In 1931, Flávio de Carvalho carried out an action in downtown São Paulo that would become a radical landmark in Brazilian art. During the Corpus Christi procession, he deliberately walked against the flow of the religious cortege, moving through the dense crowd while keeping his hat on — a gesture considered offensive in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. Conceived as a psychological experiment, the experience consisted of introducing a dissenting body into the ritual flow and observing the collective reaction to this symbolic rupture.

The crowd’s response was immediate and escalating. Initial astonishment, expressed through glances and murmurs, quickly turned into visible indignation. As Carvalho persisted, shouts demanding that he remove his hat intensified, followed by physical pressure and attempts at intimidation. Tension mounted to the brink of lynching: his hat was torn from his head and the crowd, charged with agitation and hostility, advanced in a state of latent aggression. Carvalho meticulously describes this transformation of religious fervor into potential violence, revealing how faith, when confronted, can mobilize collective impulses of coercion and exclusion.

In the book that resulted from the action, Carvalho analyzes the episode as a manifestation of the gregarious instinct and the dissolution of the individual within the mass. For him, the crowd experiences a sense of omnipotence sustained by shared belief, and any threat to ritual order triggers defensive mechanisms that may become violent. Individual responsibility dissolves, and the emotional energy of devotion shifts toward aggression against the dissenter. His reflections anticipate modern studies of crowd psychology by demonstrating that violence is not necessarily the product of isolated impulses, but of collective dynamics that legitimize and amplify aggression.

Today, Experiência n. 2 is recognized as a pioneering gesture in performance art, decades before the term was consolidated. By transforming the city into a stage and his own body into a critical instrument, Flávio de Carvalho shifted art from object to action, from the studio to the public sphere. The work does not reside solely in the event itself; it incorporates real risk, public reaction, and social tension as artistic material. In doing so, it inaugurated in Brazil a practice that exposes invisible structures of power, conformity, and intolerance, affirming art as a radical field of experimentation and a means of revealing the psychological forces that shape collective life.