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Abstract
This paper contributes an initial venture into thinking about the uses of urban space in the context of leisure and contemporary urban life in São Paulo, Brazil. Looking at different urban spaces of leisure along Augusta Street, this paper analyzes the social, frenetic, and yet intimate spaces in São Paulo that were transformed and revived in the last few years. It examines Vídeo Guerrilha, an annual three-day video arts festival on Augusta Street. It also observes the revival of the neighborhood of Lower Augusta/Baixo Augusta in São Paulo, which is in progress and closer to the city center and, more specifically, the “bad” side of Avenida Paulista, the active artery that separates downtown from upscale neighborhoods in the city's southwest zone. It focuses on visual and urban street culture along Augusta and the two parallel avenues that flank it, Bela Cintra Street and Frei Caneca Street. The urban dynamic is reflected in the city's urban landscapes and shows a constant tension between opposite realms: global–local, private–public, and the individual–collective.
Notes
1 Petar Milat, “Introduction,” Operation: City 2008 conference, The Neoliberal Frontline: Urban Struggles in Post-Socialist Societies, Zagreb, Croatia, December 4–7, 2008; available online at http://monoskop.org/images/3/3d/Operation.City_2008_The_Neoliberal_Frontline_Urban_Struggles_in_Post-Socialist_Societies.pdf.
2 Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money (New York: New Press, 1998). See also Samuel Pinheiro Guimarães, Desafios Brasileiros na Era dos Gigantes (Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto, 2006) and Larry Rohter, Brazil on the Rise: The Story of a Country Transformed (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
3 “Glocal” or “glocalization” serves as a means of combining the idea of globalization with that of local considerations. As explained by Phillip Young P. Hong and In Han Song in “Glocalization of Social Work Practice: Global and Local Responses to Globalization,” International Social Work 53, no. 5, (September 2010): 656–70, glocalization corresponds to the integration of local markets into world capitalism.
4 See Mercer, “Worldwide Cost of Living Survey 2014,” http://www.imercer.com/uploads/GM/col2014g3579/index.html?aliId=71032338 accessed August 8, 2014. Also, Antonio Regalado, “On São Paulo's Mean Streets, the Rich Roll in Armored Splendor: High Crime, High Tastes Drive Auto Upgrades; For One 19-Year-Old, a Bulletproof Pink Beetle,” Wall Street Journal, September 10, 2009, A1, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB125253329665697311.
5 For an overview of these differences, see The Culture Trip: http://theculturetrip.com/north-america/, http://theculturetrip.com/europe/, and http://theculturetrip.com/south-america/.
6 Niemeyer is Brazil's most iconic architect. He is considered to be one of the key figures in the development of modern architecture. Niemeyer was best known for his design of civic buildings for Brasília, a planned city that became Brazil's capital in 1960, as well as his collaboration with other architects on the United Nations Headquarters in New York. His exploration of the aesthetic possibilities of reinforced concrete was highly influential in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
7 Richard Parker, Bodies, Pleasures, and Passions: Sexual Culture in Contemporary Brazil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991).
8 Richard Bevins, “A Hip Street in São Paulo, Brazil, Moves to a Different Beat,” LA Times, October 3, 2011, http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/03/world/la-fg-brazil-rua-augusta-20111004.
9 Vídeo Guerrilha, 2012, http://www.Vídeoguerrilha.com.br/.
10 Vídeo Guerrilha is similar to the annual DUMBO Arts Festival in Brooklyn, where more than 500 artists from around the world showcase a wide range of installations and interactive performances. Also a three-day neighborhood takeover, it utilizes everything from storefronts to building exteriors as mediums to display the festival's unique exhibits.
11 See César Meneghetti, “The Invasion of Urban Spaces—César Meneghetti's Views on Vídeo Guerrilha,” Netherlands Media Art Institute, Timeframe, http://nimk.nl/blog/timeframe/2011/01/19/the-invasion-of-urban-spaces-cesar-meneghettis-views-on-Video-guerrilha/.
12 Vídeo Guerrilha, 2012.
13 Though it is not the first time that an artistic, urban intervention with video takes place in the city of São Paulo, Visualfarm, the creative collective organizing this event, has already made many art projections in the last eight years. This has been their most ambitious project, and none have been at this scale.
14 The projections were concentrated in the Lower Augusta Street area between Mathias Aires and the Marquis de Paranagua.
15 Video mapping, also known as projection mapping or spatial augmented reality, is a projection technology used to turn objects, often irregularly shaped, into a display surface for video projection. These objects may be complex industrial landscapes, such as buildings. By using specialized software, a two- or three-dimensional object is spatially mapped on the virtual program that mimics the real environment on which it is projected. The software can interact with a projector to fit any desired image onto the surface of that object. Artists and advertisers alike can add extra dimensions, optical illusions, and notions of movement onto previously static objects to utilize this art form, or technique. The video is commonly combined with or triggered by audio to create an audiovisual narrative. See Adrienne Day, “When Skyscrapers Are Your Screen,” New York Times, January 25, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/arts/design/video-mapping-artists-use-light-as-a-medium.html; Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon, eds., Performance and Technology: Practices of Virtual Embodiment and Interactivity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Michael Naimark, “Two Unusual Projection Spaces,” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, “Immersive Projection Technology” special issue 14, no. 5 (October 2005): 597–605.
16 This last installation was well received and served as a temporary platform for spontaneous public creativity. See Valéria França, “Projeções vão colorir Augusta a partir de hoje: 3° Vídeo Guerrilha vai transformar fachadas de prédios da rua em telas para 100 artistas; público poderá participar das intervenções,” Estadão, November 22, 2012, http://www.estadao.com.br/noticias/impresso,projecoes-vao-colorir-augusta-a-partir-de-hoje-,963312,0.htm.
17 Meneghetti, “The Invasion of Urban Spaces.”
18 See http://www.timeout.com.br/sao-paulo/en/aroundtown/events/245/video-guerrilha. This has been relatively small scale for Visualfarm, which is in the business of creating projects throughout Brazil and abroad.
19 Lost Art, Caleb Neelon, and Tristan Manco, Graffiti Brasil, Street Graphics / Street Art series (London: Thames & Hudson, 2005); Simon Romero, “At War With São Paulo's Establishment, Black Paint in Hand,” New York Times, January 28, 2012. [Alternate spelling: pixação], http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/world/americas/at-war-with-sao-paulos-establishment-black-paint-in-hand.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
20 Emilie Brunet, “A City in Runes: Street Art Might be on the Brink of Respectability—But Gritty Pichação is Still Beyond the Pale,” Time Out São Paulo, 2012, http://www.timeout.com.br/sao-paulo/en/art/features/116/a-city-in-runes.
21 Gustavo Lassala, Pichação não é Pixação: Introdução a Analise de Expressoes Gráficas Urbana (São Paulo: Altamira Editorial, 2007); Anita Rink, Graffiti: Intervenção Urbana e Arte (Curitiba, Brazil: Editora Appris, 2013).
22 François Chastanet and Steven Heller, Pixação: São Paulo Signature (Paris: XG Press, 2007).
23 Regalado, “On São Paulo's Mean Streets.”
24 Anthony Faiola, “Brazil's Elites Fly Above their Fears; Rich Try to Wall Off Urban Violence,” Washington Post, June 1, 2002.
25 Teresa Caldeira, “Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation,” in Setha M. Low, ed., Theorizing the City: A New Urban Anthropology Reader (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 83–106. See also Teresa P. R. Caldeira, City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
26 See Gustavo Coelho and Marcelo Guerra, Luz, Camera, Pichação, 2012. Documentary film, 104 min.
27 Due to the project's success, in 2013, Vídeo Guerrilha had editions in Rio de Janeiro (Lapa neighborhood), Brasilia (Complexo Cultural da República), as well as projects abroad in Cuba, China, Italy, Spain, and the United States.
28 Michelle Young, “The Legalization of Street Art in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,” Untapped Cities: Urban Discovery from a New York Perspective, http://untappedcities.com/2012/02/13/the-legalization-of-street-art-in-rio-de-janeiro-brazil/.
29 For more about the controversies about street art in Brazil, see UGallery blog Art Talk: “At War with São Paulo's Establishment, Black Paint (and Camera) in Hand,” posted January 30, 2012, 9:10 a.m., http://blog.ugallery.com/post/33883735010/at-war-with-sao-paulos-establishment-black-paint-and.
Additional information
ALEXANDER LAMAZARES is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Bronx Community College of the City University of New York. He is Deputy Chair and Portuguese Language Coordinator in the department of Modern Languages. He received his MA from the University of Chicago, and his doctorate from the State University of New York at Albany. He has published in Gender, the Latino Research Review, and Religion and the Arts. The Russian journal, the New Literary Review, translated his article on post-Soviet aesthetics in Cuba. He is a recipient of a National Endowment for Humanities fellowship, which was based in Brazil. His current research looks at contemporary Brazilian visual culture, with a focus on São Paulo as an urban space of modernity.