4 Dias 4 Noites (4 Days 4 Nights), realized by Artur Barrio in May 1970, is a defining work-process in his practice and one of the most radical examples of dérive in Brazilian art. For four days and four nights, Barrio walked continuously through the streets of Rio de Janeiro, without a predetermined route, destination, or external goal, and without stopping for food or rest. The work left no photographic or videographic record, nor was there any audience to witness it; it exists entirely in the artist’s memory and reflections, which have become a living archive informing his subsequent works.

The experience was conceived as an intimate exploration of perception, embodiment, and the interface between mind and body. Exhaustion, sleep deprivation, and hunger heightened Barrio’s sensory awareness, while his surroundings were transformed through the hallucinatory effects of prolonged walking. The city and its presumed reality were disrupted and reconfigured by his mind, an effect that exemplifies one of Barrio’s enduring aims: to rupture preconceived notions of reality and perception.

Barrio initially intended to document the experience in a 400-page Caderno-Livro, written as a continuous stream of consciousness. In the end, he produced only blank pages — a gesture of surrender to the impossibility of capturing the dionysiac flow of movement, time, and sensation. In his view, any attempt at conventional documentation collapses the ongoing action into a single “pregnant instant,” unable to convey the continuous and unrepeatable nature of the experience. The empty notebook emphasizes absence, impermanence, and the irreducibility of process to representation, foregrounding the ephemeral and anti-historicizing qualities of the work.

The journey itself was organized in what Barrio called segments. As he explained:

“I call it a segment in the sense that the stretches arise one from the other. I was aware that one segment had ended; but the next one, I didn’t know what it would be. That is, I leave the Solar da Fossa and walk to a point, which ends. So, that is a segment. Now, I don’t really know how I got to that point, but where that segment ended something arose that triggered a question, and the segment ended there, because something prompted an issue. This is an association. It’s a paranoia, it’s an associative paranoid situation.” (Barrio in an interview in the Panorama da Arte Brasileira catalog, 2001.)

This description of segments highlights the improvisational and unconscious logic of the work: each stretch of walking arose from the previous, guided by intuition, circumstance, and associative perception rather than reason or plan. Barrio has also recounted the unexpectedly mundane moment when the piece ended:

“Ah! Now I know! I stopped when a hole opened in my sneaker. Then I went to the School of Fine Arts, spoke with my old professor, Onofre Penteado, and asked him for five cruzeiros to go home. He gave me the money, and I took the bus back.”

This anecdote underlines the deeply human, improvisational nature of the work, where the extraordinary intensity of four days and nights of walking concludes in a simple, everyday gesture.

Ultimately, 4 dias 4 noites exemplifies Barrio’s commitment to dissolving boundaries between art and life, body and environment, and between action and documentation. The work exists as an event preserved only in memory, yet that memory has served as a fertile source for insights, gestures, and processes in his later practice, demonstrating how ephemeral experience can become a generative force in art.