ARC Magazine’s Editor-In-Chief Holly Bynoe shares Chapter 1 of her account of time spent in Sao Paulo for the 18th International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil in February, 2014. Bynoe generously writes a revealing piece that is part travelogue, part diary, and all thoughtful critical reflection. This first instalment situates her in the immense physical & cultural landscape that is Sao Paulo – a city simultaneously worlds away from the Caribbean, yet sharing an undeniable South-South connection – and begins to unravel the deep-rooted impact of her time at Videobrasil.
Grounding.
It’s quite illogical to travel 1,600 miles North to reach a destination 2,700 miles South of your locale, but as a citizen of the Small Island Developing States and the wider Caribbean, access to the Geopolitical South hasn’t been thought about or considered as something valuable/viable/possible. So I had to make an incomplete circle of approximately 270º, which included a trip through the United States, before finding myself in the wild cultural landscape of São Paulo, Brazil.
If you look at it as a system of exchange, access to the Geopolitical South has been and is being relegated to the big boys; the investors of the United States and Europe who have had a foothold in South America for decades. With Brazil on everyone’s mind as the economic focal point of the South and with its status as an emerging BRICS country, it seems like social and economic development is expanding at an ever rapid pace with no end in sight.
Before I headed in for my visit, I heard that most Brazilians have no formal understanding of the Caribbean. I would say that this is reciprocated, and most Caribbean people know little about Brazil and many South American countries; their diversity, political history and the organically existing parallels between both regions, given their cultural history.
City of São Paulo from the Edifício Itália. All images by Holly Bynoe
Nonetheless, landing at Guarulhos International Airport could cause panic and ensue existential crises in the heart of any small island folk. Why was the futuristic graveyard of skyscrapers making my chest collapse/flutter? Was it that Gilliam’s ‘Sam Lowry’s Icarus’ somehow battered on my brain and I couldn’t help but descend into a surreal apocalyptic dreamscape? My love for cinema has capitalized on overtaking my brain when something powerful is being felt. Or was it the fact that it immediately reduced my concept of first world centers like New York, Toronto and London to tiny blotches? Immediately I had to renegotiate my thoughts on utopic/dystopic futures as the massive expanse of the city rose under me, around me and then parallel to me before its verticalness dropped away.
Almost immediately a couple of things came to my mind.
Firstly, why do Caribbean people mostly travel to the North? It seemed that within seconds it was also recognizable as a metropolitan space, one which shares so much in common with the islands of the Caribbean – from its history of slavery and the resemblances within the context of indigeneity, agriculture, colonialism and religious practices – core values and realizations that are often amiss in America and Europe. There was also the matter of influence, and how our cultural uniqueness has been coopted by the United States and to a lesser extent Europe – another reason to consider other sites as equally important, and as having the potential to expose hidden dialogues.
Secondly, why is this spectacular city almost never factored as a practical place or as a model of future sustainability, especially when the creative economy of the Caribbean is now more than ever outreaching to the typical centers of New York, Miami, Toronto and London to make significant strides in their practices? Are the commonplace excuses of language creating walls in the minds of people still valid? Haven’t we already practiced such exclusion with our French, Spanish and Dutch neighbouring islands? Have we not yet understood that if there is an important need, work and exchange will be facilitated?
Thirdly, how can I know all of this and come out with something meaningful, not only from my time at Videobrasil, but holistically thinking about a creative future that in some way can be adapted for the SIDS and the wider Caribbean region? How can we make all of this work worthwhile for partners, clients, artists and cultural professionals? How can we have these experiences transcend words and images, falling into an energized recess where we all start to work actively to engage with our needs in a more fearless way? How can we apply pressure where pressure is most needed, and how can we finally turn our backs to complacency and negligence? In mere minutes I reduced/deduced this place to be active and bureaucratic – after all it is a Federation forged by socialism and dictatorship which lasted for more than two decades. Maybe this is the way to think about why a country like Brazil has risen from the ashes of poverty to become the most important in the Geopolitical South, eclipsing the rise of other nations.
Topographic view entering the suburbs of São Paulo.
After all, no one does it quite like Brazil. They export 25% of the world’s supply of refined and raw sugar products (sugarcane & beets); lead in soybean production and export; are the 5th largest producer of cellulose in the world; have a very diverse market offering services not limited to banking and the manufacture of petrochemicals; and have the 8th largest GDP in the world. Not that this income generated is distributed equally; quite the contrary, its distribution is anything but fair.
So, bearing all of this in mind, I had to ask: how and why did I get here?
Last April while on my way back home, I had a short stop in Barbados where the Fresh Milk Art Platform Inc. team was giving a presentation to a Brazilian delegation that included Videobrasil’s programming director, Thereza Farkas. As a means of building profitable ways to engage with the South, Barbados had invested in opening lines of communication with Brazil, and as such the National Cultural Foundation of Barbados developed the e-CREATE Cultural Industries Symposium as a starting point to circulate ideas and foster collaborative exchanges. From that meeting, Fresh Milk’s director Annalee Davis reached out and put Thereza and I in touch, and the rest we would say is grant-writing history.
Nothing forms bonds like creative minds sweating it out together for funds, and trying to develop new avenues of collaboration.
A vision and a method.
Striving to understand the creative economy, sustainability and cultural value in the Caribbean is taxing work. It leads to questions and theories that are unrelated to studied data from accessible research pockets, herein citing the festival and creative industry work that Keith Nurse has been committed to over the last 20 years.
Without a way for us to ground a non-profit working model in a more feasible way and understand that it is so very different from how NGO’s are considered in the first world, it is becoming clearer to me that ARC is not only deeply embedded in identifying new ways to advocate and fight for fairness and visibility, but as a mediator/medium for shaping the tone and nature of intercultural relations. It is now even more important to think about expanding the boundaries and dialogues that comprise our cultural conversations.
ARC is in itself an act of resistance, and the promotion of different cultures in order to examine similarities and differences, engaging in a mirroring of self, is paramount. So for this creative assessment there has to be a practical assessment of aspirations. This included:
Opening up the creative Caribbean and its diaspora’s production to São Paulo, and vice versa.
Questioning what it would mean to capitalize on our creative collaboration; how would that change our vision of ourselves? What would the new mirrors of duality be in our consciousness?
Seeking different futures; what would our creative economies look like if we are willing to be open and treat them without certain geographic confinements?
Studying new paradigmatic shifts and models occurring in NGOs. If we are serious about the establishment of a holistic foundation, the development of arts education and securing a livelihood, then how do we critically think about adaptations to the models that do work and function in creative non-western arenas?
This civil goal of outreach, scholarship and exchange was anchored during my entry into Videobrasil. The Associação Cultural Videobrasil was founded by Solange Farkas, and is dedicated to the fostering, dissemination and mapping of contemporary art, as well as the public cultural promotion and the interchange of ideas between artists, curators and researchers. Its special attention is directed to the production of the geopolitical South, and it supports an active network of international cooperation.
SESC Pompeia. Southern Panoramas Pavilion.
Videobrasil has a longstanding partnership with SESC Pompeia and over the last 20 years this has led to increasing public access to the festival. It helps that the major site for Videobrasil in São Paulo is located at SESC Pompeia, a project undertaken by famed Italian/Brazilian modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi. SESC Pompeia is a site that engages with a wide audience. By nature it is a social gathering place that houses cafes, an indoor recreation area for children, exhibition and concert halls, a theatre, outdoor alcoves, a public swimming pool and a tremendous boardwalk that was littered with hundreds of bare bodies tanning upon my first visit.
The style of SESC Pompeia is reminiscent of the birth of Modernism in Brazil where Concretism / Neoconcretism and Geometric Abstraction played a heavy role in the birth of an independent identity in Brazilian art that looked at the west critically. This utilitarian manifestation is impressive and is straight out of a scene from Huxley’s Brave New World. Bo Bardi saw SESC Pompeia as a respite from the machine of capitalism, and at the centre you can simultaneously see one of the largest video festivals in the Geopolitical South, while participating in numerous social activities. The heart of SESC is this feeling of great community, of a lifeblood that is strong, potent and full of possibility.
Hit the ground running, or sweating in this case.
Everything in São Paulo runs late – not that we were late, but with the doomsday traffic and the fact that they are having the hottest summer on record in 70 years – my first full day on the ground was off to a swinging, sweaty start. Our first stop was at Galeria Vermelho. I was accompanied by Israeli born, US-based artist Irit Batsry, and communications director of Videobrasil Ana Paula Vargas. Galeria Vermelho is one of the more established blue chip galleries in São Paulo and they boast of representing a cadre of artists who have been attracting more attention on the international market over the last 5 years, including Cinthia Marcelle, Cadu, Ana Maria Tavares and Rodrigo Braga.
Staghorn Fern in the outdoor garden of Galeria Vermelho
With a very modern setting, Galeria Vermelho was a prime example of a carefully considered space; the use of nature and severity in views and thoroughfare – cutting, chunking, peeping – gives it a very special edge and appeal. From most of the galleries and walkways you were allowed to contemplate the exterior, seeing fractions of the day, snippets of light that add a reflective and freeing quality when viewing work. They have an extensive collection of monographs by Brazilian artists and the history of Brazilian art, along with several alcoves. The roof and back yard garden allow for loitering, reiterating its location in the South (picture a lovely Stag Horn fern spanning 5 feet in diameter adorning the back wall). On view were the works of Andreas Fogarasi, Maurício Ianės and Carmela Gross.
At lunch, we were joined by Portuguese producer and founder of FUSO, Antonio Câmaram who organises the roving video festival that goes on during August across various museum gardens in Lisbon, Portugal.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Another industry stronghold, Galeria Luisa Strina is the oldest contemporary art gallery in São Paulo. Established in 1974, it has gone on to develop the careers of major Brazilian artists like Tunga, Cildo Meireles, Antonio Dias and Edgard de Souza. On view was ‘Secret Codes’ organised by Spanish curator Agustín Pérez Rubio. The group show provided an overview of the history of Conceptual art, bringing together thirty-two artists from Brazil and abroad, and almost forty different artworks dating from the 1960s to the present. The show was divided into 7 segments that took into consideration the evasion of language and meaning through various concerns of poetics, space, social relations, time etc. Stand out features included Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project, 1970 by Cildo Meireles, Luigi Serafani’s Codex Seraphinianus 1981, and Quad I & II by Samuel Beckett.
Spread of the Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini. Original Edition on view at Luisa Strina Gallery.
Mendes Wood was closed for an installation, but we were able to see some of the collection, which included works by David Salle, Tunga, and a collection of modest sized photographs by Francesca Woodman. What was outstanding about the layout (and most of the places visited) was the way these galleries were treated as an antithesis to the formal white cubes that are the norm in western counterparts. As a revolt against sterile, minimal environments and the fact that concrete features heavily in an oppressive way in this city, these galleries are thinking about new ways to incorporate nature, while reflecting on how Modernism and Concretism have shaped the design. They use this methodology to subvert the notion of seeing work in typical ways; from having walkways lined with vines, ferns and palms to having glass and the exterior provide respite while critically engaging with objects – the structures inform the language and reading of the works.
This was predominant at our visit to Galeria Nara Roesler where we saw a strong selection of work by several emerging, mid career and established artists from Vik Muniz, Isaac Julien, Tomie Ohtake, and Laura Vinci. The gallery formally represents approximately 36 artists and has been around for 25 years. On view was a group exhibition entitled ‘Prática Portátil’ showcasing the collection of the gallery, and it honed in on the poetics of practice in each of the artists’ works.
Virginia de Medeiros (Bahia, Brazil) presented Fala dos Confins, which documented the artist’s twenty-day journey in Bacia do Jacupie in the dry lands of Bahia while journeying through five cities in a Volkswagen Kombi. This work explores the nature of speech and observation that lends itself to legend, fable, folklore and the rich tradition of oral history that are intrinsic human qualities in the rural landscape of northern Brazil. In this haunting piece of storytelling, de Mederios has dialogue with the landscape and with the past in a quiet but sprawling manner.
Vik Muniz’ 140kg suitcase cast in marble at Galerie Nara Roesler. Nature enters all of these alcoves, redefining the function of a white cube. There are a lot of these structural slippages in São Paulo’s contemporary art world.
Work by Lucia Koch at Galeria Nara Roesler
Columbian artist Alberto Baraya’s continuous project ‘The Herbarium of Artificial Plants’ 2001-ongoing, sets out to question the nature of empirical objectivity in research, science and botany. It re-elaborates royal scientific journeys of the 18th and 19th centuries to the Americas which collected, dissected, classified and framed non-European nature. Following the work of Carl Linnaeus (father of Taxonomy), Baraya’s aim with this project is to collect, identify and classify every artificial plant possible. Baraya has stated: ‘By picking up some plastic flowers on the street, I behave like the scientists that Western education expects us to become. By changing the goals of this simple task, I resist this “destiny”.’[1]
Our final stop for the day was the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, a private institution that has been around for 12 years, whose programming and projects are largely based on public education and, more specifically, education for teachers. They host up to 20 temporary exhibitions every year and are specifically interested in the work emerging out of Brazil after World War II through today. The institute has seven exhibition halls spanning over two floors, one of which houses an education sector with four studios, rooms for seminars, and a hall with a restaurant, bookstore and merchandise store.
Paulo Miyada, contemporary art curator, researcher and head of the centre for Research and Curatorship at the Institute introduced us to the programming and gave us a brief history on the current collection. First we visited the exhibition of sculptor, designer and teacher Nelson Felix’s ‘Verse (my gold, I leave here)’ which factored heavily in a study on note taking, geography and the imagination. Nelson presented over 100 drawings which observe the city of São Paulo as a main economic and cultural location, lying in equal distance across an imaginary line that connects two small islands in the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean. We then saw two rooms that paid homage to the centenary of Tomie Ohtake, namesake and founder of the institution, who moved to Brazil from Japan at the age of 21 and is still a staple component of the creative climate of São Paulo. São Paulo is home to the largest population of Japanese outside of the main land of Japan.
Nelson Felix’s ‘Verso’ on view at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, in São Paulo. Guide with curator and activist Paulo Miyada.
Nelson Felix’s ‘Verso’ on view at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, toured with with curator and activist Paulo Miyada as my guide.
As the day drew to a close, we piled up in our taxi, exhausted, and were whisked to our various abodes. My stop was last, and for an elated instant, I considered going to see Lars Von Trier’s ‘Nymphomaniac’. Instead, I opted to float in the warm rooftop pool, staring at the opaque orange sky while skyscrapers rose beside me with their glass, concrete and people in fervour.
Southern Panoramas (Exchange and Interference: In Search of the Other)
In the curatorial essay welcoming the public to the Festival, curators Eduardo de Jesus, Fernando Olivia, Júlia Rebouças, in collaboration with main curator and founder of Videobrasil Solange Farkas, state the raison d’être and schematic of the Southern Panoramas collection:
“This diagram’s perspectives build multiple approximations, favouring intense dialogue between distinct forms of artistic expression, divergent world views, appropriations and re-articulation of tradition and history. Between its points—with retrain fragments of their context of origin—lines of dialogue are drawn that share a search for new narratives and ways of living with and assimilating the Other.”
The quest for new narratives is something that I keep encountering in my studies and quest across the Caribbean. Opening lines of dialogue between the geopolitical South, which is the main objective of Videobrasil, reveals the seriousness of their effort in determining new politics, articulations and subjectivities that plague, and in a broader sense co-opt, the artists whose works have been selected for this showcase.
After previewing the collection and being so uninformed of the work emerging out of these territories, I was left with questions about our placement in the Caribbean and the way we have decided to establish our institutions, ideas and organisations’ schematics to support creative works:
Do we have the cultural vision, infrastructure and foresight to carry the visual arts industries forward?
The Caribbean functions as a truly national space given our policies and the way in which we have relegated our borders. Can an adapted model working in an Intra Caribbean and autonomous way function to counteract the ways that we have set up support systems?
If in the wider system of operations, governmental and informally, artists are left sterile and vulnerable without support or with limited support, then why are we, as independent artist-led initiatives, struggling to define our creativity? Is this environment and its health a moot concern, only valuable to a handful of people?
The role of print publications then becomes significant as a cultural repository for ideas and presence, their manifestation creating a critical outlet for new ways of thinking about independent action and crafting autonomy, which works against systems of defining our collectivity. ARC acts as a think tank, where new philosophies can arise and be promoted out of cultural diplomacy. Existing as a brand and an action identified by the outer world as pioneering a type of previously unmatched visibility, how can we define our motions in these terms? By navigating across Caribbean cultures and highlighting what unites us rather than divisive traits, ARC seeks to rise above social, political and cultural factions that often operate in unnecessary opposition to one another, in order to direct the way in which we are perceived by those looking in. Artists like Tania Bruguera and her Immigrant Movement International project and assorted social interdisciplinary acts are prime examples of this redirection and re-presentation of perceptions on culture and community, and suggest ways of functioning within bureaucracy, obtaining power and visibility and, in effect, controlling how the international public views our spaces.
View of main multimedia, education and public programming room at Galpao. Exhibition highlights media supported over the last 18 festivals over the course of 30 years.
Non-profit models therefore need to be revised as they take effect in developing countries. There is a belief of them being impractical in ways that factor and impact directly on our creative health and survival. Finally, this Videobrasil collection and its reach into Oceania, Asia, and the Middle East left me thinking about ways in which we can develop our legislation to battle the vagaries of nationalism that threaten to hold us in one place, with one circular, limiting narrative incapable of progress.
I have been asked to contribute to Videobrasil’s mapping project, Platform VB. Report forthcoming, I will give a glimpse into the experience which ties in to my practice as a fine artist and includes poignant indicators as to the way the curators have decided to map out the space. Some mistakenly consider that the platform only supports media and video arts, however the show is greater in its wealth and diversity, supporting various photographic series, installations, graphic art and optical projects that extend intricacies of human conflicts – internal and external – in very subtle ways.
The layout of this show moves along visual nuances, formal cinematic inventions and narratives that defy easy representation. They challenge tropes and intensify our understanding of the ways that artists are reinforcing language and dimensionality. To be explicit, Lais Myrrha laid out a broad line of granite that buttressed two panels, thus creating a walkway. This dust mound, Theory of the Edges was roughly 2 meters wide and 7meters long and was split in two by a colour divide. Half of its composition was jet black sparkling grains, meeting a dull white counterpart. Viewers are left to troll over this sand, and as they roam the space this clear line of black/white becomes confused, and at the centre of this meeting point and disruption the sand has turned grey.
In its poetics, this clash speaks heavily towards personal mobility; towards action and consequence, and within the larger framework of the exhibition, asks us to consider the nature of greyness and dualities in our personal lives. This quickly extends to a politicised reading of self, as boundaries, limitations and greater conflicts are referenced when exploring this showcase of vulnerability and complexity.
This specific installation recalled Robert Smithson’s ‘A Tour of the Monuments along the Passaic‘ where he left NYC in 1967 and revisited spaces that once upon a time were familiar to him. He takes very mundane photographs and juxtaposes them with words that reference his personal and political being, and at the end of this essay he conjures a playground for the reader, a sandbox in which, over the passage of time, a child is left to circle clockwise and anticlockwise. This time that Smithson conjures is cyclic and non-linear; the sandbox becomes a confused mass of white sand – mixing with lower grades of black sand turning a confused grey. In this grey, Smithson reflects on his conceptual practice, on the poetics of cinema and the false sense of immortality that it provokes in the viewer. I too witness the mixture as the exhibition draws to a close, providing a similar instance for me to reflect on as I think about this city, its mega structures and all the falsities that give it stability.
Re-entering the work, I consider the narratives of ambiguity rising out of the works of Bakary Diallo, Leticia Ramos, Lorraine Heller Nicholas, Tao Hui, the stellar Virginia de Medeiros – the stand out artist in my São Paulo visit – Gianfranco Foschino, Aryson Heraclito and Turkish artist Zafer Topaloglu. Topaloglu’s 5-channel epic ‘Waved’ dealt with confession, memory, isolating identities and images that tried desperately to fill in the gaps that exist psychologically through the fluidity of influence and culture. I conclude that the curators of the Southern Panoramas showcase were thinking about ideologies and a specific type of manifestation of presence.
Installation shot of the Southern Panoramas Showcase. Image courtesy of Videobrasil.
Installation shots of the Southern Panoramas Showcase courtesy of Videobrasil.
Through all of these subjectivities, I am keenly aware of context, action and the way that human collectivism is now drawing from smaller, and at the same time larger, pools within distinct culture. The words that tie all of these things together directly reference collectivity, vestiges, memory, love, transgression and dualities. These are the words that provide me with the keys to unlock the content, which I will further explore and develop through the works of the artists mentioned.
That evening, we visited a library to attend a screening of the Egyptian film The Square and an artist talk by Shady El Noshokaty, who decided to drop into Galpão earlier that day. The thing about being in a creative community like Videobrasil and around SESC Pompei is that spontaneous things happen all the time. I was lucky to have a first hand account of an artist/activist recount his memories of the Arab Spring in 2011, and the failure of said attempt to bring reformation to his native land. The talk became political, charged and loud. I had questions about the role of documentary photography in relation to Susan Sontag’s seminal work in ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’, and how to work in an objective way when entrenched in various traumas. How do photographers occupy a space that breeds or facilitates a truer encouragement of reading both the surface and the inside of these tragedies? My questions, however, weren’t in the realm of being discussed or considered, as supporters, most of Jewish and Middle Eastern descent, dominated the dialogue for the evening and the declaration of an artist as ‘an artist only’ couldn’t’ save El Noshokaty from the polarities, truths and dilemmas expressed during the debate.
Wanderlust:
The Edifício Copan is a 140-meter, 38-story building designed by famed architect Oscar Niemeyer during 1957-1966 and is the largest residential building in the world, housing upwards of 5000 people. Its sinuous space and concrete gridding makes its presence one that is optical and disorienting, modeled after Le Corubusier’s Unite d’habitation. Erected to bring São Paulo into a modern city centre, its façade 50+ years later is one that is rugged, grey and monstrous. In a city of skyscrapers it is easy to feel inconsequential – however the Copan with its busy alphabetized blocks and dirtiness left me with the idea that I was walking through a modern ruin, and this ruin, even though occupied, was projecting its own demise. I felt that way about a lot of things in São Paulo, a lot of ends and romance towards greater demises.
Oscar Niemeyer’s Edifício Copan
Through the floating streams of people I find myself a little lost; in São Paulo, one is always a little lost. I am making my way to Pivô, a 12,000 square feet cultural non profit art platform founded in 2012 which acts as a point of exchange and experimentation for local artists to answer critical questions relating to contemporary art and urbanism.
The founder of Pivô, artist and cultural activist Fernanda Brenner, greets me with her staff, two young women busy plugging away at computers and managing workflow. Pivô, previously a hospital, is now a collection of many cavernous spaces, and I was taken through three magnificent floors to see its infrastructural wealth and learn about Brenner’s plans for its development.
It was clear that as the founder of a young non-profit space, she was still coming to terms with understanding what that meant for the future; its sustainability through the development of applicable, timely and consistent programming. In order to activate the full project – which deals with education, curatorial refinement, an ongoing residency program, keeping studios open and available while developing a strict research hub that expands on the current dynamics of production, pedagogy and circulation of national and international theorists, and educators – Brenner and her team have some considerable work before them. Thankfully they have very rich and diverse ideas regarding raising substantial support, and Pivô as a political act works against the current system of market and institutional support in São Paulo, giving them an edge and a kind of visibility that is absent from other independent enterprises.
Studio and residency space at Pivô.
Brenner spoke in definite(s) against the current tendencies of support and the lack of private sector buy in, which continues to negatively affect artists and their ability to enter into the market, incubate and experiment. Pivô’s directing team has ideas of developing and opening up its mission to a wider audience, hinting to the development of a communal area that would reconsider communal assembly within a very hectic and driven urban setting while revolving around keeping up with the ongoing dialogue that is essential to the context and relevance of existing within the walls of the Copan, which shapes its presence and efforts.
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In this city, it is best to walk with directions written down so that cabbies can assist you without wading through rudimentary English. I have no rudimentary Portuguese but I am not completely lost as it is relatively close to Spanish. We pull up to the outskirts of Jardin da Luz and move through the gates of my next stop, the Pinacoteca, which was established in 1905 and still today is one of the most important museums in Brazil. It used to be the headquarters of the Lyceum of Arts and Crafts, and in the 1990s its focus shifted to develop a history of supporting international exhibitions, a growing documentation centre and a wide collection of 19th century Brazilian art. It also has a significant collection of work from the Modernist era.
Photographic installation ‘Segmentos’ by Luzia Simons at the Pinacoteca.
Here I viewed works by Moussia, and the beautiful photographic installation ‘Segmentos’ by Luzia Simons consisting of 4 large panels of segmented tulips which referenced the Garden of Eden and enveloped the circumference of the museum’s atrium. After a trip to the bookstore to see what monographs they had in English, I emerged with a guide that helped me through the historical exhibition, lending a better appreciation of important works developed in the 19th and 20th centuries while giving room to understand the nature of colonisation, the effects of Brazilian independence and globalization on the works that I was viewing.
At lunch, a group of middle-aged women met me in the café and asked to sit with me. They were surprised that I was visiting from the Caribbean, so naturally they had a round of 20 questions for me. The spirit of these women, as artists, educators and scholars left an impression on me, and I was determined now more than ever to wander through this city to find other treasures, other means of unlocking the histories, secrets and determinants of São Paulo.
And I think perhaps at the Terraço Itália later in the evening as I watched the pink sun set, hued by the city’s pollution, with its tender eruption of buildings, I found it. I found it, in a certain type of glassed quietude; with patterned flocks around me and in the silent way in which a city so full of tension can wrap itself around you and cradle you in significance and penetrating resonance. With some meaning and resolve for why I move back and forth across these boundaries, and why at times the troughs and waves are far less and more than the highs and lows.
Sunset from the Terraço Itália.
[1] Interview with the author in Como Viver Junto, Fundaçao Bienal, São Paulo, 2006, p. 24