“DELIRIUM AMBULATORIUM: the term first appeared applied to experiences of mine and of LFER when we were invited to take part in IVALD GRANATO’s MITOS VADIOS in a parking lot on RUA AUGUSTA in SAMPA last month. But it didn’t really happen. The thing is that delirium ambulatorium, defined as a pathology, is a kind of schizoid syndrome; in our case, obviously, it’s not anything pathological, but a need to nourish renewal: walk, walk, walk. I can only speak about my own experience: only I myself know how much I walk the city streets at night, what’s running through my mind and what comes out of it. This feeds me and supplies me with the substance I need to empty my head of everything that’s cerebral, so it can become free and allow the NEW to emerge. Is that really so hard to understand?” (Hélio Oiticica in a written interview with Daniel Más, 1978) – Freely translated from the original.

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DELIRIUM AMBULATORIUM is a key proposition in Hélio Oiticica’s thinking and practice, explicitly formulated in 1978, when the artist returned to Rio de Janeiro after nearly a decade of self-imposed exile in New York. Rather than a clearly bounded artwork, it is a way of acting, perceiving, and creating: an artistic procedure grounded in urban wandering, non-linear walking, guided by the body, chance, and the direct sensory experience of the city.During these walks – mainly through downtown Rio, the Mangue area, between Central do Brasil station and Morro da Mangueira – Oiticica turns the city into a large experimental labyrinth. Like an explorer or an ethnographer of everyday life, he moves through urban space on foot or by bus, paying close attention to leftovers, found objects, banal situations, and chance encounters. Carrying his Index Cards, he notes ideas, glimpses, and project sketches, letting the environment steer his creative thinking. This practice resonates with Situationist dérives and with Surrealism, especially in its embrace of objective chance, trouvailles, and what Oiticica called profane illumination.

DELIRIUM AMBULATORIUM brings together art and life, body and city, as inseparable dimensions. Walking becomes a meditative and passionate act, in which the “body-foot” thinks, feels, and reinvents urban space. In this process, Rio de Janeiro ceases to be a mere backdrop and becomes a “field of meditation,” a vast game or playground open to invention. Oiticica understands this experience as a simultaneous process of myth-making and demythification of the city: the myth of the street, of dance, of Mangueira is critically reworked without being denied, giving rise to new sensory, political, and poetic ways of relating to urban space.

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JACQUES, Paola Berenstein. Elogio aos errantes: a arte de se perder na cidade. Salvador: EDUFBA, 2012.