The first stage of judging for Viver a Rua having been completed (sorry, the results are strictly confidential) I took the opportunity of a four-day trip to Lisboa.
Wow. What a fantastic city.
Lisbon is a city of hills and views, of winding ancient alleyways and six lane avenues. With so much mountainous topography the transport system is key. It is a delight. Perfect little trams rush round hairpin bends and stagger up impossibly steep climbs. It was with a real schoolboy glee that I sat on the number 28 to the end of the line and then rode it all the way back again.
There are a series of ‘elevators’ that make one journey up and down continuously. Elevador da Bica travels from the riverside to town and back again, the street’s inhabitants clearing a path with a well-practiced millisecond to spare.
More spectacular but no less practical is Elevador de Santa Justa. If it is possible to be a little bit in love with an elevator then I stake my claim to Elevador de Santa Justa. Built by Gustave Eiffel’s pupil Raul Mésnier, it has the advantage over the Eiffel Tower of being incredibly useful. Not only is it an extraordinary city icon it also gets you through the equivalent of nine stories of city steps in a few seconds.
The brilliant thing about these transport wonders is that they are entirely integrated into the metropolitan ticket system. So although they do attract sightseers who come along simply for the ride, they are also part of the working fabric of the city.
From the top of Elevador de Santa Justa the city spreads out below and above, with the Castelo de São Jorge on the horizon.
Up at the battlements of the Castelo, Elevador de Santa Justa beams.
From the eastern side of the castle you can just make out the Ponte Vasco de Gama, Europe’s longest bridge at 17.2 kilometres.
This tantalising glimpse encouraged me to go to Parque das Nações, the ‘new city’ built for the 1998 Expo, but the slightly crappy funicular that erm, just goes along the riverbank, had stopped for the day and I found the whole ‘buildings of the future’ thing a bit soulless after the historic centre.
Buildings that have soul oozing out of their mortar include Torre de Belém, the early 16th Century fort built at the edge of the Tejo to defend Lisbon’s harbour.
And the incredible Mosteiro dos Jerónimos built around the same time to celebrate Vasco da Gama’s ‘discovery’ of India.
As with so much of the old colonial powers of Europe, the marvels we wonder at now were created through the exploitation of trade routes and slaves. This is a history that is not well documented for the visitor. I was staying at Atelier RE.AL, a creative hub in Rua do Poço dos Negros (‘the well of the blacks’) and it took a pointed question to my hosts to discover that this ‘well’ was a pit into which slaves were thrown.
Lisbon is the city of the literature of José Saramago, the Nobel Laureate whose death was announced on the day I arrived and whose body was flown back from his adopted home in Lanzarote to a state sponsored wake, the gravitas of which would only be afforded to popstars or Royalty in the UK.
By a complete coincidence, I found myself having dinner with the staff of RE.AL in the restaurant that was Saramago’s Lisbon regular, and where he held the wedding party of his marriage to the Spanish journalist Pilar del Río.
In this modest Portuguese eatery, the walls cluttered with snaps of their most renowned customer, the staff recalled with fondness and respect this most treasured of Portuguese writers. They were recalling him as a man. There was no discussion of literature. I wonder if they have ever read his books. If you haven’t you should strongly consider it. In The Double the protagonist is sitting in front of the television and spots a man playing a minor role in the soap opera who looks exactly – but exactly – like him; the novel follows the search for his identical other. In The History of the Siege of Lisbon the plot revolves around the consequences of a proof-reader inserting the word ‘not’ into a historical chronicle, changing the way in which the past is read. Saramago’s novels start from a very simple ‘what would happen if…’ scenario. They are brilliantly crafted.
On the day of his funeral, I went down to the City Hall where his body lay in an open casket to pay my own respects but I couldn’t get past the international media or the Portuguese dignitaries.
Not wanting to spend too much time with a corpse, I decided to forgo filing past (perhaps if I had waited long enough I would have found my chance) and carried on exploring the city.
Saramago’s face, pensive and erudite, suddenly covered billboards everywhere. “Obrigado José Saramago” they read. The authorities must have been planning for his death for some time, with a stack of posters at the ready.
Between the death of the nation’s cultural icon and their football team’s assassination of the People’s Republic of Korea 7-0 in South Africa’s World Cup, the city had plenty to talk about in the bars and cafes. “Saramago” and “Ronaldo” were uttered everywhere with unavoidable pride.
Saving the best until last.
I know it might sound disingenuous to say that the highlight of my trip to this incredible European capital was a custard tart but I promise you that this was not just any custard tart, this was a pastéis de nata, made to a secret recipe in the Antiga Confeitaria de Belém since 1837. I admit that the circumstances of my consumption were in themselves a relief, undoubtedly heightening the pleasure. Having walked half way across the city, taken a wrong train, and having had an encounter with a ticket inspector, I was suffering from a sugar low and, at the very least, needed a sit down. My expectations were also not that high. I don’t really like custard tarts. The thing was plonked, rather than placed, in front of me. But the second my lower lip brushed the thin layers of delicate crisp pastry and my upper lip the soft yellow custard cream, everything in the world suddenly seemed alright. I was completely absorbed by what was happening in my mouth.
This confeitaria can shift up to 30,000 of these creamy concoctions on a single day in the weekend. Their seemingly never-ending series of vaulted rooms can seat up to 2,000 people at a time. There are 40 women employed whose sole job it is just to roll out the pastry cases. Although pastéis de nata are sold all over Portgual, these pastéis de Belém are famous throughout the world with good reason.
They are not overly sweet. The custard is just set. The combination of flavours is comfortingly familiar and yet deliciously unique. The real pleasure – they were 15 minutes out of the oven warm.
Perfect with my bica it was a culinary moment of perfection. I immediately ordered a second.
While the competition for Viver a Rua has been drawing to a close, I have been wandering around the city waiting and wishing for something to ‘happen’. So imagine how my curiosity was aroused as I witnessed hoards of school children rush out of Escola de Carlos Alberto, ushered by anxious teachers. The roar of fire engines and the arrival of Sapadores Porto, who quickly unreeled their hose, followed the exodus almost immediately.
My excitement at being the only person around with a camera to document the burning down of a school in the centre of historic Porto was tempered by the shock and relief of seeing children who had been trapped by the blaze, wearing oxygen masks, escorted by the firemen out of the building. They seemed unscathed but surely they should be taken to hospital for a check up. Shouldn’t someone call an ambulance?
The smoke became very intense and I began to get worried that things were shifting out of control.
But hang on a second. This thick smoke doesn’t smell of anything much more than a 1980s disco. It was only when I overheard someone listlessly turn to their neighbour and utter the word “simulação” that I realised this was simply a drill; a highly theatrical drill maybe but a drill nevertheless.
When I was at school the fire drills consisted of us ‘forming and orderly queue’ in the playground to be head counted by the form teacher. There were no fire engines, no firemen, no smoke and certainly no friends in oxygen masks.
As the fog machine was switched off and they waited for the smoke effect to dissipate, the class sat in a circle on the pavement outside and cheered the burly blokes who had, erm, pressed the ‘off’ button and given them a break from basic algebra.
This cluster of firemen was another to add to my growing collection of men in groups. They are everywhere here in Porto. Gathering on the street to watch football:
Playing cards in the park:
Lounging around on the beach. There is only one woman in this photograph, out on a rock, on her own:
It is extremely rare to see women gathered together. I guess they are all still chained in the kitchen, or like Dona Jacinta who manages the building I am in, permanently sweeping the wood effect linoleum in the communal hallway.
Of course it is perfectly ordinary to see men and woman together too. In fact, Porto is quite kissy kissy in public places. Just along the shore from the group of blokes on the beach, were this semi-nude older couple dancing away. It was a lovely sight. From the esplanade above, the few of us who were there let out a collective sigh of admiration.
Perhaps it is the approach of summer, or (more likely) because I have been on my own here for too long but I’m beginning to see sex in everything. The priapic Torre dos Clérgios is probably the most famous of Porto’s monuments and certainly one of the most popular. It is the highest tower in Portugal, with 6 floors and 225 steps. That doesn’t seem so tall but given that it was completed in 1763 (by Nicholas Nasoni) I guess it was a wonder of its day that has endured.
It has a strange floor level suicide window from which a not fat person could easily choose to take a jump. I crawled on my hands and knees to the opening to have a peer out and then slunk back. Actually I’ve discovered since being here in Porto, for the first time in my life, that I have vertigo. I have never been troubled by heights before and I don’t know what has brought it on. I experience it as both a fear of falling and a desire to push myself over the edge: quite a worrying combination.
There are lots of bells inside as you might expect.
But what I wasn’t expecting was this organ type thing to operate them. I thought that bells were usually ‘rung’ but here it seems they are ‘played’.
I poked my camera over the stone battlements at the top to take some photos. Here you can see the orange roofs of the city stretching down the hill to the Douro.
Here are the ruins of a shopping mall, a famous blot on the city, which looks like the set from a science fiction film about the end of the world.
And here you can see Lello, commonly described as the most beautiful purpose built bookshop in the world.
It is extremely beautiful, with its gynaecological staircase tonguing out into the centre of the floor but it is not the best.
The books are oddly divided between highly specific set textbooks for the University just opposite and guidebooks to Portugal for the throngs of tourists that come to tick off another attraction.
One attraction that I will very sadly miss (as it takes place after I have left Portugal) is the second Festival Erótico Medieval.
Yes, it really is a four-day series of ‘sexy things’ in Medieval costume, including a ‘Campeonato Internacional Strip Masculino’ and a ‘Lingerie Restaurant’. How on earth someone came up with this idea, I can barely imagine. ‘You know what I think we really need here in the north of Portugal, is to celebrate the Middle Ages by taking all our clothes off and pony trekking in a pair of armoured wrist bands.’ Still, this is its second year, so they must have the interest.
Thursday was (another) religious holiday in Portugal. This time it was Corpus Christi or ‘Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ’ to give it its full title. It celebrates the Eucharist. In a lot of countries this feast is relegated to the Sunday following the Thursday following Eastertide (it’s all so complicated) but in Portugal they leave it on the traditional Thursday (which I am convinced is simply a precursor to trying to get Friday off too and thus have a super long weekend). Anyway, everything shuts down, so I took a trip to Guimarães.
Guimarães is considered the ‘birthplace’ of Portugal and is a medieval city that will also be European Capital of Culture in 2012. Both things – past origin and future culture – are advertised heavily. This place is well equipped for tourists.
The old city is very pretty and feels almost like a film set, transporting you back in time. At one end is the castle, which looks like it modelled for Playmobil or Lego, such is its order of straight lines and neat battlements.
The palace is generally a bit dark and empty but has the most amazing chimneys built with curved bricks.
Beautiful and moving were the 16th Century carved wooden religious figures held in Museu de Alberto Sampaio.
These distressed statues, ravaged by woodworm, were saved from the Chapel of Casa de Aveleira. The devastation caused by time and insects only contributes to their humanity.
Out in the streets, women had gathered to lay down cut grasses, vegetables and petals in a flower mural celebrating Corpus Christi that stretched down the entire length of one of the winding Guimarães streets.
This highly ephemeral street painting, at the mercy of a simple gust of wind, and laid down with love, felt very close to some of the kinds of interventions that I have been trying to make myself in urban landscapes over the past years. It was very rewarding to see this tradition.
Interrupting this idyll is something I have noticed, not just in Guimarães but across northern Portugal: the tremendous prevalence of hawking on the street. I am not talking about birds of prey, or the advertising of goods for sale from quaint wooden barrows, but rather the aggressive clearing of the throat as phlegm is brought up from the inner regions of the body and spat out onto the pavement. With an upsetting regularity a gentle amble through the delightful old streets of town will be punctuated by the sight and sound of even the most respectable looking of citizens twisting in their cheeks as they round up the yellow mucus, depositing it at my feet as I pass by. No offense intended, I am sure. Even as I sit and type in my apartment I hear the occasional distant sound of rasping glutinous muck being drawn from sinuses across the city. This is one cultural variation I could do without.
FUNICULAR UPDATE:
This week’s funicular is a whopper. Guimarães has one that runs from the city to Penha mountain over 1.7 kilometres, climbing over 400 metres and taking about 10 minutes.
You know that misanthropic feeling that you get when you’re in the queue for things like this, filled with nervous anxiety because you want to secure the best place for yourself (and your companions if you are not alone) and don’t want to be sitting next to some stranger who might somehow ruin the view? Well no such problems were confronted in Guimarães where I had the thing almost entirely to myself.
After a leisurely day, I boarded the train and returned to Porto.
Porto itself was the European Capital of Culture in 2001. The centrepiece of their artistic offering being the incredible Casa da Música designed by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, which only opened after years of delay in 2005. It was well worth the wait and immediately became an icon of the city. It is a fantastic building with intriguing and sensuous spaces and an extraordinary acoustic.
Once a month Casa da Música hosts ‘Clubbing’, in which music of various kinds fill all the spaces of the building. June’s event commenced at 10.30 p.m. with the Orqestra Nacional do Porto in the main hall as Finnish composer Magus Lindberg conducted his own 1985 composition Kraft, and ended in the early hours of the following morning with German electronic project Moderat.
If you thought the orchestral opening was a ‘safe’ selection then you were in for an ear-drum-shattering shock.
Normally it is the percussionists who look bored during a classical concert, waiting for their one cymbal crash at the ‘dramatic bit’ but in Lindberg’s Kraft it is the string section that is left twiddling their thumbs. The stage (and some of the auditorium) was filled with giant gongs, oil drums, bits of car, and other things that make loud noises when you hit them with a hammer or a mallet.
At one slightly disconcerting moment the entire brass section left the stage and made their way into the auditorium and I found myself staring close-up at the twitching embouchure of the horn player, risking permanent damage to my auditory faculty as he blew up my ear (as it were). The piece ended with at least 2 of the 5 soloists blowing through hosepipes into amplified buckets of water as the sounds shifted from the urban to the marine. Did they buy the buckets especially I wonder, or were they just ones found lying around?
Of course all this is perfectly ordinary now in contemporary classical music. The piece is, after all, 25 years old already but the battering force of sonic energy still packed a strong punch and had some of the well dressed devotees of the Orqestra Nacional do Porto, who were after something a little risqué, wondering if they had taken a leap too far.
(An aside. Not only were the seats in this auditorium silver velvet but instead of hinging up and down like a conventional theatre seat, they slid in and out. I have tried to illustrate here the slide action by photographing my own slid out seat next to the unoccupied seat beside me.)
Other highlights included Alva Noto, the stage name of German sound artist Carsten Nicolai who uses overlooked sounds (electronic interference, modems, telephones) as the basis of his heavy dance tracks.
While outside a 17 piece electronic guitar band thrashed away.
‘Clubbing’ at Casa da Música really delivered. It opened up the incredible spaces of the building to an eclectic audience of all ages and the programme was genuinely diverse enough to offer people something that they knew they liked as well as new discoveries. There was plenty of time for drinking, dancing and socialising. Casa da Música is proof that investing in cutting edge architecture can provide a social and cultural epicentre for a city.
Porto has been brimming with ‘activities’ this week. As well as the monthly occurrence of ‘Clubbing’, the giant book fair has taken up the main city square, FITEI 2010 is in full swing, and the annual 40 hour non-stop event Serralves em Festa has drawn massive crowds. On several occasions, locals have been keen to put this hive of activity into perspective: “It’s not normally like this you know. After June there is nothing.”
Serralves is Porto’s contemporary art museum on the site of the massive Serralves estate, which the city acquired in the mid-1980s. The museum opened in 1999 with a new building designed by Álvaro Siza. There is also the old Villa on the estate as well as various outbuildings, a huge park and a working farm. I have been there a few times now and the exhibitions are generally excellent. Shows are themed and the Serralves Foundation have a large collection of artist books and text works on paper that are particularly interesting. Serralves em Festa is now in its seventh year. It is a massive undertaking, with over 80 events spread throughout the estate day and night for one weekend a year, from children’s workshops to late night DJ sets. I had heard a lot about it and was greatly looking forward to being there. We were also presenting our fifth and final ‘action’ for Viver a Rua.
It was great to see so many thousands of people in the grounds of a contemporary art museum but I was tremendously disappointed by the programming decisions of Serralves em Festa. Here was an opportunity to introduce a keen and intrigued non-art audience to new, interesting and high quality work. But Serralves programmed easy, bland and conceptually vapid stuff that I found patronising – mostly circus, street arts, and easy listening.
There was nothing that you couldn’t see in any other park or street fiesta anywhere else. It is true that I was there on the Sunday, which is noted as being the ‘family’ day but even if the remit had been for accessible child-friendly activity, they could have done so much better than the pretty puppets they chose to string up. On the Serralves Foundation website, they state that their mission “is to raise the general public’s awareness concerning contemporary art and the environment”. For what it is worth, in my view, they did not succeed, despite leaving the doors of the main exhibition spaces open. It was a nice day out in a park then, but not anything that reflects the dynamic world of contemporary art. A missed opportunity.
It was into this mediocre maelstrom that the intrepid Viver a Rua communicators went to talk about our project to rename a Porto street. Here the stalwarts Joclécio Azevedo (NEC Artistic Director) and Cristiana Rocha (NEC General Director) strike up conversations.
People were generally very receptive. I think that they were pleased to have some one-to-one interaction rather than just look at the pink and purple of a princess on stilts. We move now into the final week of the competition.
The pleasures of working away from home, of seeing new places and meeting new people, are always counteracted by the problems of continually starting ‘afresh’; the lack of routine, negotiating new sets of kitchen utilities, homesickness. Actually, I think my particular ‘homesickness’ is a kind of sickness of being at home. I don’t know how else to explain the fact that I am more often away from mine than in it. This sickness, a friend confided in me, is what Alcoholics Anonymous call “geographicals”. You keep moving in order to escape facing up to the ‘real issues’. Well, I’m not so sure. All my ancestors kept moving. No more than two generations were born in the same place as far back as we can trace. I myself was born somewhere I only stayed for a year and grew up in a city (the Scottish capital, Edinburgh) where I always felt a stranger. Nature or nurture, maybe I just have the nomad phenotype. Or maybe I’m just practically responding to job opportunities in the niche market of ‘socially engaged interactive contemporary art practice’. I feel very lucky to be living (and making a living) in this way but nevertheless there are practical hurdles that need to be jumped and emotional demons to be faced.
Over two weeks into my stay here in Porto and the laundry needed to be done: urgently. Although the plumbing is very neatly in place, there is no washing machine in my apartment. My fantasy of stringing up my t-shirts and towels on the balcony, Mediterranean style, like my neighbours, will have to wait. (Not that I even have a balcony.)
With only one pair of pants left on the clean pile and after several meetings with the NEC production team to discuss alternatives (I’m afraid I refused to hand over my smalls to the Production Coordinator Mafalda Couto Soares despite her generous offer) it was decided I should try and find a launderette. The thing is, there are no coin-operated washing machines here in Porto. Everyone has one at home. There are laundry services but they are for the lazy wealthy rather than the disadvantaged poor. Generally they are for people who ‘send their shirts out’ or who need a carpet cleaned and they don’t know where to begin.
After a preparatory phone-call from NEC Executive Producer Joana Ventura to check that they would ‘handle my load’ by weight rather than charging me for each sock, we set out to Lavandaria Olímpica in Rua Miguel Bombarda, the street with all the commercial galleries.
From behind the counter we were met by Dona Maria Sousa Neto, whose brilliant white business cards were housed in a special container. I left €20 lighter.
When I returned the following day I was thrilled by the multi-coloured stratigraphy of my sweet smelling perfectly folded clothes.
Unlike my laundry, my workload here in Porto is unusually light and I have too much time to think. There is some ‘work’ to do everyday, which means I can’t really leave the city but nevertheless there are huge stretches of time that I have to occupy either with ‘other work’ (there’s plenty of that) or finding something else to do.
On Sunday I went for a walk to the Atlantic. Two hours in, under the blistering sun, I saw in the distance along the beach what at first looked like the zigzag of giant bunting. Was this an art installation? No, it was washing pegged out to dry from the communal laundry at Afurada: Lavadouro Público da Afurada. Outside Porto, clearly not everyone has a washing machine. Around a series of giant square stone basins women pounded their families’ linens. No coin operated slots here either, then. It all looked like something from Ancient Greece or Rome but according to the sign on the door, this communal laundry was in fact only set up in 2003. Perhaps it replaced an earlier facility.
I was temporarily caught up in the romance of this communal clothes-washing scene. I too wanted to wander down to the beach in the bright spring sunshine to pummel yesterday’s t-shirt. But then I thought of Dona Maria Sousa Neto and my multi-coloured sweet smelling stratigraphy and felt envy no more.
The clothes themselves are pinned to makeshift lines all over the esplanade and right down the beach.
As well as being a wonderful site, it is immensely practical. With strong Atlantic breeze and the bright sunshine it takes about 3 minutes for things to dry. You start your pinning and by the time you’ve finished you barely have a moment for a cup of tea (well here it would be coffee) before you go back to the start to take them down. Of course the strong wind is also a hazard. How many trousers and t-shirts have been consigned to the tides, I do not know.
Another difficulty of being ‘away’ is what to do in the evenings. Somehow this is tougher when you’re not in your own home. My relatively new Sony eReader (PRS-600) with its 130 free books is proving immensely useful and I’m getting through an awful lot of novels without risk to trees. But I do struggle with not feeling like a complete twit out on the town on my own at night.
On the way back from an artists’ salon event in someone’s living room last night, which, while enjoyable, was slightly disappointing in its lack of liquid refreshment, I decided to stop off at café and have a beer. Sitting at the counter on a bar stool I enunciated ‘cerveja’ as confidently as I could and was rewarded by a tall glass of ice-cold Super Bock (the leading Portuguese beer, launched in 1927). The thing was, that although the beer was cool and smooth, I was not. I felt like a poseur. Stopping off for a quick beer is just not something that I do, or at least if I do, I don’t get away with it.
Back home then to eat some more fruit. I’ve been doing a lot of that: going home and eating fruit. I have discovered nêsperas, which are abundant here in spring.
I think they must be grown locally but according to what I can discover online they originate from China and Brazil. Anyway, they are delicious. The flavour is intense, like an apricot, nectarine, lychee and apple combination. I’ve been peeling them because the skin slips off and is a bit tart. They have stones that look like a pair of well-rounded bronzed buttocks.
We continue to promote Viver a Rua and the nominations are steadily coming in. This week marked the beginning of FITEI 2010 and our series of public actions. An army of volunteers are acting as Public Communicators for the project. There are about twenty people on rotation. After a day of workshop exercises and tryouts, this band takes turns to tackle the people of Porto, raising issues of citizenship, pride and responsibility and, erm, trying to persuade them to nominate somebody.
FUNICULAR UPDATE:
I can’t promise a new one each blog but these do seem to be very popular here in this mountainous country. This one is the city funicular in Porto – Funicular dos Guindais – that runs from Ribeira (by the bank of the Douro) up into town. The brilliant thing about it is that it is integrated into the city transport system, so although it may well entice tourists, actually it is just a very convenient and cost effective way of avoiding a steep hill or an awful lot of steps.
As you can see, it looks more like a rollercoaster track than any form of public transport.
If your image of Portugal is of small stout middle-aged ladies in cardigans with brooms and budgerigars then you would, at least in part, be quite right. Dona Jacinta, who manages the building I am staying in, is constantly sweeping the wood effect linoleum in the entrance hallway, accompanied by the chirp of her caged budgie that tweets through the open door of her apartment. The enormous white cat that sleeps on a stack of cardboard boxes at the bottom of the communal staircase is so overfed that he barely twitches a whisker.
Perhaps fat white tom should have strolled up the road with me last Sunday. I planned a trip to Braga, a town an hour away from Porto described as ‘the Rome of Portugal’ because of its number of religious buildings and monuments. Walking to the train station I was gradually overcome by the sensation that something unusual was going on. There was the oddest noise in the air. A mass of high pitched audio interference, a kind of singsong screech. It was only when I got to Campo Mártires da Pátria, the esplanade in front of the old prison and courthouse, now a photography museum, that I realised what was going on. The ‘bird market’ had come to town. The sound was of hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of feathered warblers all (with a few notable exceptions) caged next to each other, singing desperately for a new owner (or so I liked to imagine).
As I snapped away, it was not lost on me that here I was in the open air, outside a former prison that is now a photographic museum, photographing birds who, born to be in the open air, were now imprisoned in their own domestic cages.
Although most of the birds were of the stout middle-aged lady kind – small and colourful – there were also big parrots, peahens, exotic birds that I have no idea about naming, ‘working’ hens and guinea fowl.
It was a multicoloured feathered congregation that ranged from the utilitarian to the decorative. There was also a vast array bird accessories to choose from, including an enormous selection of cages.
The pigeons looked very confused. They nevertheless took the opportunity of scampering around underneath the coops gobbling up the stray seeds that had fallen out from their cousins’ breakfast bowls.
Before I leave the ‘unusual market’ theme, let me briefly mention the flea market that I also visited this week. Well, it was only partly a flea market. It was also a disco and a bar, all in one room: Maus Hábitos, an alternative ‘arts’ space on the top floor of a car park in the centre of town. If you look carefully at the first of these two photographs you can see the DJ (in a red t-shirt at the back) spinning the tunes. It made for a great atmosphere, with people dancing, drinking and shopping all at the same time. Great idea.
As an aside to this aside, there was an interesting (but unexplained) case on the wall with itemised cigarette butts in it. Of course, this appealed to my fascination in collecting habits and the status of garbage.
And so back to my day trip to Braga, 53 km north east of Porto.
Braga is renowned as one of the most beautiful cities in Portugal, for being deeply Catholic and very conservative. Without any map to guide me I followed the arrow that pointed to ‘Centro’ and found myself, almost immediately in the most important monument of the city, Sé Primacial, Santa Maria de Braga, the Cathedral. Unlike any other place of worship that I have visited as a tourist, this one was absolutely packed with Sunday worshippers. Hoards of well-dressed couples genuflected at the altar before streaming out into the square.
I just had time to snap the extraordinary baroque organ before being shouted at by a steward in a comedy purple and red 16th Century outfit with matching peaked hat and plus fours and the incongruous addition of 1980s Tootsie glasses. A conglomeration that looked something like a mixture of these:
The cathedral is full of reliquaries and tombs of the beatified including the relatively recently interred Irmã Maria Estrela Divina, who I can’t find much about but it seems she was witness to various miracles.
(I had a standoff with a couple of devotees as I was waiting to take a photograph in her chapel. Having been ticked off by the steward for photographing the organ, I thought I should wait until I had the room entirely to myself. As I was sitting on a seat opposite her tomb, a couple came in, touched the monument, kissed their hand, genuflected and waited. After some time it became clear to me that they weren’t going to leave until after I did because they didn’t want to be outdone in the time they spent giving contemplation to holiness and prayer. I put them out of their misery by leaving the chapel and hiding around the corner. They left immediately after me and I went back in to take my photograph.)
After this ecclesiastic beginning, I thought I should head off 5 km out of the centre to Bom Jesus do Monte which is a famous pilgrimage destination and one of the most impressive architectural sites in Portugal. A brief stop at the Turismo centre in the central square sent me in the right direction.
Although I had seen pictures of Bom Jesus, nothing quite prepared me for the experience. You arrive at the bottom of the first giant staircase that takes you in sections through the mountain. At key points there are chapels, which looks something like the summerhouses of English country estates. These are, in themselves quite substantial structures.
The chapels are dedicated to the Via Crucis (or Stations of the Cross) and each building contains a life-sized terracotta statue scenario of a moment from the Passion of Christ. As your eyes strain from the bright sunlight and you peer into the half-light of the chapels, the scenes hover like a kind of apparition.
After climbing this first staircase for sometime, you make it to the bottom of the second. It is here that the views both of Bom Jesus on one side and the city on the other are awe-inspiring. The monumental baroque staircase zigzags up to the sanctuary at the top.
At each landing there is a fountain dedicated to a sense – sight, sound, smell and taste – each orifice pouring forth an eternal stream.
In the sanctuary itself the altar is relatively unusual in depicting the whole of Calvary with Jesus, the two thieves and extras in a life-sized tableau.
Although more tourist attraction than working Catholic institution, you do get some sense of what it must be to have a ‘religious experience’, especially when you learn that many pilgrims choose to climb all those stairs on their knees. If you don’t fancy that you can always take the funicular, which has been working consistently without any accidents since it was installed in 1882. It is the oldest funicular in the world that works with water counterbalancing. When the car is at the top, the tank is filled with water. It gets heavier and thus moves down hill, dragging the other car up the hill as it does so. Brilliant.
Back in Braga, I wandered around the mass of religious and civic sites of the old town and witnessed the way in which these architectural histories are part of the living life of the citizens. As I observe a man determinedly praying at the outside chapel of San Bentinho Hospital, appealing for divine intervention in the care of someone sick, even the cynical atheist in me appreciated the consolation found in faith.
It was then, with renewed vigour that I returned to Porto and to Viver a Rua, in my own bid to leave a permanent legacy on the streets of this beautiful country.
Here I am in Porto. The place Portugal gets its name and we get its wine. The city is very pretty and the weather is glorious.
I am here working on Viver a Rua, a project that will culminate the permanent changing of the name of a Porto street. All the maps will eventually have to be altered. The idea is a continuation of my other naming pieces Name in Lights and Rooted in the Earth, in which members of the public nominated someone who deserved a public tribute and the winning names were made into a giant illuminated sign, or planted as ornamental carpet beds in London parks.
This is my second visit to Porto. I came in November last year to run a workshop, to get to know the city and the producing organisation NEC, and to propose some ideas for FITEI 2010 one of the longest standing European arts festivals. NEC are the guest programmer this year, and they invited me. The brief was ambitious: to come up with a proposal that was high impact but extremely ‘economical’. (Well, they arefacing a financial crisis here.) It doesn’t cost anything to change the name of a street. The idea is to get the people of Porto talking about citizenship, to actively discuss who they want their role models to be and what it means to leave a permanent legacy in the city.
Many of the streets here are named after ‘key individuals’, much more so than in the UK. Most of them are forgotten townspeople who did something important. I am staying in a very nice little two-bedroom apartment in the eaves of an old building in Rua Dr Barbosa Castro, right in the centre of the old town. Nobody seems to know who Br Barbosa Castro is, or was, and if you Google the name, all you get is the street.
My apartment is a short distance, down steep winding cobblestoned alleyways to the edge of the river Douro. The Douro starts its journey as the ‘Duero’ in Northern Spain and makes its way across nearly 900 kilometres of the Iberian peninsula before ending up at the Atlantic Ocean. It is a very pleasant riverside walk under beautiful bridges from town to the mouth of the river and the Atlantic beyond.
Strolling along the riverside the road suddenly leaves land and heads out into the Douro on stilts. You tread on a grid with the river below.
One of the most captivating bridges is the now inoperable Ponte D Maria Pia designed by Gustave Eiffel in 1877. It rises above you, a perfect Meccano arch, fragile and stable all at once.
The views of Porto from the bridges are incredible. The jumble of buildings scattered over the hills are strangely timeless.
On the other side of the Douro is Vila Nova de Gaia, the city in which all the port wine establishments can be found. The town is propped up (literally and metaphorically) by the signs of manufacturers, many with the British names of their entrepreneur founders: Sandeman, Offley, Taylor, Graham, Croft.
In this beautiful city, which has the faded grandeur of the old colonial power that it once was, I have come to work.
In a bid to get nominations of names that we should consider for the name-changing project, NEC and FITEI have been aggressively courting the press. Earlier in the week, with Artistic Director of NEC Joclécio Azevedo, I was interviewed for ‘Porto Alive’ a remarkably serious cultural news programme on the cable channel Porto Canal. We were hosted by Maria Cerqueira Gomes, who we met in make-up just before the broadcast.
This is Maria Cerqueira Gomes here, although not on the evening she interviewed me. That evening she was very upset because wardrobe hadn’t delivered her on-screen ‘costume’ and she had to make do with the (perfectly respectable in my opinion) white blouse and beige jeans that she had already been “wearing all day”!
The studio was hilarious. The TV visible bit was all white and shiny but the rest of the room was an absolute tip. Bits of broken staging, tables and chairs, a giant polystyrene question mark, all piled high behind the cameras, as if ready for Guy Fawkes and the strike of a match.
Maria did an excellent job of conducting and translating the interview all by her self. She would ask me a question in Portuguese (for the benefit of the viewing public), translate it into English (for mine), listen to my answer, translate it into Portuguese and then comment on it in both Portuguese and English. I had trouble keeping up but she was very much in control.
We saw a rise (albeit a modest one) in the website figures after the live broadcast, which means that people were watching, listening and engaging.
One problem that we are having here is that while people love the idea, they are often unsure that it is real. The heavy hand of bureaucracy is taken so much for granted, that citizens can’t believe that we really have the power to change the fabric of the city in this way. Of course it has been a task of immense persuasion, getting the City Council to agree to our project and, of course, they will have to pass our selected name through their usual naming committee but they have embraced the project and see its benefit. We really, really are going to change the name of a Porto street. Forever.
My last hours in Rio were spent with a packet of disposable toilet seat covers in a variety of ‘sanitários’. I don’t know if it was the soaring heat (which reached 42 degrees), the incredibly rich salted cod fish risotto, or the permanent beat of the samba, but something done me in.
Clutching a scrap of paper on which were written the cobbled together instructions: ‘Eu gostaria de alguma coisa para diarréa’, I went to the nearest drogaria to try and get something to block up the flow for the ‘executive’ bus trip back to São Paulo.
Rio is truly an extraordinary city and Carnaval is probably the most loony thing I have ever enjoyed but arriving back at Tieté bus terminal, without so much as a paper streamer or novelty hat in sight, I couldn’t help but feel a bit more, well, relaxed. São Paulo is silent. It is the oddest sensation. This teaming megacity has suddenly just paused. Carnaval in São Paulo seems to mean ‘less’ rather than ‘more’.
Back at Débora’s I begin to think about packing my case and about what the year ahead holds. Already two months in, really it feels that returning to the UK will mark the beginning of my 2010.
We threw a small ‘gyoza’ party for some of the people that have been so kind and helpful to us while we were here. As my own contribution, I made…
(FINAL) BANANA UPDATE
…a bolo de banana.
I didn’t have a recipe as such, amalgamating a bit of web-Nigella-web-Delia but I did have two ‘special’ ingredients.
(1) Banana Flour
To be honest, I don’t know if this did anything. Further internet research indicated not to replace wheat flour entirely with banana flour, so I used half and half.
(2) Banana Paste
This was a huge disappointment. I was expecting a creamy pale yellow puree but the thing plopped out of the can clean, a firm brown jellied disc. In the end I mashed only a tiny bit into the mixture, using ‘real’ bananas instead.
The result:
Well, it was a bit dry. Not disgusting. But only one of the party went for a second slice.
END OF (FINAL) BANANA UPDATE
And so to the gifts. I went to one shop. A flip-flop shop. Probably the most glamorous flip-flop shop in the world.
Of course you can buy them from racks in the local supermarket but they aren’t any cheaper (they barely could be) and the range isn’t as good.
Havaianas are quintessentially Brazilian, even if they are named after the 50th US state. Everyone wears them, from the ladies who lunch to the catadores who collect, these foam soles cross the economic, racial and social spectrum, their rainbow shades reflecting the nation.
My strict ‘family only’ policy (albeit with a marginally extended notion of what ‘kin’ means) still meant purchasing 16 pairs. If you have received a request for your shoe-size then imagine yourself stepping into these. If you haven’t, I’m sorry; I truly would love to be able to buy Havaianas for everyone.
I’m sure that some of you will flip at the imperfect fit and that others will consider my colour selection a flop but when they work, they are extremely comfortable. I’ve been wearing mine non-stop. (That will have to end. In exactly a week after this posting I will be in Helsinki which I note is currently -18. A 60-degree variation that I am hoping won’t be too much of a punishment.) If the UK summer never comes, you can always use them as ‘shower shoes’ in the swimming pool.
This trip to Brazil has been unforgettable, for the saddest of all reasons, the death of my beloved Grandma, as well as for the fat papaya, feathered headdresses, fantastic architecture and my forays into the rubbish bins.
I am not surprised that the British Council wants to forge links with Brazil. We hear a massive amount about China and India but Brazil is a country with extraordinary natural resources and a 200 million strong population who also want a slice of the pie. As I have witnessed first hand, it is already a world leader in the recycling of waste, which, with our current environmental predicament, makes it the future. It will be interesting to see how they manage the Olympics in 2016. No doubt their desire to host that circus, so shortly after China, is to show they really mean business on the world stage.
As I close the door of the Little Museum once again, I wonder when I might come back here to Brazil. The Artist Links Manager, Roberta Mahfuz, mentioned that they are looking at maybe an “eight year return” by which she meant that it might only be in just under a decade that the fruits of these exchanges between the UK and Brazil produce fruit. I hope I get to taste the fat papaya again before then.
This week saw us move from a city renowned for its ugliness to one renowned for its beauty. Taking advice to travel overnight, we booked the 2 a.m. ‘executive’ bus from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro (with free crackers in a bus shaped cardboard packet and fully reclinable chairs), arriving intact but exhausted at 9.30 a.m., grateful nevertheless for the extra one and a half hour ‘delay’ which meant we could fretfully doze a bit more.
Before we left São Paulo we paid a visit to the Aquarium. Lots of lovely fishies, as you might expect from an Aquarium.
And then without any explanation suddenly there was a series of tableaux chronicling the evolution of man from ape to human.
Australopithecos:
Homo Habilis:
Homo Erectus:
Homem de Neanderthal:
Homo Sapiens:
Truly unexpected, extraordinary and wonderfully odd, if in a crappy sort of way. I was transfixed.
And at the mention of apes…
BANANA UPDATE
We also went to the zoo (nice but sad). São Paulo has the fourth largest in the world and sets about studying and protecting endangered species.
It was here I saw my first ever banana tree (albeit caged with a bird of prey). Look at the strange dangly flower bit at the bottom.
And also monkeys eating bananas.
Quite right too.
END OF BANANA UPDATE
And so to Rio.
The beauty of the city is immediate, epic and lasting. It is like everything anyone has ever told you about it. For the body and the brain:
Golden beaches that are ridiculously busy in this hot holiday season but nonetheless a full on beach experience, in this case Ipanema.
Real Gabinete Português de Leitura, possibly the most beautiful public library in the world, with what has to be one of the biggest library desks.
The floating palace of Ilha Fiscal, playground in the days of Imperial rule.
The faded grandeur of Largo do Boticário.
Niemeyer’s extraordinary 1996 Museu de Arte Contemporânea across the water in Niterói.
The ever-present Cristo Redentor, perhaps the cleverest piece of public planning on the planet.
The exceptionally beautiful sunset across Rio, photographed from the spectacular Pão de Açúcar, or Sugarloaf Mountain.
Stepping off the cable car which took us back down into the city, a stall holder was selling t-shirts that spelled it out: I [heart] Rio.
Whereas in São Paulo it is difficult to find a postcard, Rio is ready for tourists. A bit too ready. Our ho-cell, sorry, I mean erm, ‘hotel’ room is very basic. A bed. A toilet. A shower. Not even a window. Well, there is a hole in the wall that overlooks a communal staircase out of which I lean to try and get a better internet signal borrowed from goodness knows who to skype-call Lloyds Bank for the umpteenth time to ask why my cash card won’t work. (“As far as we can see sir, you haven’t made any attempt to use your card.”) All the rates are double price during Carnaval. Literally 200% today of what they were yesterday.
How do you explain what Rio Carnaval is? It’s not just the scantily clad bronzed ‘girls’ wiggling their way down a massive catwalk with sequins and feathers enough so as to make the Baroque look modest; Carnaval takes over the whole of the city, indeed the whole of Brazil, because Carnaval is a festival which follows swiftly on from Christmas and New Year and marks the height of Brazilian summer.
When I asked people in São Paulo what they were doing for Carnaval, almost always I got the reply “Nothing”. As I guess you might imagine, there are two camps: the party camp and the ennui camp. Rio is definitely in the party camp.
Although I spurn ‘compulsory fun’, we did want at least a taste of the whole sequinned shindig and so, many weeks ago, we set about booking tickets for the Sambódromo, the specially built stadium through which the bands (and scantily clad ‘girls’) parade.
The parades through the Sambódromo go on for five days but the two main days are Sunday and Monday. Unless you want to pay the exorbitant prices through a North American ticket agent this is what you have to do. You get Débora to phone the ticket hotline on the one day (yes, really, it’s only one day) that it is active. She asks them for tickets for Sunday or Monday. They tell her they have already sold out. She phones me and asks if Saturday will do. I say yes. She phones them back and books the tickets. Then, get this, she has to go to the Carnaval’s bank and deposit the money into their account. The bank give her a receipt which she then has to fax (this is really all true) to the Carnaval with her postal address. The Carnaval then send a letter to her home address indicating the place and time in Rio where she has to go on a certain day to pick up the tickets. I kid you not. Kind-hearted Débora does all this for us. (It was exactly the same process when we booked our Hotel.) A few weeks later the letter from the Carnaval arrives to confirm our tickets for the Saturday. “What is it on the Saturday?” I ask. “It’s the Champions Parade,” Débora replies, “so you will get to see the spectacular winners.” I think about this for a moment, “But how can the Champions parade before they have won?” It turns out that this Champions Parade happens the following Saturday, when we will have already left Rio de Janeiro and will be zipping up our suitcases and on the way to the airport for London.
We take some relief from the fact that neither Débora (who is from Rio) nor anyone else we have thus far met, has ever actually sat in the Sambódromo. It holds 90,000 people but in a city of over 6 million, in a country of nearly 200 million, all of who are celebrating Carnaval, it is only one element of the ‘celebration’.
I am not going to attempt to do justice to the complex network of parties, balls and parades but try to imagine a festival with 6 million people all day and all night non-stop for 120 hours, all in novelty costumes and you will begin to get some idea of what is going on here right now. The four main elements you can immerse yourself into are (1) following the blocos, which are the local samba schools that don’t enter the official parades; (2) the evening processions along Avenida Rio Branco; (3) the top 14 samba schools who parade in the Sambódromo; (4) the Carnaval Balls.
(1) Blocos These happen literally everywhere and anywhere at any time of day or night. I was stunned when Débora (who has come to Rio for Carnaval) called for us at 7.30 a.m. Sunday morning (directly off the overnight bus from São Paulo) to go downtown for a “fun bloco”. When we got there at 8.30 a.m. (yes, in the morning) I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were thousands of people all in fancy dress swilling beer and dancing to the rhythm of the drums.
And of course, here, as everywhere that people are drinking, the catadores are working. I saw one guy lazily chuck his empty can on to the street in front of him and within 15 seconds it was in a catador’s bag.
(2) Avenida Rio Branco Apparently the street Carnaval in Rio is undergoing a renaissance after some years in the long shadow of the ‘main event’ in the Sambódromo. Here, practically anyone can parade and they take it just as seriously as those in the top 14 schools that make it into the commercially exploited ‘big one’.
Although the floats do not have the same high-end production values of Sambódromo, you can see how empowering it is for participants to parade.
And some of the costumes were just as full on.
(3) Sambódromo Thousands of people, who don’t have tickets, swarm around the stadium. You can see all the giant ‘floats’ lined up on the street. They are monsters. Metaphorically and literally metaphorically if you get my drift, insomuch as many of them depict mythological or futuristic creatures.
One of my favourite things was to see were the impromptu changing rooms on the street; people getting into giant costumes of fruit cocktails, Roman legionaries, the slaves of Egypt or whatever. Every so often a taxi stops and a bronzed dancer in a sequinned thong gets out struggling with several bin bags full of feathered headdress.
Here in the middle of what is normally a main carriageway through the city, is a stable of costume horses ready to be saddled.
Particularly wide costumes are given space in requisitioned car parks.
And then they wait.
Before filing into the stadium in a giant parade.
Each school must parade for between 85 and 95 minutes and there are harsh penalties from the judges for taking too long. Although each school is headed by a group of ‘professional’ samba dancers in carefully choreographed movements, the throngs that follow (which can be up to 5,000 samba-hangers-on per school) are just people that have decided to join in. Anyone can buy a costume and join a school. It costs a fare bit but it is absolutely part of the tourist package on offer.
Although the ticket-ache meant that we didn’t get into the Sambódromo itself, I have to say, I am a bit relieved. Each show is 10 hours long: from 7 in the evening until 5 the next morning. Unless you’re in the ‘luxury boxes’ you have to make do with concrete or a plastic chair. And, well, it’s all pretty much, well, erm, the same kind of thing.
In the Museu Internacional de Arte Naïf, which we visited a few days ago, I enjoyed these paintings of the Carnaval, especially the third reproduced here, which seems to say something about the attitude of spectators as well as participants.
Of course the whole thing is broadcast non-stop on television here, with repeats throughout the day, which are difficult to avoid. Depending on which channel you are tuned into, you get a completely different ‘angle’ on events. One station insisted on shoving its ass-cam right between the dancers’ cheeks and then repeating the shot in slow motion; no doubt to show the skill of her samba moves.
(4) Carnaval Balls I have yet to go to a Carnaval Ball. In my current state of sequin exhaustion I’m not sure I will make it.
This was the week of my presentation ‘33 Proposals for São Paulo’ at Centro Cultural São Paulo. There was quite a crowd (who were all these people?) and it all seemed to go well, with Patricia doing a magnificent job with the translation. I presented my 33 proposals alongside previous examples of my work and something of what I have learnt here during my trip, much of which has been part of previous blog postings.
Some of the proposals are so slight they are barely worth proposing, while others would require a great deal of involved negotiations (and money) to realise. But I can assure you that at least part of me wants to make them all.
Without too much context, I represent them to you here.
PROPOSAL 1
Rather cheekily I offer the presentation as my first proposal and at the end of the evening it was the only one that I had actually made.
The first proper set of proposals is to do with rubbish itself. One thing I am interested in doing is to question the aesthetic properties and possibilities of rubbish and so,
PROPOSAL 2
I would like to:
I would love to organise this. (Actually, I think I know somewhere to propose this one.) A public call would be issued across the city and people would pay a small fee to enter. Instead of daywear, eveningwear and swimwear, we would have the categories, plastic, paper and metal, searching for an alternative aesthetic to the Playboy image of beauty, and fabricating the costumes entirely from trash. There would be a big cash prize for the winner.
There would be no restrictions on age or gender to enter, but if it is still all a bit too girly for you then perhaps you would prefer:
PROPOSAL 3
in which I would like to:
I’m not entirely sure what this is yet. I don’t want it to be simply kicking cans instead of footballs but I do want to pick up on some of the popularity of football here in Brazil to entice people into playing with waste. Perhaps there could be can crushing contests, cardboard folding competitions etc. This would give catadores a head start, which would probably be a good thing.
As regular readers might recall, my rubbish research has led me to become a collector of Brazilian waste bins. The strange ‘baskets on legs’ that appear in various forms. I am interested in the aesthetic, rather than the utilitarian properties of these strange objects and so:
PROPOSAL 4
is to:
Perhaps people would start throwing things into it, which would be quite fun.
I have been really interested in the relationship between the municipal waste collection and the organised but informal system of catadores. Don’t forget, 100% of municipal waste here is landfill but at the same time 90% of aluminium is recycled. Catadores search out the cans wherever they are.
And so:
PROPOSAL 5
I would like to,
Now I know this is a bit mean but we all live in a lottery culture whether we like it or not. Of course most probably, I would never know what happened to my solid silver can but I would still like to make it.
However, there is no escaping,
PROPOSAL 6
Each São Paulo citizen throws out an average of 850 grams of rubbish each day. For a normal Brazilian life span of 70 years, that means every individual is responsible for 22 tonnes of waste over the course of their life.
Despite its huge landmass, Brazil hasn’t recorded any giant meteorites, so I thought perhaps they would like one of their own. (A few thousand miles away in Mexico, the Bacubirito meteorite is one of the largest single space objects to have been sent on a collision course with the Earth and survive. It is estimated to weigh 22 tonnes.) I would like to cast a giant meteorite in recycled aluminium weighing 22 tonnes as a kind of totem for our individual responsibilities.
As well as these aesthetic considerations I have been giving some thought to pragmatic ways in which I might work with the waste collection system.
I was really interested in the catadores carts. If I am completely honest, my attention was drawn predominantly to the way that they looked, rather than anything else but I did notice that they are often quite cumbersome in their steering.
And so,
PROPOSAL 7
is to:
I don’t really mean this in the patronizing ‘do good’ way that it comes across. I am simply interested to see what happens if you bring two sets of experts together, in this case engineers and catadores.
I have been very interested to learn that as a citizen, you are responsible for the pavement directly outside your house. This means that some areas are paved with ornate marble mosaic and others are completely unmade.
PROPOSAL 8
This proposal is to shift the emphasis from graffiti on the walls to mosaics on the pavements and to try and encourage a competitive spirit in the design of pavements outside your homes.
As you will see, in my trial, I have used discarded disposable ice-cream spoons in the design (and you will see why a bit later) but the general idea is to use the rubbish that you might throw out on the pavement, to make the pavement design.
A much longer-term project is,
PROPOSAL 9
I have been interested in thinking about what catadores collect. Of course their primary concern is to try and make a living, so they collect items for which they will be paid. But I have tried to think about some alternative economies.
Having really enjoyed the abundance of fruit here, I wanted to think about the status of the seeds of these fruit that are so readily discarded. In this proposal, catadores are paid for collecting seeds. These seeds are planted and the fruit harvested. I want to create an orchard out of rubbish.
This project is not economically viable, insomuch as the ‘set up’ costs would be more than the yield from the fruit but nevertheless as an idea it presses the question of how value is determined and understood.
A more direct way of doing this would be to make that information available directly to the consumer. And so, for,
PROPOSAL 10
I would like to:
I have visited both catdores cooperatives and private companies that act as intermediaries between catadores and recycling companies. One such company was paying R$2 per kilo; which means that catadores need to collect 36 cans for R$1. Printing this information on the can itself would simply disseminate the facts of this economic exchange.
More didactic (and perhaps less interesting) is,
PROPOSAL 11
Every day 9,700 tonnes of rubbish are driven in trucks from the city of São Paulo to the landfills at the periphery. 9,700 tonnes is equivalent to 10,000 Classic Volkswagen Beetles, 2,500 African Elephants and 40 Tian Tian Bronze Buddahs. That is a lot of trash. I would like to produce a children’s counting book, where each of the numbers relates to the amount of rubbish thrown out by São Paulo in a single day.
One of the tremendous benefits of working on these ideas here in Brazil has been to see some of the places and meet some of the people that are key to the waste collection and disposal systems for myself. I am interested in thinking about ‘meetings’ as a kind of artistic practice. Art allows us to think in a way or to do things that we might otherwise not do.
PROPOSAL 12
Visitors would be escorted on a day trip across some of the key sites in the life cycle of an aluminium can. The trip would include visits to the places the average public does not normally see: the canning factory, catadores cooperative and recycling plant as well as those that they normally do see: the retail outlets and personal space of a consumer. The idea would be to imbue the kinds of places we normally encounter with the ‘back story’ of those places we do not.
Of the many different things that I personally collect, one of my favourites is my collection of disposable ice-cream spoons. I have thousands. (You will understand now, why my design for the ‘sucata pavement’ was made with this trash.) Actually, I’ve collected quite a lot of spoons here in Brazil, many of which I have picked up off the street.
And so this leads me to perhaps the most self-interested proposal,
PROPOSAL 13
I would quite happily pay well above the recycling value of the plastic, especially for examples that are not yet accessioned into my collection.
In terms of the process in this proposal, as an artist I am interested in inverting the commonsense assumption that the catadores ‘need our help’ and rather want to think about how their expertise might be of value to me.
As for the spoons themselves, what I am concerned with is the value of material culture that exceeds the material value alone.
In this regard I would like to think about forms of rubbish collection that are not predicated on economic models.
And so to,
PROPOSAL 14
In which rubbish might be sorted by, for example, colour or by weight rather than by is scrap value.
Or,
PROPOSAL 15
In which somehow the accumulated waste of an individual would become the mountainous subject of a sculptural classification. Perhaps this could be in the form of a museum diary, rather than a sculpture, with a day-by-day archive of one person’s waste. A collection of rubbish that is never thrown out.
Underlying this proposal is the idea that rubbish may tell us something about ourselves; that material culture holds useful information.
Nowhere is this sense of knowledge being held by material objects more powerful than with the printed word: books.
This leads me onto,
PROPOSAL 16
I haven’t completely worked this one out yet but there is something in it that I am interested in pursuing. Proposal 16 explores the palimpsest: the idea that a piece of writing has been effaced to make way for new writing.
I want to hold a contest to gather books. Clues could send teams of people out on a bibliographic hunt: great works of literature, history and science; cookery books, play texts, political tracts. These books, with their collective knowledge, meaning and power would become the recipe for a new set of books. The paper would be passed through the recycling system and like the alchemical dream, would become a fresh publication. In this way, the new publications are themselves and all the books of which they are constituent parts: a kind of hidden material library.
You may recall my visit to the wonderful beginnings of a ‘Waste Museum’ in a disused office room off the main corridor of the municipal Secretaria de Serviço that deals with waste management.
PROPOSAL 17
The rest of the proposals are really about socialisation and citizenship: about what it means to be a Paulista.
In many ways Brazil is the world leader in terms of what it does with its rubbish, certainly in terms of recycling. One of the reasons that I was so interested to come here after working with rubbish in Japan in 2008 was because Brazil has overtaken Japan as the foremost recycler of aluminium in the world. In Japan aluminium is so successfully recycled because people are ‘good citizens’ and wash and dispose of their waste in the ‘correct’ fashion (all rubbish is separated before it is disposed of, in specific coloured bags and you write your name on the bag of rubbish before you put it out on the designated collection day). In Brazil the success is due to one thing: money.
In this society which is so predicated on economic difference as the benchmark for social status, the issue seems to me to be less about the environmental ramifications of waste disposal or collection and rather more about those who throw that rubbish away or are given the job to collect it.
And so to,
PROPOSAL 18
This simple invitation may well produce unexpected results.
I am interested in the social status of catadores. In some sense they are celebrities. They are high profile – known around the world; they are visible on the streets; they are depended upon. And in another sense they are outcasts, considered the dregs of society.
I started to think about the catadores dogs. Dogs are kept by humans for security and companionship but I wonder if they are not also a point of greater identification for a general public than the human beings who are their ‘masters’.
PROPOSAL 19
PROPOSAL 20
I don’t imagine these portraits to be explained – just to be there. I like the idea that catadores, or rubbish collectors, might meet themselves when at work, and for the rest of us to think about the human contact that our trash will face when it leaves our hand.
PROPOSAL 21
…because the lives of those who are forgotten are often far more interesting than those who are placed on a pedestal.
And while we are mentioning pedestals.
PROPOSAL 22
Charles Baudelaire developed a derived meaning from the French term ‘flâneur’: that of “a person who walks the city in order to experience it”. This term has been used as a way of understanding some contemporary art practices that engage with the city.
Although they are not ‘strolling’ (rather they are determined hunters of valuable rubbish) the catadores are contemporary flâneurs – always on the streets, experiencing the city.
For,
PROPOSAL 23
I want to:
Many streets would have multiple names and many streets would have the same names, so this isn’t really a practical mapping solution but it would allow us to think of those streets in a different way.
The fact that they are on the streets, experiencing the city and looking around them carefully, means that,
PROPOSAL 24
…we could
Taking this one step further, we could invert the idea that catadores are somehow on the margins of society, outside state control and make them agents of state policing.
PROPOSAL 25
Another thing that we saw at the Secretaria de Serviço was the live tracking of the municipal garbage trucks, so that the location of each truck could be determined.
PROPOSAL 26
…is so obvious that perhaps it has been done already. Make this tracking public.
The idea here is that as a public we are encouraged to follow and track the truck that is coming for our rubbish. It would enable people to check when the truck destined for their street was due, meaning they could put out their trash with pinpoint accuracy, thus reducing the amount of rubbish left on the street.
Perhaps I’m living in a dream world to think that people would engage with such a website and of course it is reliant on people having access to the internet but the incentive here is to get people thinking about citizenship and taking pride in their city.
If this most recent set of proposals are about rethinking the status of rubbish collectors, then the last set are about citizenship itself. I have made projects with these kinds of imperatives before and one of the mechanisms that I used was personal proper names: my name, your name.
So, for São Paulo I would like to use the incredible billboards that mark the way into the city, from the airport and along the motorways. I would like to engage a discussion and hold a competition and for,
PROPOSAL 27
…to print the:
Or perhaps not even the names but,
PROPOSAL 28
…rather the:
I would love to see that. But even more, what I would like to do in São Paulo is,
PROPOSAL 29
Actually, I am already making this project in Porto, Portugal with an organisation called NEC. We are in negotiations at the moment with the City Council to be allowed to do this and it now looks like it is really going to happen. It is very exciting. But I have been really impressed by the fact that so many of the streets in São Paulo are named after the citizens who made it. What I would like to do is to name a street after an ordinary citizen. To engage a public debate on who we want our role models to be, to select a winner and to rename a street. All the maps would then have to change.
And then perhaps there could also be an exhibition dedicated to that one unknown individual.
PROPOSAL 30
In which an ‘ordinary’ person would be given the space and attention usually reserved for those deemed ‘exceptional’.
Art practice offers us a permission to do things and to see things in a way otherwise not expected. At its best, art can flatten the hierarchy of what is considered worthy of our attention: it can make a piece of trash a diamond.
It is this ‘way of looking’ that is at the heart of,
PROPOSAL 31
This is a curated series of tours of places and sites that are not usually public. From the domestic house to the sewers underneath MASP, each tour would allow visitors to see their city in a new way. The point of these tours is that they are delivered by artists or gallery tour guides. They offer an ‘art’ perspective on what is clearly not art.
The works that I am proposing here this evening are above all about conversation; about trying to kick start a debate.
And in an effort to really push this incentive,
PROPOSAL 32
…takes to the streets and directly addresses the public.
So no matter what they are, love São Paulo or hate it, these are the answers that will be published.
And so to my final proposal:
PROPOSAL 33
To wash something is to care for it, to nurture it, to value it, to recognise its worth. I want to engage hundreds of people in this exercise. We take the trash, we sort it and wash it. This vast expenditure of useless energy nevertheless asks us to rethink our relation to material culture; what we choose to keep, what we throw away, and why.
Unlike London, Paris or even New York and Tokyo, São Paulo is not a city for window shoppers. A casual visitor might well think that there are barely any shops at all. You have to know where to go. There are very few glittering window displays inviting you in.
Of course there are shops, with windows, but there is a predominance of markets and malls, the former sprawling over many streets, the latter over many floors.
Personally I have never understood the attraction of malls, the homogeneity of which I find alienating. It has been so wet here though, that sometimes a mall roof is a welcome protection.
Everyone is talking about the rain. It’s a bit like England. I’m sure it will make those of you still enveloped in the winter freeze exercise your schadenfreude to know that it rains and rains and rains. Everyday. If you want to feel better about not being in this tropical paradise, check out the weather report for São Paulo. Heavy rain: day after day.
No umbrella can withstand the pelting downpours. The pavements simply empty as pedestrians take cover. The moment the firmament turns down the volume, the hoards converge to continue with their journey until the next deluge.
As irritating as it is for a visitor to get wet and wonder what to do (having used up all the tokens saved for a rainy day) it is nothing compared to the misery faced by the thousands who have been displaced. With vastly inadequate drainage, huge sections of the ultra poor flavelas have simply been washed away. (This is most probably to the satisfaction of local government, which wants these ‘slums’ cleared anyway.) Even in the middle class ‘heritage world’ of São Luiz do Paraitinga where we stopped for a day en route to the countryside pousada late last year the rain caused devastation. Mudslides demolished the town’s iconic church, many houses, and left thousands homeless. The emergency appeal saw residents calling for ‘anything’. Everything has gone. We need anything.
So as the Haitian disaster quite rightly engages international support, the displaced here struggle with little help. Mother Earth the avenger reeking havoc to humanity with a flick of her wrist.
And so to the protection of the mall. Actually most of this week I have been indoors, listening to the rain drumming on the corrugated roof, writing up my proposals and presentation, venturing out to the gym for a break, or the supermarket for a snack.
At the mention of snacks:
BANANA UPDATE:
This week on the banana tastings we have two lollies, a chip and a pop.
Kibon’s Fruttare, “com pedaços de fruta” was actually really nice. Milky banana with chewy bits of dried fruit.
Sorvesan’s Banana com Canela was the cheapest ice-cream I have ever bought (about 30p) and was quite nice. Banana with cinnamon reminds me of my childhood, where an impromptu desert would be slicing a banana and pouring a mixture of brown sugar, lemon juice and cinnamon over the top before grilling it until it became like a kind of toffee on top of hot banana. Lovely.
Another banana/cinnamon combo was bio2’s banana com canela frutas orgânicas secas which was so moreish that I managed to eat most of them before I took the photographs. Freeze dried bits of banana yum.
And finally, for this week’s update, Ultrapan’s Banan’up Néctar de Banana, which I only bought because of this bloody update thing, fully expecting it to be foul. It scraped a pass, but I will not be purchasing it again.
END OF BANNANA UPDATE
Here are some places to shop in São Paulo.
The area around Brás (suitably spelt like a collection of ladies undergarments but pronounced with a flat vowel, as in a Yorkshireman saying ‘brass’) is the biggest clothing market in the whole of Brazil. 55 streets of outfitters and the largest wholesale mall in Latin America. Mind you, it’s pretty much 55 streets of Primark. Never have I been amongst so many retail outlets with so little temptation to make a purchase. I am however, in the minority. People come from all over the country, and as this photograph will testify, they don’t shop lite.
The area around Rua 25 Marco is a sequin heaven. Yes, here there is truly a bauble for everybody. Shop after shop after shop of beads, feathers, sequins, and threads, alongside party shops selling costumes and novelty accessories. Now here, for me anyway, the temptation is impossible to resist. 25 Marco (“Vinte Cinco de Marco”) is the place you go for your carnival creation and although hectic at all times of year, it is swarming with shoppers as the annual shindig approaches.
In Praça da República there is a weekly market with crappy paintings, leatherwear, and so on, with a line of stalls selling semi-precious stones.
One very interesting novelty here: a group of ‘nurses’ touting for business with sphygmomanometers. This is possibly the most inventive hawking I have ever seen. And they might actually save your life! (Mind you, they didn’t have any takers while I was there.)
Liberdade is ‘Japan Town’. São Paulo has the highest population of ethnic Japanese outside Japan. In the supermarkets there can be moments of cultural and geographical confusion as, for a split second, you think you are on a different continent altogether.
But if there is any confusion, then it is soon put to rest. São Paulo is not Tokyo and the Japanese here are, by their own repeated identification, Brazilians. Most of the immigration was two or three generations ago. As if to underline this, I present you with a photograph of a ‘sakerinha’ – half saké, half famous Brazilian cocktail ‘caipirinha’.
Along the streets of Liberdade there are markets with Japanese goods, including these very cute water lilies.
The mother of all markets, is however CEAGESP – Companhia de Entrepostos e Armazéns Gerais de São Paulo (The São Paulo General Warehousing and Centres Company). To describe it as a ‘market’ is a grand misnomer. It is more like a town. This is the larder of the megalopolis. We got up at the headache hour of 5.30 a.m. and took two metros and two trains, sandwiched with a walk either side to get there. It was also raining. Of course. Without a map of the ‘market’ it was difficult to know where to go. All of food is here but on this, our first trip, we only saw fruit and flowers.
However, here is a nice thing: hunky Brazilian guy with wide smile in back of truck with pickaxe chipping away at ice for fish market.
Streets and streets of trucks with boxes and baskets packed full of produce follow.
Beyond this, the flower market, which makes Columbia Road look as irrelevant as a single grain of sand on Copacabana Beach.
My own preoccupations return to Grandma. The cliché: I can’t believe that she is really gone, triggers an odd sort of upset, in which in a kind of metaphysical way, I step outside myself, trying to observe what I am feeling.
In an absurdly grand (or perhaps it should be grandly absurd) gesture, I ended up buying many more flowers than I could carry at the CEAGESP Flower Market. Struggling back with them on the rush hour trains was no joke.
Back at Débora’s house (and as much in a tribute to the sucata recycling of Brazil as the practical fact that there simply weren’t enough receptacles to house this floral abundance) I made hanging vases out of plastic mineral water bottles.
It was the day before Grandma’s funeral and I wanted to do something. When I returned to Brazil, I knew that I would miss it. To be honest, I felt relieved. But as the time got closer I craved the formal outlet and institutional parade of the crematorium and to hear the family eulogies. So I guess the flowers were to mark this day out as an occasion.
The first picture shows big, plump, pink ‘antique’ Roses and pale blue Hydrangeas. The second Sunflowers. The third Anthurium. The fourth Strelitzia (Birds of Paradise) with Anthurium, and what I think might be a Yucca flower, possibly Adam’s Needle. The fifth shows my desk, with more Roses and a vase of Strelitzia, Anthurium and the incredible Zingiber Spectabile (Beehive Ginger) which look like they have come directly from the set of ‘Pandora’ in James Cameron’s Avatar. The sixth and final photograph shows tropical Protea with more Yucca.
My aunt sent me the order of service, the music and each of the speeches. Half way across the world, with my watch synchronised, I sat at my computer with my photograph of Grandma on the desktop, listening first to the Mozart (Piano Concerto 21 in C – Andante) and later to the arrestingly fragile Gracie Fields 1935 rendition of ‘When I Grow Too Old To Dream’. Whimpering over the keyboard, I read each of the homilies in turn, really trying to summon the voice of each of my relatives: my dear dad, my uncle, my sisters, my cousin, my aunt. Clearly my borrowed desk in São Paulo is not the same as a pew in Oxford crematorium but I did manage to focus very intently on Grandma, to feel the glow of her spirit, and to think again, about what all this means.
