During a meeting, we decided to guide us in one question: What is it that you don’t see on the river? We don’t see its occupation or its usage, in fact, lots of people don’t even see the river as a part of the city. They pass by it every day, either crossing bridges or facing hours of heavy traffic at Marginal, but they don’t see it. So, we’ve come to a second guiding question: did people stop valuing the river because it got dirty, or did it get dirty because people stopped valuing the river?

   Bearing in mind the difficulties trying to approach the riverbank, and the possibility of occupations (in structural terms of its bank), we decided to take the river into the city. If turning the back to it was a part of the historical process of occupation of São Paulo, nothing better than using this history to make it be seen. Nowadays, the original riverbed would cut lots of important streets of the city. And this riverbed, which carried lots of histories, of habits, of a culture of river [5], does not exist anymore.

    Take it to the inside of the city is a way to oblige the citizens to look indirectly to this river. Look to an urban structure that demands more actions, other traditions, but more than everything, to a possibility of coexistence and revaluation that is not lost.

These days, communications are plunging human contacts into monitored areas that divide the social bond up into (quite) different products. Artistic activity, for its part, strives to achieve modest connections, open up (one or two) obstructed passages, and connect levels of reality kept apart from one another. (BOURRIAUD, 2009)

   We searched for these experiences on the river and the affective relations people have established with it through history. At the Museu da Pessoa, we collected some places of those accounts, with no nostalgic appeal, but as source of facts that occurred at the river in the past. We selected those that happened in areas of urban occupation post-rectification and transformed them in points of action.

    We decided to take those accounts and lead them to people as a way to problematize the relation that they have with the city, in the specific case, with the river. We’ve assumed that the politically non-participative citizen, by his abstention, makes himself directly active on the destruction. In turn, the political decisions that forbid the free access to the space are crippling factors of popular discernment.

    The imprint of those accounts in public areas creates new urban allegories in strategical points, which incite the look. From this visual recognition, the river turns itself real by the act of making it visible also to the other. “So reality is what I talk about with a third party” (BOURRIAUD, 2009). The dialog initiates at the intervention. On communicating, we launch the ideia that is going to be returned at its own way. On this relation, the spectator creates a moment of sociability, therefore the piece itself is an object producer of sociability. (BOURRIAUD, 2009)

 

 

[5] Concept created considering the customs developed by communities that make use of rivers. In other words, the routines that certain populations develop in a life around the river. We named it “culture” for considering those relations so intrinsic to those societies that they are a part of their identity, their people and their culture.