. On the one hand, there is no real centre or identifiable public area out of which the city can be said to have grown and around which it could continue to orient itself. On the other hand, its expansion has always been motivated by disparate and competing private interests, thereby creating a poorly defined notion of what
is public.

City in Transit

The consecutive waves of unplanned demolition and reconstruction, never subordinated to an overarching urban vision, contributed to the development of a city without open spaces such as parks, promenades, playgrounds, gardens and squares. As a result, the city has evolved a lifestyle that is led, for the most part, behind closed doors. São Paulo is an indoor city, with its inhabitants spending their time inside houses, apartments, restaurants, clubs, cars, bars, cinemas, museums and galleries; on the streets thousands of people can be seen, at any time of day or night, but always in transit. They go from one place to another, concentrating on their journey, focusing on their final destination. So the city can be seen mainly as a passage way – an infinite number of routes taken daily, connecting the different points that together make up the mental map of São Paulo carried within each inhabitant.

The topography of the undulating valley in which São Paulo lies has also militated against the creation of landmarks that are visible from every part of the city – there is no large monument, cathedral or tower that can situate the passer-by. The main reference points are on the high ground, two large rivers (which once defined the city’s limits), as well as the major avenues, many of them built on top of rivers, which serve to orientate drivers traversing long distances. The fact that there are no conspicuous, dominant architectural elements has perhaps served to create a more flexible city, recognizable by its smaller constituent parts – bars, bakeries, signs – which are part of the day-to-day life of every inhabitant. It is common for the residents of São Paulo to mention now-vanished points of reference: ‘It’s near the old Banespa building, where the prefecture is now’; ‘Do you remember that quarter with residential houses near the park, where there’s now an enormous office block? Well, the shop’s right there.’

Architecture/Memory

The short life of architecture in the city is also a disorienting force. Like friends or relatives who die prematurely or suddenly, fragments of the built environment of São Paulo are increasingly disappearing; its population of familiar buildings, houses and neighbourhoods has suffered through a process of rapid transformation, with a turnover time of less than a generation. In contrast to those who have survived a war – and witnessed the total destruction of a city to live with the lasting memory of an immense emptiness – we in São Paulo have lived through continual demolition and construction as part of our everyday lives. A house is knocked down to make way for a block of apartments; a 15-storey residential building becomes a block of 40 offices; gardens and squares become viaducts, road junctions and busy avenues; landmark historical structures are destroyed overnight by owners in need of money and used as car parks until the land is sold.

The architecture of the city interweaves a recent past with an unstable present – all over town, buildings representing every decade from the 1910s to today sit uneasily side by side. It is difficult to identify a signature architectural style from any particular decade; if any one style seems to dominate, there is always an older building close by that bucks the trend or another that is brand new (‘I don’t remember seeing this building the last time I passed by here’). As a result the city can be understood as a selective, private and subjective collection of memories, a landscape of isolated, forgotten parts and of others that have been preserved for arbitrary reasons amid buildings from other eras and architectural styles. As with our more subjective and transient memories (for example, about the colours of the clothes people wore in the 1970s, which get confused in our minds with the hues of the photographs of that decade, leaving us wondering about their real colour), it is impossible to re-enter the house where our grandparents lived or even the house where we grew up. In relation to architecture, access and allegiance are confused – like the reproductions of works of art in books to which we once felt so closely attached that, when we cross the ocean and finally visit the museums where they are kept, we feel disappointed by the originals. There is a subjective memory that will always be linked with the image of photographs, videos of family, stories about people who shared the same space.

Tropical Forest

Among the innumerable layers superimposed on the city there is one that is almost forgotten by those who live here, perhaps because of the natural abundance that surrounds us. The streets of São Paulo, for example, are in constant need of renovation and repaving, destroyed by tree roots that insist on growing and retaking the city. Tough grass sprouts up between paving slabs. If there is no control over the growth of the city, there is also none over what remains of our ancestral city: the forest. Overhead, buzzards with enormous wingspans spiral over the buildings on hot air currents, while underfoot greenery breaks through the minutest cracks and fissures, in places where one would assume there could be no more life, buried under cement, stone and steel.

MASP

In the 1960s the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, designed by the architect Lina Bo Bardi, displayed a radical idea for an exhibition design in which different periods of art history were superimposed and conflated, as they are in the surrounding city. Modernist European and Latin-American paintings mingled with other older works in the museum’s permanent collection with no defined order or itinerary for visitors, inundated by the light and noise of the city outside. Bo Bardi’s innovative open-plan installation has now been completely revamped, but many people who lived in São Paulo in the 1970s and 1980s have embedded in their memories this collection of paintings floating together in a disorganized and suspended field. To ascend into the building via a transparent lift and arrive at a wall of glass fronting the exhibition hall was to witness, all at once, multiple times, stories and languages – all compressed within a two-dimensional image of art history. For the visitor, to walk through this one vast room was to define your own path, to determine your own pictorial narrative and chain of associations.

Like the paintings inside, the MASP building itself was suspen-ded in the void, supported by four enormous columns over a ground-level terrace and belvedere, open to the public who pass along Avenida Paulista. The museum and its contents hovered overhead, approximating in volume the inviting vacuum left below in the street.

[In]visible Cities

São Paulo seems to display more evidently a characteristic that it shares with all big cities: the impossibility of grasping it all at once, of understanding it as a whole, of travelling through every part of it, of applying any system of measurement or logic. It is a city made up of infinite temporary cities, superimposed and criss-crossed by a disorganized and expanding terrain, composed of the ‘exceptions, exclusions, incongruities, contradictions’ of which Calvino writes.

Its inhabitants negotiate its different times and spaces on a daily basis; the memory of the city is within each person who lives and moves through it, not in the ruins or buildings they (should) preserve; this makes São Paulo a city that remains alive and intense, in a state of constant flux. ‘Like language, which flows from mind to mind, carrying images, feelings, thoughts. Through its flow, it draws mental landscapes that change the way we relate to each other and to the world. It is about movement and change. It shows how our perspectives and horizons are changed by its incessant flow, how we do and do not step into the same river twice’.5