São Paulo
Highlights
Experiência No 2 (Experience No 2)
Experiência No 2 was a radical action in which Flávio de Carvalho walked against a Corpus Christi procession, refusing to remove his hat. The crowd’s reaction neared violence, exposing mass psychology and anticipating performance art.
Under constant threat
Artist Guilherme Peters, and journalist Andrea Dip, will screen their film Under Constant Threat (Sob Constante Ameaça), a short film based on interviews with around 2500 women, on the constant threat they are faced with while walking on the streets of Sao Paulo, Brazil.
DELIRIUM AMBULATORIUM
Hélio Oiticica’s Delirium Ambulatorium explores urban wandering as a creative practice, a “to-and-from” movement without linearity, where walking through the city feeds the mind, transforms urban space into a playground, and allows new artistic ideas to emerge through sensory, bodily, and chance encounters.
nós aqui, entre o céu e a terra (we here, between sky and earth)
27 chairs were carried by performers on bamboo poles from nearby institutions to the 34th Biennial, then arranged as sculptures and conversation spaces, connecting people, objects, and places in a shared, politically and socially resonant experience.
Oeste ou até aonde o sol pode alcançar (West or as far as the Sun can reach)
Komatsu, using a compass, follows the sun’s path across the city from east to west, overcoming obstacles like trees, walls, and streets. The video pauses whenever the route becomes impassable, highlighting the limits of the journey.
Walking Tools
Walking Tools is an open-source locative media project led by Brett Stalbaum at UCSD (2007–), developing shared GPS media standards and tools like HiperGps/HiperGeo to create, deploy, and share location-based narratives for education, art, and activism.
Hygiene of Art: The City Invaded by Blank Space
The City Invaded by Blank Space (1973) is a participatory artwork presented at the 12th São Paulo Biennial during Brazil’s military dictatorship. Through blank signs, media interventions, and public actions, it created spaces for free expression, challenged censorship and state control, and culminated in the artist’s arrest, marking a powerful act of political resistance.
The Green Line
In the summer of 1995 I performed a walk with a leaking can of blue paint in the city of São Paulo. The walk was then read as a poetic gesture of sorts. In June 2004, I re-enacted that same performance with a leaking can of green paint by tracing a line following the portion of the ‘Green Line’ that runs through the municipality of Jerusalem.
Walking pieces
Treads
This collaborative walking art project features a live multi-channel sound and movement installation based on simultaneous remote walks across global cities, translating these into a layered performance space in Athens. Drawing on soundscape storytelling, movement, and historical-philosophical references, it explores urban memory and social inclusion through collective dérives and sonic localization aligned with the tradition of Plato’s Academy.
• Passing – Going – Coming
This hybrid sound walk connects the Museum of Modern Art of Sao Paulo and Praça 14Bis through three interconnected maps in the CGeomap app, enabling users to explore spatial and temporal layers of past, present, and future. Conceived by Geert Vermeire and Fred Adam in collaboration with NuSom young artists, it integrates sound recordings, texts, and locative stories to create a multisensory temporal and spatial artistic mapping.
• Ecumenopolis – the whole world is one city
“Ecumenopolis – the whole world is one city”, a series of collaborative and global sound walks created for Sound Walk Sunday 2019. The sound walks are made for individual walkers around the British Library London, the State Library of Moscow, the National Library of Greece and the City Library of Sao Paulo, during September 2019.
• Articles elsewhere
Fragments of the Urban Absurd
A bunch of years ago, I threw together Sauntering verse. Based on an individual going on a walk, it uses what3words as a source for collecting words, related to the locations the person moves through, to construct poetry connected to the person’s journey. Then, the often clunky result can be cleaned up by using ChatGPT, …
• Interview with Sophia New and Daniel Belasco Rogers
As part of the release of my book, Walking as Artistic Practice (pre-orders now open for softcover shipping in April!), I’m going to be publishing some brief interviews with the various artists, authors, researchers, creatives, collectives, and platforms whose art practice, written material, or other works I cite and mention. My 26th interview in this […]
Walking times between Sao Paulo metro stations
Like many, I find the typical design of public transport maps rather gorgeous. They speak to my imagination on several levels. There is the challenge of simplifying complex and rich information, simplifying as much as possible, but not more. Then, an extensive public transport network also speaks to the level of service the state provides …
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