A Turnaround in the City’s Culture

For now we shall not sing of love,
which has taken refuge deeper than the underground.
We shall sing of fear, which sterilizes embraces,
we shall not sing of hatred, for it does not exist,
there is only fear, our father and our companion,
the great fear of the backlands, of the seas, of the deserts,
the fear of soldiers, the fear of mothers, the fear of churches,
we shall sing of the fear of dictators, the fear of democrats,
we shall sing of the fear of death and the fear of what follows death.
Then we shall die of fear
and on our graves yellow, fearful flowers will grow

Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Congresso Internacional do Medo

An urban event par excellence, Virada Cultural is a mirror of the city, a great stage onto which all our rottenness and desires are projected, including — and above all — the desire to enjoy ourselves: divertir-se, from the Latin divertere — to go away, to separate, to be different, to diverge. But also the desire to entertain ourselves: entreter-se, etymologically, entre + ter, “between” + “to have.”

The people took to the streets. An estimated 4 million people were in central São Paulo this weekend. They walked and packed the subway stations. Headlines about Virada Cultural focused on violence statistics. The announcements preceding it focused on the uninterrupted program — 24 hours — and the number of attractions — more than 900…

If numbers are what matter, let us stick with Mário de Andrade’s: “I am three hundred, I am three hundred and fifty.” For these are the qualitative numbers of the multitude. Of the crowd that wants to be different, to diverge from this city’s hostility, to be among others and to have the city. To enjoy and entertain themselves in the best sense of those words.

Marcos Augusto Gonçalves, Vanessa Bárbara and Gilberto Dimenstein have already said everything, and said it better, than I could about the hypocrisy of suggesting that São Paulo might be different from what it is for one night, and about the need to resist by dancing.

Embracing the narrow-minded discourse of the Military Police colonel who dubbed this gathering of all classes, genders, ages and artistic languages a “criminal all-nighter” is a dangerous choice and a direct path toward criminalizing public space. In this view, the best option is to embrace the shopping mall model and create controlled, enclosed spaces, with security at the door, armored against supposedly suspicious “different” people.

It is undeniable that nine injured people and one death in a single night (whether a festive one or not) are unacceptable facts, not numbers. Calling for police on the streets or demanding an end to public events such as Virada, with flimsy arguments about “wasting money,” means endorsing a financial and compartmentalized approach to art and culture.

Gerfried Stocker, artistic director of Ars Electronica (the world’s largest and longest-established media art festival), opens every lecture with the same slide: “If you think culture is expensive, try ignorance.” I wholeheartedly agree.

We need more, many more turnarounds — viradas. Especially of and within the culture of living in the city. This requires more projects that allow us to keep taking it over: walking, riding the subway, filling not only the stages where big names in music perform, but also those featuring artists with less commercial success, as well as theater, dance and cabaret, as happened this weekend in São Paulo.

Unprecedented for an event of this kind and scale was the visual arts’ takeover of Vale do Anhangabaú, where projections, interactive works and swings generously tried — and succeeded — to “pick out faces in the anonymity of the crowd,” as an article by Silas Martí in Folha pointed out, doing justice to the efforts of Lucas Bambozzi, Bijari, Colaboratório Urbano, Marília Pasculli, Rachel Rosalen & Rafael Marchetti, Basurama, Daniel Seda, Alexis Anastasiou, Facebuilding and many others.

The São Paulo Court of Justice gave a masterclass in citizenship, opening its doors to the city and hosting one of the most powerful artistic interventions ever made in Brazil. “Água,” by Rejane Cantoni, Leonardo Crescenti and Raquel Kogan, transformed the Palace of Justice into an incredible virtual swimming pool, into which the public plunged without fear, into the architecture envisioned by João Cabral de Melo Neto: “Architecture as the building of doors,/to open; or as the building of openness;/ (…) doors through-which, never doors-against;/through which, freely: air light sound reason.”