I’m part of a movement from Bixiga, here in São Paulo,
a neighbourhood on the outskirts of the city centre
that has been fighting for 40 years to liberate a territory
which is our last earthen and free piece of land,
the last area where one can breathe.
You can find it on google maps.
It’s beautiful to see there is nothing there yet.
And we’ve been fighting for its liberation for 40 years,
a struggle against what we call real estate speculation,
which promotes demolition, creates ruins and then returns to tidy everything up
by creating buildings and other rather odd things.
So this is the story I want to present here.
This image is…
…a graphic macumba, as we like to call it,
to summon Parque do Bixiga, which I also like to call Roça
because I’m from Minas.
I’m minério (ore) actually,
as being mineiro (from Minas Gerais) isn’t really working anymore.
And…
So, it’s a matter of imagination
but it also reflects an existing project,
which has actually already been drawn, seriously, by architects,
and aims to free the Bixiga river, one of the three rivers,
together with the Itororó and the Saracura,
that just like many other São Paulo rivers are currently buried.
They’re asphyxiated.
Three rivers that run through the Anhangabaú Valley.
This river looks a bit like the Amazon River,
I imagine that if the Bixiga River comes out from below it won’t be as big as this.
But it’s a living force,
and is also related to the will to liberate that land
and avoid death inducing construction, because that’s the problem here.
Silvio Santos, someone we should know well, for various reasons,
is also known as a real estate speculator,
who’s very active in São Paulo,
and is responsible for a wonderful project
which aims to build three 100m high towers.
Beautiful, wonderful towers, in this area called Bixiga,
that has its own specific way of life, which has nothing to do with this.
I’m going to read to you and I’ll try and be quick,
maybe too quick because I’m feeling anxious.
What you’ll see here are images of movements that took place during this fight.
Almost 40 years ago,
a piece of land almost 11.000 sq mt in size, within the Bexiga neighbourhood,
resists the advances of real estate speculation in São Paulo.
It’s the last earthen and free piece of land in the centre of the city.
This land lays between Rua Jaceguai, Rua Abolição, Rua Amaro and Rua Japurá,
where the Teatro Oficina lives.
A fertile valley where throughout the years
a cosmopolitical struggle for life has been ever-present,
a meeting between humans and the land,
the land and the theatre, the theatre and the cosmos,
the cosmos and the small avocado sprouts growing on the branches of a tree trunk
already knocked down by a storm that is still rising and insists on rising.
The storm and the swaying of the Caesalpinia tree,
hand planted by Lina Bo Bardi,
the architect who drew and created the current Teatro Oficina.
The swaying tree led to the fall of the wall
that interweaved the inside and the outside between the trunk and the tree top.
We found it great that the theatre’s wall had fallen,
in an act of acupuncture to open up the spaces and call the park in.
What happens between the Bixiga stream and the earth
may have been heard by overflying birds,
building a sort of vital map through routes of resistance.
The birds fly from the dry branches of the fallen avocado tree,
from where those green flourishing sprouts shoot up,
to the tops of the trees in the forest surrounding the House of Dona Yayá,
and return
to the Caesalpinia´s full mane,
building nests on the Teatro Oficina´s glass ceiling.
If paying close attention, long days of ornitholorgies
will be able to capture the vibrations of this atmosphere,
with its own intensities building these small worlds,
in the meticulous task of imagining and bearing witness to these trajectories
fertilizing life itself.
Biodiversities.
Behold a job to be done.
Rituals of coexistence point out the history of the fight in that place,
incarnated in the struggle against a capitalist and speculative way of life within cities.
Park of the Lands of Bixiga,
of the Bixiga River,
of São Paulo, from one cosmos in relation to another cosmos.
And now I´ll read an excerpt from “Sertões”,
by Euclides da Cunha, a guy…
In a mute but thrilling fight for those who can perceive it,
over countless centuries,
dulled as it always is by adverse agents,
and yet, tenacious, unconquerable,
in sure evolution, the land, a living organism,
is transformed from the inside out,
indifferent to the elements disrupting its face.
Auscultate is a word of Latin origin,
and means to give ears to.
A technical term for listening to the internal sounds of a body,
which may be performed by directly touching that body with one’s ear
or with an instrument known as a stethoscope.
It consists in investigating
the noises of the circulatory, respiratory and gastrointestinal systems.
But I like to think it can also be a sort of wiretapping
of subterranean fluxes, all in all, of the earth itself.
On the 5th of June of this troubled year of 2019, this disgrace,
an urban acupunctural ritual, the room of great proportions
in the fight for the creation of Parque do Bixiga,
shot an arrow towards the unmassacre of this territory.
It was a gesture to auscultate the pulse of the Bixiga River,
a buried force, like many others in São Paulo, in Brazil.
In São Paulo, according to research performed by the project Rios e Ruas (Rivers and Streets),
at any given point we stand at
there is always a river 150 to 200 metres away.
Right here, now.
A great part of the streets we walk
are river courses buried by the rage of brainless urbanization.
In Bixiga, three rivers: Saracura, Itororó and Bixiga;
compose a river basin and run towards the Anhangabaú Valley,
where a river plain once formed, and was buried during the construction of the capital,
and now suffers with floods.
Effects of the water courses being confined
in galleries and narrow concrete pipes over the years.
Real estate speculation builds cities for necrosis,
like mining, which dissipates mountains and lives,
like ruralism, which burns and chops down.
A kind of three bizarre brothers,
creating coarse areas, brutally implanted
both by a rampant demolition of constructions,
human, non-human, more than human, call them what you will,
constructions that are no longer fit,
due to the compulsory creation of violent and patriarchal architecture,
submitted to constant updates of a colonial, speciesist, segregationist,
sterile and extremely boring nature,
And without the slightest immersion in the biospheres they change.
Giving in to this obsession, this form of exploiting life in cities,
this way of creating what we call a city,
is a way of surrendering ourselves to the death policies
of these urban fabrics, the fabrics of the land and our own bodies.
Not giving in is an important, a very important force of life.
A small but important power,
that in series and constellations might produce
a technology which enables us to fight together
and create a cosmopolitical perspective.
From this land, on this land, for this land, it’s time.
The fight led on Bixiga’s land,
and the movement that aspires to renaturalize the asphyxiated river
is also a co-movement, which is allied to others,
and there are various territories being disputed in the city of São Paulo.
These are fights for the right to the city, fights for non-human rights,
fights for imagination, and a cosmopolitical imagination,
conflicts between ways of living,
fights for the right to exist differently,
policies favouring life, creations of other worlds and other stories,
fabulations of people to come and who already are,
Today more than 40 territories compose a network called Novos Parques (New Parks),
a symbiosis fighting for green areas in the capital.
The fight of indigenous people for the land,
with the land, as one with the land.
The march of indigenous women,
margaridas (working women) and campesinas (peasants)in August 2019,
who took Brasilia and echoed:
“Territory, our body, our spirit”.
A tekoá, a place where (…)
Is it pronounced tekoá? Tekohá? Tell me.
Tekoá? Yes. Tekohá, tekoá… Yes.
A tekoá, tekoa, is a place that practices a way of life which resists.
I really like establishing an
alliance between this way of thinking and what is lived in the Teatro Oficina,
a place that practices a way of life which resists,
and has a battle to fight, a fight that goes side-by-side with the fight of that location.
Denilson Baniwa, with his graphic power,
revendicates and establishes: Brazil, indigenous land;
São Paulo, indigenous land.
Agrarian reform settlements in Greater São Paulo,
and responsible consumer groups,
circulate the products of an urban and agroecological agriculture.
Seed orchards and composting facilities are widespread in urban allotment gardens.
The Tupinambá de Olivença with Casé Angatu,
who consecrated the land of the Teatro Oficina and the land of Bixiga
with their song and dance:
“Tupinambá is going to get you, is going to eat you.
Tupinambá is going to get you, is going to eat you”.
Movements such as Ruas e Rios (Streets and Rivers)
take action to restore rivers, streams and their courses within the capital.
Against all of life’s constraints,
we will need joy and courage,
as well as poets.
Mushrooms and fungi,
which have the quality of accumulating toxic residues and heavy metals in mining areas,
avoiding them from reaching the forest’s biodiversity and plants.
Basil and rosemary baths which brace the people.
The works of the terreiros (places of worship) which brace the land.
The prayers of the Guarani people which brace the world. The fire words of Davi Kopenawa.
All those powers, all those peoples in symbiosis,
are holding the sky above our heads as we speak.
The powers never stop creating amongst themselves,
ever-unfinished shapes, always yet to be completed,
undone, destroyed, created, to the point of being perennially unfixed,
to the point of constant movement, operating on the fringe of contours,
a continuous seeping, an incessant creation with something else, one with another.
There´s a crazy woman, a biologist, called Donna Haraway,
who says that we are humus.
Manure, right?
Humus, not Homo, not Anthropos, but humus, a fertile matter.
And not only humans but the entire earth.
The transformation that doesn’t stagnate.
The agitation and the rest. The pulse.
The composition and the decomposition.
The cardiac muscle. The gills of fish.
The skin of snakes. The systoles and the diastoles. A cocoon.
Maybe one can say of all these things: “it is a vital force”.
Of speculation, intoxic, active, one says progress.
This essay here starts with
the oestrous state of things,
which leads to an exercise of cosmopolitical imagination,
a typewriter which in the rite of words gestates a plan for life.