Sâo Paulo Travelogue August 22nd - 30th, 1997 (First Travel) Andreas Broeckmann, V2_Organisation, on tour with Christian Huebler, Knowbotic Research. The week Friday, 22nd Departure from Frankfurt/Main (22.15). Saturday, 23rd Arrival in Sao Paulo (5.00). Marina Ludemann of the Goethe Institut Sao Paulo picks us up from the airport and drives us to our hotel (Hotel St. Peter, Alameda Lorena 1160). Marina will take care of us for the rest of our stay, coordinating the schedule, taking us to places, and helping us in negotiations with different people. After breakfast we take a walk to the Avenida Paulista which is close to the hotel. Avenida Paulista has, for the last twenty-odd years, been the financial centre of Sao Paulo. All the big banks, telecommunications companies, etc., have their office blocks there. They moved here from the old city centre, 'downtown', which had become too small and too congested. Sao Paulo is the largest industrial city in South America, and the Av. Paulista is its financial heart - this is probably as close as you can get to the Global City on the sub-continent. At the moment, the banks and companies are gradually moving away from the Paulista to a new speculation site in the west of the city, along the Pinheiros river. New office blocks are being built there, as well as a helicopter terminal, because that seems to be the only fast way of travelling: public transport is insufficient, and the city streets frequently congested. The 'better road access', which is one of the pro's for the move to Pinheiros, is already getting stuck again in peak hours that extend over most of the day. We then take a rest at the hotel, where Marina picks us up at 15.00, together with her German friend Jutta who has been living in Sao Paulo for 18 months but who will have to go back to Germany soon as she cannot find work and her visum is running out. We drive over to Giselle Beiguelman's flat, and move on from there by foot for a walk round the old city centre. Giselle is a journalist who works for Universo Online, the Internet branch of the Folha de Sao Paulo, the biggest Brazilian daily newspaper, and she is cooperating in the Arte/Cidade project of the group Urban Interventions, led by Nelson Brissac Peixoto. Giselle is also a subscriber to the Nettime mailing list. We walk to the hotel where Mike Sandbothe is staying, a philosopher from Magdeburg who is also in town on invitation by the Goethe Institut. He will take part in a seminar which will also include Siegfried Zielinski, Dietmar Kamper, Harry Pross, and others. Although it is the weekend and we are told that the centre is 'empty', we find it pretty busy with people hanging around in the streets, selling drinks (incl. refridgerated coconuts), music tapes, snacks, there are shoe shiners and fortune tellers, as well as homeless people lying around on banks, the pavement, or the few pieces of lawn. The homeless who live in the streets, sleeping under blankets, in cardboard boxes, under bridges and beside public buildings, are a continuous presence in the extended city centre. How many there are is unclear, but Renato says that there might not be more than 5000 in the whole of Sao Paulo, but because they are so visible the impression arises that there must be more. Almost everybody initially tells us that the city is very dangerous and that we have to watch out constantly, be careful, not risk anything, etc. Here, 'downtown', it seems that some of that fear is based on the fact that what still could look like a metropolitain, post-colonial centre, has been abandoned by the middle classes and has been taken over by poorer people who spend their days and do their business here. The 'public sphere' as an open, public place where middle class people will go to drink coffee, talk, and do business, is certainly no longer present here. But the poorer people use the same place for doing exactly that, and what is called danger and is articulated as fear and uncertainty, is to a large extent the feeling of alienation and loss. While 'revitalising the centre' would probably mean kicking out the poor people and ensuring stable, high property prices, the richer Paulistanos may have to get used to the new, the transformed and very much vital centre of the city. Without romanicising the situation there it seems necessary to acknowledge the presence and actuality of the people who live in and use those public spaces. We go to the Edificio Italia, a 40-storey building in the centre that has a bar and a restaurant at the top from where you have a fantastic panorama view of the inner parts of Sao Paulo - the rest disappears in the mist on the horizon. As night falls, we drink Caipirinha and get to know each other. Later we take a snack at Marina's house and then go to a concert of the lesbian rock singer Cassia Eller who entertains an excited, mixed audience with her powerful voice and extravagant show. On the way back to the hotel we have a beer with Giselle and talk about the BrasMitte project in which Giselle has been involved for a while but which has yet to be realised. It is an initiative by Nelson Brissac Peixoto and tries to develop a cooperation between artists and urban planners in Sao Paulo and Berlin. The title refers to the Sao Paulo district of Bras, and Berlin-Mitte, which are to be compared, linked, used for joint projects of 'art in public spaces', etc. Knowbotic Research had been approached by Alfons Hug of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt - the Berlin-branch of BrasMitte - to see whether they could get involved, so it was interesting to hear the different ideas about this project from various people over the following days. Sunday, 24th We spend the morning working at the hotel, preparing for tonight's presentation at the Instituto Cultural Itau. At13.00 Fabio Duarte de Araujo picks us up. Fabio is a friend who had been in Rotterdam before the N5M conference in 1995-96 and had helped with the preparations of the Alien Staff project V2 did with Krzysztof Wodiczko. Fabio is an architect working and living in Sao Paulo and Limeira and is currently doing a PhD project about 'digital nomadism'. Fabio is an important conversation partner and indispensible guide throughout the week. We walk along the Avenida Paulista, take a look at the outside of the MASP modern art museum, built by architect Lina Bo Bardi, have some 'fast sushi' for lunch and then proceed to the Instituto Cultural Itau (ICI) where we do some final preparations, technical check-up, etc. Itau is a bank, its branches omnipresent it seems throughout the city. Itau also builds computers and technical equipment, and is probably involved in a lot of other things. The ICI is a modern five-storey building on the Av. Paulista with a glass facade, the ground and first floors hold the gallery, further above are offices, at the back there is a lecture hall seating around 100. Together with the Paco das Artes Gallery, the ICI is preparing an exhibition about media art that will open at the end of September. At 18.00 we start the presentation about KRcF projects (DWTKS, Anonymous Muttering, Tendencies), and about some of the recent projects of V2 in the field of city/networks ('Digital Territories'), and machinic aesthetics. Translation is, we are told, excellently provided by Herr George Bernard Sperber, a quinto-lingual phenomenon. Despite the fact that we talk much longer than planned, there are still people in the hall and some ask engaging questions. It's 21.00 when we finish. >From there we move over to Marina's place for an evening party. We meet Renato Cymbalista who works for an NGO concerned with city development and who knows a lot about the legal and the illegal city. He suggests to us to take us into one of the favelas, an offer we eagerly accept. Many others who hear about this look at us in amazement, they think we are crazy to go there - the images that the word 'favela' calls up seem to lie close to what Purgatory might be. We also meet Herrn Strauss of the Goethe Institut, and Lucas Bambozzi, artist and free-lance media art curator at the Casa das Rosas. Casa das Rosas is a new art-place located on Av. Paulista, close to the ICI, and is directed by the artist J.R. Aguilar. Lucas is curating a show about machine and electronic art that will open in November and that is, as he says, a bit rougher and more 'low-tech' than the one that will open earlier at the Itau. Monday, 25th The Goethe Institut has organised a workshop which we are going to hold, but as we have no clear idea about who will participate,we leave the programme relatively open. On Monday we meet up at Itau Gallery at 11.00. Beside Fabio, there are five others. Not all of the participants of the workshop can come at this moment. Here are the people who will participate in parts of the workshop, with the projects that they will present during one of the sessions: Sandro Canavezzi de Abreu, an architect, artist and comic designer who lives in different cities and who knows Sao Paulo at night, and some of the favelas, has proposed a large telematic building for the borderline between the Praca da Se and Bras - an experiential environment that will facilitate the encounter by poor people with high technology. Artur Lara has turned his studio in Vila Maddalena into the first Cybercafe in Sao Paulo, has done research about Graffiti groups in Sao Paulo and is now working with drummers and musicians. There are three main graffiti groups in Sao Paulo who have distinct calligraphic styles and who are competing with each other through finding ever more daring, ever more astonishing surfaces for their inscriptions (like the front of the roof of a branch of the Itau bank). Silvana Olivieri is an urbanist who comes from Bahia/Salvador and whose project 'Refactory' proposes to turn an old factory terrain in Bras into a community centre and a factory for goods made from recycled materials. Silvana names the work of three people as key inspirations for her own attempts: the Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, the Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica, and the Flemish architect Lucien Frank. The first two of these frequently recur as reference points in our discussions of the coming days. Polise de Marchi is the only person we meet who actually lives in the infamous eastern part of Sao Paulo which begins with Bras and which many middle class people have never visited in their lives. Polise's family is from Italy and she has grown up there. She has done her final study project about the gasometer in Bras which she proposes to turn into a cultural center and theatre space. Valeria Nagy is an urban planner who works together with Polise and Silvana. She only joins us on the last day of the workshop. Valeria has a job at a planning office that evaluates architectural projects regarding their effects in terms of car traffic and parking. Eduardo Jorge Canella is an architecture student at FAU - USP who has worked on a theatre project for the local community in the Sao Paulo quarter of Jacana. Jackson and Sergio, both from the Casa das Rosas, where they do technical and Internet-related work, join us at the Itau Gallery later in the afternoon. After a short ride on the subway we walk through the centre in the Praca da Se area, and then through the Parque Don Pedro to Bras. The park forms a brutal border between the central and western part of the city, and the east. Several multi-lane highways, a concrete-lined canal that once was a river, fences around the lawns and trees that cannot prevent the homeless from setting up their tents and make-shift tenements. A wide and empty space that reminds me of the no-man's-land along the border between East and West Germany before 1989. Crossing the line takes you away from the hybridity of downtown, where banks and official buildings stand next to the little stands, the camelos of the fortune tellers, and brings you into another Sao Paulo of the working people, of artisans and sales-people. We spend an hour walking around in the oldest part of Bras, drink a pure cane-sugar extract, and hear stories and analyses between old factories and new storehouses. We then have lunch in a 'lanches' off Av. Paulista. 'Lanches' are snack bars that can be found at many street corners and that sell simple, cheap food, beer, cigarettes, etc. From there we return to the Itau Gallery and continue our discussions about the city until we have to prepare for the panel discussion that starts at the ICI at 19.30. It is chaired by Daniela Bousso, director of the Paco das Artes modern art gallery of the USP, and includes, beside Christian and myself, Siegfried Zielinski (KHM Cologne), Arlindo Machado (USP Sao Paulo) and Laymert Garcia dos Santos (Unicamp Sao Paulo). After the statements the discussion mainly focuses on the work of KR cF which seems very interesting and challenging for the Paulistanos. Later Zielinski and we go for a little private party to Daniela's place, she serves pasta and whisky and we talk with her and her friends about another Sao Paulo. Tuesday, 26th During breakfast at the hotel, I briefly meet Artur Matuck who is a media artist and Professor of Multimedia at USP. He has done a number of network and installation projects in the past. He came for both evening programmes and asked some good questions. He later tried to join us for the workshop with some of his students but apparently couldn't make it. After coffee with Fabio at the Frans cafe we take a bus to the Cidade Universitaria where, in the Paco das Artes, we meet for the workshop at 11.00. We hold some general discussions about questions of urbanism, potential urban interventions and the role of technology and hear presentations about their projects by Canella and Sandro. After a long and exhausting discussion we break up at around 19.00 and, together with Sandro, drive over to the place in Vila Maddalena where my anthropologist-friend Pete Gow is staying. Pete is just back from the Amazon region where he visited the Panara indians - and where he drove through a small, miserable town which proudly calls itself the 'metropolis of the 3rd millenium'. We go to a nice pizza restaurant and talk about the dangers of Brazilian cities, about Rio de Janeiro, the Amazon, life, the universe and everything. For once we get back to the hotel before midnight. Wednesday, 27th At 9.15 Marina picks us up to go to the Itau Gallery for a meeting with the technical curators (Maria Eugenia S.T. Saturni, Angela Aparecida Carvalho Cilurzo) and the exhibition designer in order to plan for KRcF's participation in the exhibition there, which is starting on 23 September. Half an hour late (11.30) we arrive on the terrain of the old Matarazzo factory, where the Arte/Cidade 3 project will take place in October. Nelson Brissac Peixoto, initiator of arte/cidade - grupo intervencao urbana, introduces the project to a number of German guests (Kamper, Pross, Sandbothe, Zielinski, and us). It will take place on a 5 kilometre long strip of wasteland somewhere in the middle of Sao Paulo along a railway track which was first built in the late 19th century. There used to be factories and all sorts of industry and storage buildings on this strip, but it is now virtually empty - save for some graffiti adorned remains of buildings, among which is the Maturazzo factory. The Maturazzos were one of the main industrial clans that determined the development of Sao Paulo in the first half of the century. Brissac explains that the axis it forms on the aerial photograph is not perceivable at the ground level, neither can the other end of the 5 kilometre stretch be seen from the factory, nor can anybody travel parallel to it, unless by an infrequently used local train. only two of the four train tracks are still in use. The exhibition terrain is also almost invisible for the rest of the city, because no roads lead through it. Along this track, 40 art projects will be realised in and around three main locations. A train will take the exhibition visitors from one location to the next. The train itself will house a connecting project, the Kino-Train, which Lucas Bambozzi and Lucia Koch (of diphusa - distribuicao de video e arte electronica) are developing in reference to the Russian, post-revolutionary propaganda trains. Video conferencing, handy-cams handled by the visitors and other interfaces will produce multiple individual perspectives of the exhibition site. Another project within Arte/Cidade 3 is the website which is curated and designed by Giselle Beiguelman and Dede Sendyk (of the WWW design agency Folder). Like BrasMitte, Arte/Cidade 3 seems based on the fascination for an historically coded site that has lost or changed its meaning. It represents the rise of Sao Paulo in the first half of the century and, in its current state and almost 'ex negativo', the economic change that characterises the city today. The history to which it refers is that of the first generation of European immigrants, of the grandparents - the intense growth of the city in that period implies that many of the middle-class people we meet, and probably large parts of the local elites, descend from European immigrants in the third generation (Dede and Giselle called themselves the 'first post-yiddish generation). This is probably a highly significant demographic fact. It is now countered by the migration, in the last 20 years or so, from the Northeast of Brazil - poor people from the countryside looking for a livelihood in the big industrial city. This internal Brazilian migration is not infrequently refered to as an 'immigration', which points to the fact that the 'nordestinos' perceived as coming from a different culture, as foreigners, sometimes as undesirables. It seems important to ask why the Arte/Cidade project, and BrasMitte, refer to the historical city and to the historical migration experience, rather than to the current migration, which seems to be so much more important for the actual transformation of the urban fabric of Sao Paulo today. There is certainly something to be said for the affirmation of an historical dimension in a fractured city like this. But one might ask whether the 'new' Sao Paulo is not already 'an-other' city which cannot be hidden or reconciled through nostalgic gestures. At 13.00 we drive over to the nearby SESC Pompeia centre with Lucas Bambozzi. SESC is a national Brazilian association of people who work in commerce, which as far as I understood covers the whole tertiary sector. SESC has many centres all across the country, theatres, cinemas, leisure centres, where social and cultural initiatives are organised for members and sometimes non-members. SESC Pompeia is a large community centre in a complex of former factory buildings. It houses a public library, and exhibition space, a theatre, handicraft workshops, sports halls, and a large hall with a bar where people can sit, talk, read and watch television. The centre was designed by the architect Lina Bo Bardi who came >from Bahia and who did projects all over Brazil, amongst which is also the MASP on Av. Paulista. Some of the workshop participants refer to her as the most important Brazilian architect who, unlike the modern Brazilian monumentalist Oscar Niemeyer, built in a style much more attentive to the surrounding of each individual project, and to the cultural function and background of the people who would use the buildings. SESC Pompeia is like the eye of the storm, an island in the city.It has the space and the peacefulness that so much of Sao Paulo is lacking. It feels like the spatialised nucleus of a civic stratum, and although it is over 20 years old, it still looks fresh and interesting and functional. Viewed from here, there is hope for Sao Paulo. At 14.00 we meet with Renato in the bar, have lunch and look at Renato's photographic projects. He takes series of pictures which document details of the city which are easily overlooked but which show the individual inventiveness and creativity that goes into the design of, for instance, the painted wooden boards of pick-up trucks, the roofs of residential houses, or the graves in the cemetries of the poor. Renato says that for him there is enough 'art' in these everyday details of the city. We then drive down south to the periphery of Sao Paulo. It is Renato's route between the centre and his home outside of town, so he knows where he is going. There are favelas all across the sprawl of Sao Paulo and they are supposedly different from each other, but as during the week we don't meet anybody who knows much about the different parts of Sao Paulo, it is a matter of publicised crime statistics, overall size and infrastructural provisions that at this point make them distinguishable. We drive through some neighbourhoods of a favela in the south, which as we are later told is one of the most violent ones, but that is not apparent at first sight and might not mean very much in practical terms, unless you live there. In one instance, a large truck is parked in the middle of a narrow road and we see a bunch of young men hanging around at a car garage. If they were going to stage a hold-up, they would do it like this ... We think very quickly how to react, but when Renato asks them to move the truck to the side they do so immediately and we drive on, slowly, meandering around the high 'sleeping policemen'. There was clearly more fear than danger. >From a busy main road that leads away from the centre, smaller streets branch off to the left and to the right into the residential areas of the favela. Single-lane tracks with tarmac wind through densely built areas with brick houses, often two or three storeys high, sometimes built up or down the sloping hills, with little courtyards. The buildings are simple and sometimes improvised, but they don't look miserable. Shops, bars and workshops that we see are small, clean, and look as though they were functioning well for the community here. People are sitting around in the streets, children playing, everbody is wearing clean clothes. There is no tragedy in the air as with the homeless people in the centre, this has some normality. Most people seem to have electricity, in the neighbourhoods where we drive through there is an occasional public telephone. Water and sewage seem to be the biggest problem. The water reservoirs in the south of the city are being polluted (maybe not even only by the favelas?), and the bad sanitary situation makes life more difficult and more dangerous for the people living here. But there seems to be a dispute within the city government whether one should build sewage and water systems in order to improve the situation in the favelas and thereby possibly make it more attractive for people from the Northeast to come to Sao Paulo, or whether the favelas should not be recognised as legal quarters and left as they are, in order not to encourage their growth further. The ideology, the ethics and the politics of this dispute are obvious . Renato says that for him it is important to recognise this as a poor but valid way of living, and that the favelas are not simply ugly, but that the bricolage creativity that goes into this architecture brings forth an interesting, at times even beautiful style. We drive on to Renato's house which lies in a gated community on a peninsular reaching into one of the water reservoirs that provide the drinking water for Sao Paulo. It is quiet here, there are large gardens and mainly small and medium-sized detached houses. These used to be weekend houses for the Sao Paulo rich and is now an 'alternative' settlement, a mixed community of second-generation weel-off Paulistanos, 'green' German emigrants from several generations, etc. The road is a dirt track which the inhabitants have been protecting in order to prevent fast driving. The water of the reservoir is too dirty to be inviting for a swim even on a warm day like today, so we just go for a walk along the sandy beach at the bottom of the garden, have a beer in the afternoon sun, and conscientiously leave again before the sunset in order to meet our appointment in town. Renato drops us off at the office of the Folder design agency near Parque Ibirapuera where his brother, Andre Cymbalista, works as an internet designer and programmer. Too soon, the taxi driver shows up and drives us across the centre to the building of Folha de Sao Paulo, where at 19.00 Giselle Beiguelman is expecting us for an Internet chat on the Universo Online website. The chat goes quite well, though we discover that the WWW is much slower than 'normal' IRC connections, which slows down the communication a lot, and that an hour is very little time for such a non-linear form of communication with strangers. Giselle is a bit worried about the fact that I communicate in different languages but not in Portugese, but we have a laugh in the end and some of the exchanges with the participants are meaningful and lead to follow-up email contacts. Artur Lara is with us at UOL and drives us, after we are finished there, to his studio and Internet cafe in Vila Maddalena. We want to go out and eat, and he takes us to the best pizzeria in Sao Paulo which happens to be just round the corner from where he lives - and exactly the same place that we went to the night before with Pete. (So much for the size of Sao Paulo.) We go to a 'meat restaurant', have a great meal with meat, vegetables and salads, and listen to Artur's stories of his out-of-body experiences. For coffee we go to the nearby Bar Empanada which is a well-known meeting place for students and others. Thursday, 28th On Thursday we again meet at 11.00 at Paco das Artes for the last day of the workshop. Silvana and Polise present their projects for the gasometer and the 'Refactory' in Bras, and we again talk about different historical, economic and cultural aspects of the urban fabric. During and after lunch at Economy Faculty of USP we begin talking about how to proceed with the Knowbotic Research project for Sao Paulo. It is clear that the experiences of the city and the workshop are far too fresh now for everybody to lead to anything like a conception, but there is a general agreement that we should somehow develop and work on this together. Some points we talk about: Unlike the architectural and urbanistic projects that we have mainly talked about during the workshop, the KR project would be more directed at an experimental interface that would allow for a reflection about how to act and intervene in the urban environment, rather than at addressing a particular urbanistic situation. Whether this would be developed in relation to a specific area in the city (as is happening in Tokyo now, and as could be imagined in relation to the area between the Praca da Se and Bras), or to a distribution of nodes in different parts of the city, or on a more abstract, conceptual level, would have to be discussed. An important aspect of a project in Sao Paulo could be the problem of connecting people who are living in what many experience as a fractured, incoherent, a broken city. However, the approach should not be through a mimetic representation of the city (e.g. through its history, its transgressive map, or the social segmentations), but by articulating the possibilities that the machinification of certain phylums of the urban situation might offer. Questions of scale have to be considered carefully: how to find a level of urban agency that does not fall victim to the fractured and unbounded vastness of the city, but that is also more than a localised intervention. The local knowledge and experience that is present in the workshop group should be tapped and used as one of the bases for creating a locally specific approach to the Sao Paulo 'Tendencies'. There was a lot of positive feedback to the physicality of the membrane interface used in Anonymous Muttering, and frequent mention was made to the strata of colours, music, and bodies as significant reference points for understanding the Brazilian urban culture - as maybe epitomised by Helio Oiticica's ParangolŽ-cloaks. During these final discussions, Fabio is having a class at university, and we later wait for him next to the Paco das Artes. We play music from the car (Carlinho Brown, Chico Science), and Sandro and Silvana give a performance of the dance/fight Capoeira on the pavement. Through the thick evening traffic we drive over to Parque Ibirapuera, a park where people >from all social strata meet, play and spend time at the weekends. It also houses the exhibition hall of the Sao Paulo Biennale. While Silvana and Polise (and Valeria) then go for their German classes at the Goethe Institut, Andreas and Fabio take a rest for a couple of hours and later join up with Christian and Artur again, who have gone to Artur's studio where he is holding his weekly jam session with some musicians from the area - a guitar, a flute, various percussion instruments. The original plan was to go dancing, but we stay squeezed around a small table on the pavement outside the Bar Empanada until 2.30 in the morning, drink beer and caipirinha, eat empanadas, joke and chat. Friday, 29th On Friday morning we meet at 10.00 at the Frans cafe in Alameda Lorena for an interview that Fabio, Sandro, Silvana and Polise want to do with us. The time is too short, but it is enough for us to formulate some of the first ideas about the week in Sao Paulo, and how this links in with the rest of our ideas about networks, media and the city. At 11.30 we say good bye to Marina Ludemann and the others at the hotel. Our plane leaves almost on time at 14.00 URLs Arte/Cidade - http://www.artecidade.org.br BrasMitte - http://www.artecidade.org.br/brasmitte ArtLab Tokyo - http://www.canon.co.jp/cast Casa das Rosas - http://www.dialdata.com.br/casadasrosas diphusa - http://www.comum.com/diphusa Folder - http://www.folder.com.br Goethe Institut - http://www.goethe.de/br/sap Instituto Cultural Itau - http://www.ici.org.br KRcF - http://www.khm.de/people/krcf Telepolis 'Cyber Paulista' - http://www.heise.de/tp/arch/6089/1.html That - http://www.that.com.br Universo Online - http://www.uol.com.br V2_Organisation - http://www.v2.nl				SP Workshop 1998 SP City Sp Workshop 1 SP Workshop 2 SP Travel_Log Andreas Broeckmann