Sunday was full of surprises, and most of them dispiriting for the groups that thought they’d made gains during last year’s protests. Here’s the five biggest.

By Mauricio Savarese

1 – Marina Silva out of the run-off

From presidential front-runner to the falling star of Brazil’s politics. The former environment minister was a bad player from the start of her campaign. Not all of her demise is her fault, of course. As usually happens with third way candidates, she preached new politics and became an easy target for the left and right. But her defeat doesn’t have to do only with her rivals: she flip-flopped on gay rights, lost many of the staff that were working with her deceased former running mate Eduardo Campos, avoided openly supporting of conservative politicians, played victim too soon, failed in answering criticisms from Dilma Rousseff and Aécio Neves (who are now heading to the run-off), and failed to make Brazilians more confident about what kind of president she would become. In the end, anti-government voters left her when it became clear Aécio Neves might have a better chance of actually taking down Rousseff.

After getting roughly same vote she did in 2010, it’s hard to see her as a presidential contender again. For now, supporting Neves in the run-off is all that is left for her – and if he loses that will show her political leverage is even smaller than many expected.

2 – Increase in abstention after street protests

Street protests last year suggested new political forces would appear. That was not the case, at least at the ballot box. What was more noticeable was a rejection of candidates in general. The number of Brazilians who chose not to show up (voting here is mandatory), or cast votes for no one reached 29% this year, the highest level since 1998. This is only a small uptick, but it would be impossible to say that street protests re-energized the country politically, at least in the electoral sense.

It is hard to see Dilma Rousseff and Aécio Neves as so exciting to all the voters that went to the streets last year. And those voters are not putting forward any policies that could be embraced by the candidates. If you look at the first round results, June 2013 looks like too much ado for nothing, at least in terms of the ballot box.

As one left-leaning friend in São Paulo put it on Facebook:

“What happens in June
Stays in June.”

Or, here’s some alternate theories from Rio Gringa.

3 – Brazil’s conservative Congress

Preachers, the military, policemen…Brazil’s new Congress is has become more conservative. Almost 40% of the Congressmen are rookies, which makes for the biggest shakeup since 1998. The Worker’s Party suffered a major defeat: they lost 18 seats and will have 70 in 2015. PMDB comes right next, with 66 seats — they had 71. The most voted-for candidates in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are extremely conservative politicians Celso Russomano,  Jair Bolsonaro, and Marco Feliciano.  If Dilma Rousseff is elected, that means her reform agenda will be even more difficult to carry out. If Aécio Neves wins, there may be more reforms, but some of them could be very controversial: allowing minors to be tried as adults is one example.

Bolsonaro, above, says that the government supports gay pride marches so that it can tear apart ‘the fabric of society’ and make it easier to control the population. In other charming moments, he has praised Brazil’s military dictatorship.

4 – São Paulo governor Geraldo Alckmin wins easily

There is a water crisis in Brazil’s wealthiest state. There are various corruption allegations about a cartel that operated for years in subway here. São Paulo’s military police provided, with their brutality, the spark to set off the biggest street demonstrations that the country has ever seen. Yet governor Geraldo Alckmin, who could be held accountable for all those events, breezed to re-election. He won in all cities of the state but one.

Depoliticized voters, plus a lack of enthusiasm for a Paulista third way, represented by businessman Paulo Skaf, gave the 2018 presidential hopeful a shockingly easy ride. Some analysts expected him to win – his power in the Paulista countryside is unmatched. But so easily? That was shocking.

5 – PT wins in Minas and Bahia

This was a major blow to Aécio Neves in his home state and a surprising victory in the battleground state of Bahia. The best news for Dilma Rousseff was that the gubernatorial races there ended in the first round. Taking Minas Gerais from Neves’ allies means governing Brazil’s second most important state with a close friend of hers, Fernando Pimentel. Rui Costa’s victory in Bahia keeps in PT hands a state that was on the verge of going to the opposition. None of those two results were expected a few months ago. In Costa’s case, it wasn’t expected a few days ago.

Follow Mauricio Savarese on Twitter

The very fun World Cup confounded expectations while exposing some deep truths. Was it all worth it?  Above, dismantling the extra seats at São Paulo’s Itaquerão Stadium.

James Young
Belo Horizonte

It is January. The foreign journalist sits at his desk in London (or New York or Berlin) and thinks about the World Cup. The foreign journalist is not happy. The foreign journalist is worried. The foreign journalist is angry. The stadiums are not ready, he hears, and even if they were, the traffic and the public transport network in Brazil is such a seething mess that he and his fellow foreign journalists would not be able to get from their expensive hotels to the matches anyway. People say the hundreds of thousands of protestors who took to the streets last June will back in five months’ time, and that there will be more of them, and that they will be more furious and more violent. “It’s the World Cup of chaos!” he writes, and leans back in his chair, pleased with his work.

At the same time the foreign journalist knows none of this is important. What is important is o povo Brasileiro – the Brazilian people. The foreign soccer journalist loves the Brazilian people. He cares about them – about their terrible public schools and hospitals, the high taxes they must pay, their capering, corrupt politicians. One of those politicians, the president Dilma Rousseff, says it will be the Copa das Copas – the best World Cup of them all. “Who is she trying to kid?” writes the foreign journalist, his fingers banging on his keyboard with ever increasing rage.

It is June. The foreign journalist is sitting at a bar on Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro. A caipirinha glistens icily on the table in front of him. He gazes at the milky green ocean and the depthless blue sky. He feels the warmth of the sun on his bare toes. As he watches, a Brazilian woman walks past. He stares at the lustrous dark shank of her hair and the soft coppery skin of her arms and legs – it almost seems to glow!, he thinks to himself, making a mental note not to forget the image. The woman smiles at him. Such friendly people!, thinks the foreign journalist. He sips his caipirinha and remembers the thrilling tumble of goals he saw while watching the Netherlands v Spain in Salvador a couple of days before. “It really is the Copa das Copas!” he thinks. He raises his glass to Dilma, and to Brazil.

Such bipolarity is not the foreign journalist’s fault, of course. To dip into touristic cliché, Brazil is an intoxicating, embracing country of sunshine, smiles and sensuous, bewitching rhythms. And the World Cup was, for the most part, far more exciting and goal-drenched than any such multi-billion dollar, corporate-sponsored modern soccer tournament has any right to be. Even the final between Germany and Argentina, normally a bitter, bickering affair, was open and enthralling.

The stadiums did not fall down – though two, the Arena das Dunas and the Arena de São Paulo, hosted games without proper safety certificates (the former) or being tested to full capacity (the latter). The airports did not collapse under the strain of transporting thousands of fans across this vast country (though overall passenger numbers were 4% lower than they were for the month before the Copa, Brazil’s aviation authorities have said, as business travelers and non-World Cup tourists postponed their trips until after the tournament).

The traffic was not as apocalyptic as threatened, even if that was largely the result of the country’s traditional mid-year school holidays being moved forward to coincide with the World Cup, eradicating the horrors of the school run, while public holidays were declared on match days in many cities. In the end, no one died – apart from the eight construction workers who lost their lives to accidents during stadium building work, and the two Brazilians who were killed when a road bridge, part of an unfinished World Cup urban infrastructure project, collapsed in Belo Horizonte (needless to say, as a nation swooned into a collective crisis after a young soccer player cracked a vertebrae, an injury from which he will soon recover, there was not even the suggestion that a minute’s silence might be held before games to honor such deaths).

Brazil is a country where many still live below the government’s extreme poverty line of less than $32 per month, and where there were a dizzying 50,000 murders in 2012. Stress levels among Brazil workers are the second-highest in the world, according to a report last year by the International Stress Management Association, which rather punctures the image of Brazilians as beaming girls or boys from Ipanema, samba-ing down the beach in tiny bikinis or sungas (the snug fitting beachwear of choice for local males) while effortlessly juggling a soccer ball on their toes. While the media (both local and international) shrieked with delight over the avalanche of goals during the group stage of the Copa das Copas, before declaring with equal drama that Brazil had been plunged into mourning after being dismantled so humiliatingly by Germany in the semi-final, the majority of locals I spoke to in a non-interview scenario during the tournament about (a) the World Cup and (b) Brazil’s elimination responded roughly as follows:

1. “I haven’t watched that many games because I’ve been at work, but it seems like it’s been pretty good.”

2. “Yeah, it’s a shame. This Brazil team is shit. The players are all money grabbers who care more about their careers in Europe than the national team. But really I’m more interested in [insert local club of choice].”

In other words, the reaction of people who are impressed and intrigued by the fact that an entertaining sporting competition is taking place in their backyard, and angry about the crappy performance of their team, but also of people who, quite frankly, have more important things to worry about.

The Mineiraço was not the Maracanazo (Brazil’s historic, and allegedly psychologically scarring defeat to Uruguay in the final game of the 1950 World Cup at the Maracana) because Brazil is a very different country now to what it was then. Back then this relatively young nation was still coming to terms with its identity as a multi-racial society (slavery had only been officially abolished in 1888), and wrestling over the idea of whether a nation built on miscegenation could ever really amount to much – the complexo vira lata, or “mongrel complex”, described by renowned sportswriter and dramatist Nelson Rodrigues. As the historian David Goldblatt writes in his book on Brazilian soccer and history, Futebol Nation, after the Seleção lost to Hungary in the violence scarred quarter-final of the 1954 World Cup, “the official report continued to cast the problem in terms of miscegenation: “The Brazilian players lacked what is lacking for the Brazilian people in general…The ills are deeper than the game’s tactical system…They go back to genetics itself.””

Today things are much different, although racial segregation is still rife, with the country’s exclusive leisure clubs, expensive restaurants and shopping malls (and World Cup stadiums) generally populated by wealthier, paler-skinned Brazilians, and the public hospitals, schools and working class jobs and neighborhoods filled largely by their poorer, most often darker complexioned countrymen (a recent survey showed that black Brazilians earn 36% less than their non-black counterparts). Nonetheless, led at least in part by black or mixed-race soccer players, from the country’s first superstar, Arthur Friedenreich, to Leonidas da Silva, at least today’s Brazil is no longer in any doubt that on and off the pitch its present and future success will be the result of, rather than despite of, its rich racial heritage.

Now – after the teams and the foreign fans and journalists have gone home, the real debate over the success of the World Cup can begin – the benefits and costs totted up, the long term future of the stadiums discussed (Brazilian club soccer returned to action this week, with many Mundial stadiums not even half-full), and lessons over the painful preparations for the event hopefully learned. 

“Apartheid” is too strong a word to describe Brazil’s serious class and race problems, says Mauricio Savarese. But it comes closer to describing the truth than the often-repeated claim that Brazil is a country without racism. Here, it’s not the state which is prejudiced. Above, youth at a planned ‘rolezinho’ in Rio de Janeiro.

By Mauricio Savarese

A few years ago a professor tried to get a sense of the social background of the students in my class. First question to his 45 pupils: “How many of you have been out of São Paulo?” Everyone raised their hands. “How many are working?” Fewer people raised their hands. That went on for ten minutes. In the end, two questions made one thing very clear: those seats weren’t for everyone. “How many of you went to one of our terrible public schools?” It was just me, and one other student. Everyone else in the room had studied at private schools.

“How many of you are black?” The other student was the only one to raise his hand. Things were different in all the other classes, in 2002, at one of Brazil’s best journalism schools.

There surely is racism in Brazil, and it could not have been any different for the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery. Things have improved, but this is the blackest place outside Africa and yet there are few Afro-Brazilians in politics, high corporate jobs or in the judiciary.

The flashmobs at São Paulo malls, known as “rolezinhos,” made all that prejudice self-evident: these people, young, mostly poor and black, will be discriminated against, even when all they are is heavy consumers trying to have some stupid fun.

All these things are pretty shocking. But they don’t seem to be enough for some. Since they need more convincing, they call it “apartheid.” They probably think there is a Brazilian Nelson Mandela somewhere in waiting. By comparing Brazil to a brutal regime that has taken decades for South Africans to dismantle, they find no difference between a democracy that needs fixing and a racial dictatorship that enforced their views through a wicked legal system. That kind of plagiarism is a new fad in Brazilian politics. Please, forgive us. Most of us can’t relate to suffering that took place overseas.

It is true that Brazil is much closer to “apartheid” than it is the fallacious “there is no racism here” claim. But our Supreme Court is headed by a black man, we do have affirmative action in universities and the outspoken hatred I saw twice in the London tube has no place here. We have a reasonably active national secretariat for racial diversity. We should be prosecuting more people for racist crimes, but the fact that notable racists are looked down upon is a sign that Brazil doesn’t have much to do with the officially racist South Africa that arrested Mandela.

In Brazil, the political and legal systems are fighting racism. But there is surely an issue with opportunities in the private sector and in political parties. There has never been a Brazilian Barack Obama, a black man leading a major ticket. Black CEOs? Only if they start the businesses themselves.

There are two other words that have become bucket adjectives in Brazil. People are allowed to use them freely, without any regard to what they actually mean: “fascist” and “populist.” It is probably better to deal with those when the presidential elections are upon us, come November.

Racism is big enough of an issue in Brazil for us to feel the need to use foreign words to make the concept more clear. Our challenges lie in reinforcing existing mechanisms to promote prosperous diversity. Or perhaps, in creating new ones so that the corporate and the political establishment can embrace Brazil as it is. Manipulating Mandela’s legacy won’t do us any good.

Mauricio Savarese is a Brazilian journalist, originally from Ipiranga, in São Paulo’s zona sul, and is the author of the blog, “A Brazilian operating in this area.” He was formerly a reporter in Brasília for UOL and is active on Twitter. Read his other thoughts on rolezinhos here. 

In São Paulo, taking to the streets involves far more than protests, riots and demonstrations. It’s also about taking back space from the concrete jungle for parties, festivals, public parks and shopping-mall meetups – ‘rolezinhos.’ The poster in the photo above by Claire Rigby reads “More love, please.” 

By Claire Rigby

2013 may be remembered as the year Brazil took to the streets. Or depending on what’s around the corner, it may be remembered as a mere precursor to what came next. But whatever 2014 has up its sleeve, in São Paulo a tendency to take to the streets en masse, invading public spaces and investing them with life and colour, runs deeper and wider than last June’s headline-grabbing protests.

The push for a more humane city – more street life, more music and more space for human interaction – takes in creative types infiltrating music and art onto the streets of the centro, and campaigners for a new downtown park. It includes the bike shop renting private land to create a mini public square, and the working-class kids turning up in their hundreds at the mall, in Facebook-driven public actions known as ‘rolezinhos‘. And though less overtly politicized so far than the UK’s 1990s Reclaim the Streets movement, which evolved from staging euphoric anti-car parties in the streets to embrace anti-capitalism, the struggle to take possession of the city’s public spaces is becoming more interesting by the week.

Lord knows, São Paulo’s unforgiving urban landscape needs the human touch more than most. In depressing contrast with the warmth and courtesy you encounter every day here from its inhabitants, across large swathes of the city, the bleakly over-developed built environment presents a blunt, blank face to the world, all walls, railings and asphalt. At the heart of South America’s largest metropolis, on the edge of the Tropic of Capricorn, sun and rain ricochet off concrete and more concrete, pedestrians take their lives in their hands crossing the street, and the obsession with ‘verticalization’ that began in the 1950s seems to never run out of steam, with new towerblocks rising endlessly, citywide (see Corruption – it’s the private sector). 

On the Rua Augusta, a long street that runs from Jardins over Avenida Paulista and down into Centro, the demolition of low-level buildings in favour of huge apartment blocks is still in full swing – as is a campaign to save one large, tree-lined plot of land from its fate as the proposed site of a pair of yet more tower blocks. Driven by an eclectic bunch of protest veterans, ‘occupy Centro’ activists and more conservative local residents, the movement to create a new public park, Parque Augusta, on the rare remaining scrap of green held a series of vigils outside the proposed park’s padlocked gates over Christmas and into the new year, including a Domingo no Parque SÓQÑ (‘Sunday in the Park [Not]’) event on 5 January), held in the street outside the locked gates under the slogan ‘The street is a park too!’.

Meanwhile in Vila Madalena, where public spaces and greenery are also in short supply, at the bar/café/gallery/bike shop Tag and Juice, owners Billy Castilho and Pablo Gallardo have seized the chance to rent a vacant lot opposite their shop, to use it as a mini-park. The lot, open whenever Tag and Juice is open, has hosted art exhibitions, mini food fests and live music, providing shade from a tree and grass to sit down on, just round the corner from Beco do Batman, the epicentre of SP’s street art scene, where a long winding alley is plastered with work by some of the city’s finest urban artists.

Party people

On the cool cutting edge of the movement to infiltrate more fun into SP’s streets are clubnights like the pioneering Voodoohop, created in 2009 by the German DJ Thomas Haferlach. Voodoohop has thrown colourful, unpretentious parties and happenings all over Centro, in the streets and in some of its most interesting spaces: at Trackers, a many-roomed, no-frills petri-dish for new clubnights; on the top floor of the residential Edifício Planalto, towering over Centro’s western margins; and on the Minhocão, a godforsaken flyover that snakes through São Paulo at 3rd-floor height. The highway is closed evenings and Sundays, when it becomes a de facto, no-frills High Line park frequented by strolling families, joggers and cyclists, snogging couples and, on the central reservation, the odd groups of friends sharing a discreet sundown spliff.

Métanol, a clubnight collective headed by DJ Akin Deckard, has also graced the city with its fresh, feel-good Métanol na Rua parties, spilling into the roads in Vila Madalena and beyond, spinning its sunny Saturday afternoon vibes on into the night. And in a similar vein, Selvagem, voted 2013’s best party by the jury of Guia, Folha’s weekly listings supplement, held a series of indoor-outdoor Sunday afternoon events last year at Paribar, a bar/restaurant set at the edge of a tucked-away square in Centro.

It’s no coincidence that so much interest should be focused on Centro. There’s a widespread sense of affection for the region, left to rack and ruin for many years but also blessed with some of the best architecture in the city. Far from the social and cultural wasteland imagined by some of SP’s elite, and despite its problems, which include a simmering crack epidemic, downtown SP is packed with heart and soul, and busy with street life – around the crowded 25 de Março shopping region, all over República and up the hill into Bixiga, where people sit out on their doorsteps and linger in botecos on hot summer nights.

São Paulo’s real urban deserts, arguably, are in its affluent western neighbourhoods: in places like Itaim Bibi and Jardins, and in Brooklin and Berrini, where luxury apartment blocks loom coldly behind railings, and large houses shelter behind blank, impenetrable walls. You can walk for many blocks in parts of these neighbourhoods and never see a soul – just gates sliding open briefly to discharge powerful, glossy cars.

Roll on

In the city’s huge, poor periphery, in contrast, where a different kind of architectural chaos prevails, there’s no shortage of human warmth and interaction at street level. But in an equal and opposite reaction to the move to colonize the streets downtown, in the run-up to Christmas, a different kind of movement was born, taking the search for places to gather in a new direction: the rolezinho. Roughly translatable as ‘little excursions’ or outings, rolezinhos are offline meetups organized on Facebook. In December, a series of them brought flocks of teenagers together inside shopping malls around the city’s vast suburbs.

The appearance of fun-seeking crowds of working-class teens, many from neighbouring favelas, struck panic into shopping centre management, some of their customers, and into military police called to the various scenes, who appear to have criminalized the youngsters at a glance, making arrests at each of December’s rolezinhos despite no crimes having been reported. ‘If this had been a large crowd of white, middle-class kids, as has happened a number of times, would this have been called a flash mob?’ asked the anthropologist Alexandre Barbosa Pereira, who specializes in the culture of SP’s periphery, interviewed as part of a wide-ranging article by Eliane Brum at El País’s Portuguese-language site. 

Brum writes that a number of rolezinhos planned for January have been cancelled: ‘Their organizers, young people who work as office boys and assistants, are afraid to lose their jobs by getting arrested for being where they are not meant to be – an unwritten law, but one that’s always followed in Brazil.’ As if to prove it, no fewer than 23 people were detained for questioning after a rolezinho at Shopping Internacional de Guarulhos on 14 December – but with no actual crimes reported, all 23 were later released without charge.

Rolezinho participants claim a variety of reasons for having turned up – mainly that they are out to have fun, flirt and meet other youngsters at the shopping centre – standard behaviour for teenagers worldwide, as well as legitimate claims that the facts of the rolezinhos so far bear out. See this YouTube video from a rolezinho held at Shopping Metrô Itaquera on 7 December, where chattering pre-teens and teenagers are seen milling about aimlessly, at one point fleeing excitedly from a handful of police officers walking through the mall. Then check out the almost unanimous comments below it: ‘favelados’, ‘raça nojenta’, ‘bando de vagabundos sem pai e mãe’, ‘gente feia e mal vestidos’ (‘favela-dwellers’, ‘disgusting race’, ‘motherless fatherless layabouts’, ‘ugly, badly dressed people’).

The latest rolezinho, which gathered 400 youngsters together at Shopping Tucuruvi last Saturday (4 January), ended with panicked shopkeepers calling the police to eject the 400 kids, and the mall closing down three hours early, with no arrests or reports of any trouble having been caused.

Perfect storms

Meanwhile back in Centro, the campaign around the creation of Parque Augusta rolls on. The Prefeitura (City Hall) announced its approval of the new park’s creation just before Christmas, but with its gates still padlocked, the parks’ champions are still working to secure the land as a public space.

The current sporadic occupations of the street outside the park, in front of the locked gates, might not quite amount to a Taksim Square moment for São Paulo; and a series of ruined shopping-mall tweetups don’t necessarily amount to much more than the discrimination faced every day elsewhere by the same kids, whose faces, posture, accents, clothes don’t pass muster in their very own city.

But as Taksim Square itself showed – and as seen in São Paulo in June 2013’s perfect storm, when a series of small demos over bus-fare rises spiraled to epic proportions, fuelled by a brutal crackdown on demonstrators by police, leaving a small, smouldering long tail of unrest in Rio, São Paulo and beyond – when things kick off, the trigger can come from the most unexpected of places.

Claire Rigby discusses, with Folha arts writer Silas Martí, the difficulty of cutting through visual stereotypes in Brazil, a country which is often too photogenic for its own good. Above, ‘Descansando na Canoa’ (1984) by Luiz Braga, courtesy Galeria da Gávea. Throughout the post and below, other selections from the SP-Arte/Foto fair.

By Claire Rigby

What do you see when you picture Brazil? Football, favelas and goddess-like samba queens? Acres of skyscrapers in shades of white and grey, helicopters flitting about them? Or dense green jungle encroaching on stretches of sand? Visual clichés like these are there for a reason – because they’re part of the truth; but do we need to be a little more choosy about what we let into our mind’s eyes?

Too photogenic for its own good, Brazil is all too often objectified, exoticised and even eroticised in photographic images. Take Mario de Janeiro Testino, the Peruvian photographer’s lush book for Taschen, in which lithe, slightly dressed young beauties drape themselves all over Ipanema and each other; or every football-on-the-beach image you’ve ever seen, where muscular youths run, play, sweat in the sand. Skin glows, the sun beats down, people smile.

The way Brazil is seen from abroad – or to be more precise, the way the country and its people are depicted by foreign photographers – was the subject of a polemic published last week in Folha’s Illustrada supplement by the arts writer Silas Martí. Focusing on a major series of images, The New Brazil by Noor, a photography agency based in Amsterdam, Martí’s think-piece was entitled ‘Para inglês ver’ – literally, ‘for the English to see’, but better translated as ‘for appearances’ sake’. In it, Martí criticised Noor’s images – the result of a set of interlinked assignments by the collective’s photographers, arranged into themes including ‘São Paulo rising’, ‘The power of women’, ‘Brazil’s new middle class’, and ‘Salvador da Bahia’ – for what he saw as their typically clichéd, one-dimensional take on Brazil. Including images by a number of other foreign photographers alongside Noor in his critique, Martí writes, ‘Beautiful bodies glowing on the beach, favelas pacified to the sound of batidão funk, and glimpses of aestheticised misery dominate recent essays by foreign photographers attempting to document the country in times of euphoria.’

He singles out a handful of photos: a man gazing out over the shanty-town, wings tattooed on his back; funk-lovers drinking beer; boys playing football outside favela-chic shacks. Brazil-watchers, like Brazilians, will have seen hundreds of such images – they form an inescapable part of the visual discourse purporting to explain what the country is all about. But as an attempt to try and decipher Brazil for the outside world, the Noor images are arguably both as successful and as flawed as any other attempt to sum up the unencompassable complexity of the country – whether in images or in text. It’s a problem that not only photographers but also journalists writing about Brazil, or indeed about anything else, face every day of the week: that of filtering and distilling complex subjects, and absorbing and deciphering signs to present them to readers in a digestible, palatable form.

A guest post by Mauricio Savarese here on From Brazil this week, Why is Brazil important?, touches on some of the same problems: Brazil’s image abroad, the interest Brazil awakens in those curious to understand more about it, and the level of detail, complexity and attention they are prepared to invest in doing so.

For Martí, even the Mexican photographer Carlos Cazalis’s cold-toned images of São Paulo don’t pass muster: ‘Even when the scenario is different, and the softness of Rio gives way to paulistano chaos, exaggerations prevail that disturb the more critical eye.’ As one of Folha’s leading art critics, it’s fair to say that Martí has a better – and a more critical – eye than most. He allows, in the words of one of his interviewees, for the fact that visual clichés of the kinds he discerns in the Noor images are also reproduced – internalised, perhaps – by Brazilian photographers: ‘Certain clichés are connected to our inner vision of the country,’ says Boris Kossoy, a photographer and professor at the University of São Paulo (USP). ‘It’s an opportunistic point of view, or a colonised repetition of what people want to see abroad. It’s exotic content for the consumption of idiots.’

I emailed Silas to ask whether there were Brazilian photographers he thought were doing a better job of portraying Brazil. ‘It’s tricky,’ he wrote back: ‘I don’t feel up to speed with the work of all the photojournalists working at the moment. And although there are lots of photographers whose work I love doing interesting things, they’re not necessarily focused on looking at Brazil in particular. Some of my favourites, though, are João Castilho, Rodrigo Braga and Luiz Braga, and I like some of the things Cia. de Photo does. But you’d have to be careful not to classify these works as journalistic, since their pretensions are more artistic, and not always documentary. Even so, I’d say that these photographers, using some of fiction’s strategies, are registering a Brazil that’s more real in some aspects.’

Leaving him to have the last word – and taking up his implied suggestion of looking to art for the kind of insight that encapsulates complexity without flattening it out – scroll on for more works from last week’s SP-Arte/Foto fair,  including some of the Brazil-focused works that seem to slip between the artistic and the documentary.

Things that seemed impossible less than a month ago are now happening every day here in Brazil. In a political Big Bang of swirling movements, causes and new protagonists, a new Brazilian universe is taking shape. Above, protestors in front of Congress, Brasília.

By Claire Rigby

Thousands of column inches have already been written on recent events in Brazil, and more are surely being written as I write these. Nobody could have predicted, on 3 June, the day of the first in the series of protests organized by the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL, Movement for Free Public Transport), that events would take this turn, impelling a political and social Big Bang from which the fall-out is still spiraling, stars colliding and new bodies emerging in the Brazilian sky.

The protests and their aftermath have given rise to a cast of thousands and indeed, millions, in what is perhaps the most profound effect of the unrest: the sudden political protagonism of huge swathes of formerly passive citizens, on the street and on social networks – mainly Facebook. The site has come into its own brilliantly as a public–private forum for discussion and planning, for real-time reporting, and for registering protests, repression, meetings and assemblies in text, film, photos and audio.

Less than a month ago, as noted by Samantha Pearson in yesterday’s FT, two of the main slogans of the multi-sloganed protests, ‘The giant has awoken’ and ‘Vem pra rua‘ – ‘Come to the streets’ – were most famous as straplines for Johnnie Walker and Fiat TV ads, respectively. And even if, in the weeks preceding the slow-building explosion of people onto the streets to demonstrate, hundreds of images and texts were being shared here about the protests and repression in Taksim Square, Istanbul, there was nothing to suggest that Brazil might be next.

Less than a month ago, the Confederations Cup was already looming large, but the idea of there being protests associated with it was nowhere near the agenda. ‘Imagina na Copa‘ (meaning ‘if it’s this bad now, imagine what it will be like in the World Cup’), a catch-all phrase for structural problems large and small, was little more than a collective, anxious fretting over the World Cup, and the likelihood of Brazil’s infrastructure being ready for it. But it is now linked to protests and skirmishes outside the stadiums, and to discontent with what’s perceived as massive over-spending as well as bad planning for the Cup.

As I write this, in the streets of Fortaleza, North-East Brazil, where the Confederations Cup match between Italy and Spain is underway, a ‘sonic cannon’ crowd-control weapon has just been switched on for the first time by police, and protests have turned to tyre-burning on the parts of protestors, and tear-gassing and shooting on the part of the police. Witness this Storify of the days’ events in Fortaleza, which shows protesters with a FIFA GO HOME banner, police firing smoke bombs and teargas, and protesters scattering, their faces covered. One tweet by @KetyDC, whose feed is a tireless, compelling ticker-tape covering protests all over Brazil, reads ‘Palestine? No, Fortaleza. #ProtestoCE #VemPraRua #ChangeBrazil (AFP) ‘.

And in an example of the hundreds of causes spiraling off from or piggy-backing the protest movement and its original demand for a reduction in the cost of public transport, another image on the Storify shows a set of designer-sunglass-wearing, bermuda-shorted young men holding signs reading, ‘Political Reform Now!’ That call for political reform, not a issue in the original protests except, arguably, in the most peripheral way, has been in the mainstream political pipeline for some time now, and its revival has become one of the ways in which Brazil’s government – federal, state and municipal – is scrambling to accommodate (or be seen to accommodate) protestors’ perceived demands.

On 25 June, President Dilma Rousseff announced a five-point plan for change that included public consultation on political reforms. In vintage Brazilian style – the level of bureaucracy in Brazil, for even the simplest piece of business, is daunting – Dilma’s announcement contained half-a-dozen procedural steps to get to the matter at hand: a proposal for ‘a debate over the convening of a plebiscite to authorize the functioning of a constituent process to carry out the reform’.

The ‘debate’ on that lasted less than 24 hours, and Dilma, along with the rest of government, is now looking at simply calling a plebiscite on reform. (The political reform in question is twofold, covering the way elections should be funded [Dilma’s party, the PT, wants them to be publicly rather than privately funded], and whether the currently proportional voting system should be changed to voting on the basis of districts [the PT, a relatively small party, would prefer it to stay as it is].)

Who’s who

As for the sunglass-wearing protestors in the Storify, they’re an example of the multiplicity of actors now onstage all over Brazil, on the streets and online, making their voices heard. A battery of assemblies, meetings, demos and street battles is going off on all sides, in city centres and across their peripheries, in an atmosphere in which working out who is who has become almost comically difficult at times. On Tuesday night, I attended a public assembly about the democratization of the media, held underneath the looming hulk of the MASP museum on São Paulo’s Avenida Paulista. As a speaker was proposing ‘agrarian reform of the airwaves’, a march approached along the avenue, and drawing level, stopped. The two groups regarded each other with a mix of curiosity and suspicion for a few moments, trying to get the measure of one another.

‘Vem pra rua!’ called the marchers, unsure what kind of assembly they had stumbled upon. The assemblists regarded them silently, sizing up the placards, noticing the Brazilian flag around one pair of shoulders, wondering. Eventually, with an expression of solidarity, the speaker holding the microphone deftly sent them on their way, albeit a little uncertainly, and picked up where he’d left off.

The confusion is understandable: lots of things aren’t what they seem, and others seem not to be what they are. Some young men in Occupy-style Guy Fawkes masks turn out to be rightist agitators, hurling abuse at left-wing parties on 20 June, when a PT march was routed from Avenida Paulista. A photo of an unlikely burly, white-shirted and masked rioter who stood out from the crowd, piling in at São Paulo’s City Hall and smashing at the door, was suspected by protestors of being an infiltrator and a provocateur, but turned out to be an over-enthusiastic architecture student. A ‘General Strike’ event on Facebook, since removed, with at least 700,000 confirmed attendees, was found to have been called not by workers’ movements, but created by a single person: a man named Felipe Chamone, an amateur marksman who appeared photographed bearing a gun, triggering a counter-event on Facebook, ‘Denouncement of the General Strike event‘. Even more confusingly, a group of unions now apparently has called a general strike, for 11 July… 

‘Think hard,’ reads the page urging people not to join the General Strike event, ‘before you join any event related to the protests, even if your participation is only symbolic or virtual. Make yourself aware of who is responsible for the initiative, and whether it aligns with your convictions.’ Given that less than a month ago, out of the hundreds of thousands of people who have now taken part in the protests, many would have displayed little reaction to news of a protest other than a loud tut at the disruption to traffic, it’s to be hoped that the habit of critical thinking, developed during these first weeks of the movement, will persist.

For now, as various strains of conservatism scramble to contain, co-opt, appease and control what parts of the movement they can, the Movement for Free Public Transport (MPL), having met with Dilma this week (and having declared her to have a woeful lack of knowledge about transport), is moving onto its own real agenda. Hint: the clue’s in the group’s name, and in its slogan, ‘For a life without turnstiles’. Having achieved the 20¢ reduction in bus fares it took to the streets for at the start of June, the MPL is continuing to campaign for universal free public transport, a gateway right, its activists claim, without which many other rights – to hospital treatment, to education, to culture – are impossible for people to exercise.

Walk this way

In an open letter to Dilma in advance of its meeting with her this week, the MPL wrote about a range of other issues beyond transport, including the militarization of the police, the plight of Brazil’s indigenous peoples, and the ongoing repression and criminalization of social movements. It might be a logical progression, too, for an overtly anti-car current to emerge in or around the MPL. There’s no apparent sign of it yet (though the MPL’s open letter refers to an eleven-times greater public investment in individual than in public transport).

But given a set of factors, in São Paulo at least, that include chronic traffic gridlock, a vocal cycling activist lobby, a horrifying death toll annually on the roads, and the sharp focus on transport nationwide, a serious critique of cars and car culture would be an interesting development, to say the least. Coming in the wake of growing demands and actions here in São Paulo for people to ‘occupy the streets’ together, in the form of festivals, demonstrations and other events, the wave of recent protests managed to sweep cars from the picture effortlessly, banishing them from the scene in a single stroke and filling the streets with throngs of people, walking in unison.

There’s even a ready-made slogan, crying out to be appropriated – it’s the punchline of that Johnnie Walker TV ad: Keep Walking, Brazil.

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São Paulo’s Virada Cultural, a 24-hour mega-party featuring more than 900 acts, put the best and the worst of São Paulo on display last weekend. Despite headlines dominated by crime, Claire Rigby had a great time, alongside millions of others, and argues that these kinds of events should be a source of pride for the city.

By Claire Rigby

Headlines – “DEATHS, ROBBERIES AND MASS MUGGINGS MAR THE VIRADA CULTURAL” – “DEATHS AND MASS MUGGINGS: CULTURE LOSES OUT TO VIOLENCE” – “VIRADA OF THE MASS MUGGING” 

São Paulo’s population, waking up after another Virada Cultural, the city’s annual 24-hour cultural marathon, could be forgiven for shuddering with horror at São Paulo’s newspapers over their Monday morning coffee. But for millions of people who attended the festival downtown, the papers seemed to be talking about a parallel event. Not that the robberies, injuries, and even the shooting and death of a young man who ran after the thief who had taken his phone, didn’t take place.

They did; and there was definite tension in the air at times, especially in the early hours, when the mix of thousands of revelers, untold gallons of alcohol, and the carnavalesque all-night party – not to mention the smouldering social tensions that are the mark of every major city, not least São Paulo – took their toll.

But alongside the undoubtedly bad news, there was precious little good news to be read about the Virada Cultural (‘Cultural All-Nighter’), an event that brought an estimated total of 4 million people onto the streets over the course of 24 hours, starting at 6pm on the night of Saturday 20 May. Filling the streets of SP’s dilapidated, occasionally lovely Centro with music, art, dance and theatre, and with hundreds of official food stalls and unofficial beer-sellers, the ninth annual Virada set audiences washing up and down the town to watch shows by thousands of musicians – there were some 900 acts spread across 120 locations – and dancing through the night to everything from techno to samba, lambada and funk carioca.

Art projections filled the Vale de Anhangabaú, where artists and collectives had created 15 installations, including a bridge by BijaRi whose LED lighting glowed in response to the people crossing the valley on it. An art/activist installation Conjunto Vazio, by the collective CoLaboratório, projected Batcave-like lightning flashes onto empty buildings all over town, and under the Viaduto do Chá, grown men and women screamed in excitement as they flew through the air on immense swings attached to the viaduct overhead. Street performers, dancers and theatre companies attracted unlikely, ragtag audiences to their pop-up shows, roping in bystanders and parading them up and down the valley; and George Clinton and P. Funk played to a rapt crowd at 3am, as a tango orchestra struck up 500 metres away at a lonely Estação da Luz. The mesmerizing Gal Costa played a difficult, moving set of new music from her album Recanto; and as Sunday wore on, Racionais MCs, Brazil’s most powerful, important rap group, played a cathartic, euphoric, packed set, also featuring an impassioned speech by the group’s much revered leader, Mano Brown, in which he criticized crime during the event. The band’s previous appearance at the Virada, in 2007, had ended in confrontations between military police and fans that turned to rioting.

We walked the streets for most of the night and again on Sunday afternoon, joining audiences at stages all over the region, home to some of São Paulo’s most historic buildings, and criss-crossing the streets from one show to another, aided (if the light was good enough, and shining at the right angle), by the black, hard-to-read Virada maps and programmes, distributed in their thousands and displayed on structures erected at street corners. The city’s ubiquitous columns of cars were nowhere to be seen, and even some of the roughest of Centro’s troubled streets, which are also home to Cracolândia, an itinerant, crack-riddled no-man’s land, were busy with people strolling from place to place.

None of this is to pretend that all was well with the world at the Virada: it wasn’t. São Paulo is an immense, pressurised megacity with more social injustice and indeed, more rigidly delineated class segregation, than most. It also has a chronic crime and violence problem every night of the week. There’s no doubt about it: assorted pickpockets and muggers were having their own mini-festival of crime at the Virada, while at least one immense band of forty thieves organized a series of arrastões – mass muggings in which individuals or sections of the crowd are surrounded, robbed, and attacked if they resist. I saw a scuffle break out as we passed along Avenida Rio Branco around 3am; and I heard a pop-pop-pop, and saw people running, at what might or might not have been gunshots around the same time, a hundred yards on. (I don’t think it was gunshot, despite the stampede, but I note it here as a possibility.)

And yet as frightening as the contact with crime, violence and sheer drunken disorderliness must have been for anyone on the receiving end of it, it’s what sometimes happens at mass events, especially when mixed with alcohol – and especially when they bring haves and have-nots together in such a sudden, unaccustomed manner.

Super-sized street events always attract the kind of people who disrupt, fight and rob, even in much safer cities. It happens at London’s Notting Hill Carnival, and even, as Vincent Bevins, editor of this blog, points out, at San Francisco’s Gay Pride Parade.São Paulo, arguably, needs more Viradas, and more events like it – it’s what a new surge of street festivals is all about, most recently the Anhangabaú da Feliz Cidade festival that took place in May, as a kind of mini-precursor to the Virada. For every citizen who lost a phone to the thieves (even Senator Eduardo Suplicy wasn’t immune, taking to the stage before Saturday’s opening show by MPB queen Daniela Mercury to ask for his stolen credit cards and ID cards back – then patting his pockets to find his phone also missing) there were hundreds of thousands whose Viradas went off without incident.

I was struck by the overwhelmingly negative press coverage of what was in many ways, and for hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, a successful, enjoyable event. In a telling example of the press’s choice of focus, one headline in the newspaper Agora, a populist broadsheet, read MAYOR HADDAD ADMITS HE NEVER EXPECTED SO MUCH VIOLENCE, over a story in which the mayor, in office since January, also said, ‘From Friday through to Saturday the register of violent crime was identical to that from Saturday to Sunday’. Hardly inspiring words on the city’s problems, but a dash of perspective, albeit a sobering one, on Monday morning’s seemingly hysterical headlines. Describing the smooth running of the Virada’s 900 shows, with just two delayed or with other problems, the mayor went on, ‘What were of most concern was the question of [public] safety and the incidents that occurred above all between 2am and 6am. We had more reports than we’d predicted, but nothing out of the ordinary in an event with almost 4 million people.’

It’s tough to know what the media coverage means. Some have suggested the media may have been especially hard on the new PT mayor. Infographics showing levels of crime and violence at previous editions of the Virada seem to show more or less similar results. But beyond that, a whole tier of the city’s society (the same tier, in the main, who would never dream of attending a mass event attracting huge swathes of people from the city’s poor periphery, as the Virada does) may well have been  put off attending not only the Virada, but all manner of street celebrations and festivals – a growing and much celebrated tendency in São Paulo. Violence and crime are chronic problems. But they’re not a reason to abandon the streets any more than SP’s wealthy already have done. Events or even venues at which the classes mix are extremely few and far between in SP, as the city’s affluent areas and the vast periphery that surrounds them run on parallel tracks, in parallel realities. Moments like the Virada, filing the streets with people, huddled at the crossroads in the patchy streetlight, trying to make out what it says on the map, ought to be celebrated.

Marco Feliciano, a man accused of homophobia and racism, has bizarrely managed to take over as Brazil’s human rights commissioner. So the progressive movements coalescing on the streets of downtown São Paulo set up their own commission, above.

By Claire Rigby

‘Life’s too short to live in São Paulo’. So says a piece of graffiti currently doing the rounds on Tumblr. More than in most cities, there’s a powerful disconnect in SP between what happens on the street and what happens in the rest of people’s lives. In whole swathes of the city – in its more affluent areas especially – closed condominiums, car-loving Paulistanos and a sense of insecurity combine with who knows what other factors to make the streets a place you pass through, rather than somewhere to halt, hang out, and connect with other people.

Recently, though, a surge of interest in reclaiming the streets as a space for culture, parties and politics has given rise to a raft of interesting events and movements – Existe Amor em SP; BaixoCentro festival; Voodoohop and Santo Forte parties, to name but a few – and this coming Saturday, an open-air Anhangabaú da Feliz Cidade festival, in the heart of SP’s old Centro.

Except to the extent that reclaiming street space itself can be said to be political, SP’s ‘occupy the streets’  movement has thus far remained formally politically neutral, barring a flirtation in some quarters with the election campaign of SP’s current mayor, Fernando Haddad. But there are signs that the ‘occupy the streets’ common denominator of the various groups might coalesce into a more decisively political force.

Rights on

In one of the most powerful examples of that, last Thursday night at Praça Roosevelt – sometimes referred to as ‘Praça Rosa’, after the thousands-strong spontaneous festival that gave birth to the Existe Amor em SP movement last October (see ‘Coming up from the street‘), here on the From Brazil blog – a first meeting took place of the Extraordinary Commission on Human Rights and Minorities (Comissão Extraordinaria de Direitos Humanos e Minorias). To the clack-and-roll sound of skateboarders practicing in the square below, and accompanied by a stream of curious passers-by, walking their dogs and their babies in the square’s recently refurbished expanses, 200-300 people gathered for the newly formed Commission’s first ‘public audience’, as it was billed.

The Commission, a grassroots, autonomous body, sprang up in response to the appointment earlier this year of evangelical preacher Marco Feliciano as the president of Brazil’s Congressional Human Rights and Minorities Commission. The pastor’s appointment was about as logical as setting a fox to guard a henhouse, according to the Financial Times and the move’s many opponents, who were shocked off the internet into mobilising in a series of real-life protests nationwide, including two well-attended marches in São Paulo.

Feliciano is accused of rampant, out-of-the-closet homophobia: he has said that ‘love between people of the same sex leads to hatred, crime and rejection’, and claims that ‘many’ members of his congregation, affiliated to the Assembleia de Deus evangelical church, have stopped being gay as a result of spiritual assistance. In another oddly perverse commission appointment in March, the Mato Grosso soya baron Blairo Maggi was appointed president of the Congressional Environment commission, in a move that can be attributed, perhaps, to the wheeler-dealerism that goes in Brazil’s coalition-based politics – one party is given this commission position for that support; another is given control of this government department for backing for that set of policies.

Fox in the henhouse

Quite what someone like Marco Feliciano would want with leadership of the human rights commission started to become clear this week, when in one of his first actions as president of the commission, the pastor rushed through a proposal for the reversal of a 1999 prohibition on psychologists taking part in any treatments purporting to ‘treat’ or ‘cure’ homosexuality.

The nascent Extraordinary Commission on Human Rights and Minorities, while spurred into action by Feliciano’s appointment, is far from being all about the pastor, though: its first meeting was chaired by a lineup of speakers on subjects as diverse as is the remit of the formal Congressional committee: representatives from indigenous and black rights groups as well as the Existe Amor en SP movement sat alongside federal congressman and LGBT activist Jean Wyllys, and the much-loved cartoonist and transgender community figurehead, Laerte Coutinho.

An open mike attracted a stream of speakers, including from the trans community, the movement against the forcible internment of crack users downtown, and including an impassioned speech by the SP councilman Nabil Bonduki, on a new Bill to outlaw funk parties – outdoor, illegal raves held mainly in favelas.

Watch this space: the forces coalescing in opposition to Feliciano and his ilk look likely to branch out into ever more interesting political configurations and – sealed during the last moments of the Extraordinary Commission’s first session, in which congressman Wyllys planted a huge kiss on Laerte, to the crowd’s delight – ever more fruitful partnerships.

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The opening photo was taken from NINJA

Claire Rigby visits the stunning Casa de Vidro, one of many modernist masterpieces hidden in our tropical concrete jungle. If you’re lucky enough to be in São Paulo, get there. Photo above © Claire Rigby

By Claire Rigby

There’s no vista quite like São Paulo’s, with its long swathes of grey-and-white apartment blocks, punctuated by a few, all too few, exuberant architectural huzzahs. There’s the pink, metallic cylinder of the Instituto Tomie Ohtake – a novelty candy-cane as seen from far away, but a building of real, complex beauty seen from close up. Also by the architect Ruy Ohtake, there’s the Hotel Unique, shaped like an upturned slice of melon (no – really), where the walls of the outermost hotel rooms curve up and away in the strangest of manners. And there’s the MASP, Avenida Paulista’s massive, crouching art museum – a glassy box suspended under a colossal pair of bright red supports, created in 1968 by the architect Lina Bo Bardi.

The city’s rich modernist legacy, In which Bo Bardi played a pivotal part, takes a little longer to uncover than its more whimsical constructions – or at least, it did. São Paulo has never seemed of more interest, architecturally, following a cascade of features in the international press on the city’s modernist DNA – most recently in a perceptive FT piece this month by Edwin Heathcote. It includes a long section on the famous Casa de Vidro – the home Lina Bo Bardi created for herself and her husband soon after their arrival in Brazil from Italy, in 1946.

Few buildings have received more attention here recently than the exquisite modernist home, since having been closed for the best part of six years, the house is currently open for visits until the end of May. And with the house and garden taken over by a major, site-specific art exhibition, ‘The Insides are on the Outside’, this is the best possible chance to see the house at its best – and to enjoy the added layer of world-class art, created specifically in honour of the house and Bo Bardi’s legacy (find out more on the artworks here).

Resting on a set of impossibly slender columns, with its cool tones and glass walls the building has been lauded as one of the world’s finest modernist homes – a style seen to brilliant effect here in the tropics, where even the material, concrete, fares better than in colder climates.

When the house was finished in 1951, the plot of land it stands on had been part of a tea plantation, and was consequently bare of vegetation. Photographs from the period show Bo Bardi gazing from the wraparound windows onto faraway wooded hills, where today, high-rises line up shoulder to shoulder, just visible through breaks in the forest that now surrounds the house, tangled in green on every side, as Lina intended.

Bo Bardi arrived from Italy in 1946 with her husband Pietro Maria Bardi (see pencil-drawn cartoons of the couple, above, by Alexander Caldas). Pietro had been invited to create the São Paulo museum of art – the MASP, which was initially located in a downtown neoclassical building, on Rua Sete de Abril. The contrast between the war-torn world the couple left behind and a Brazil on the brink of modernism – Brasília was created in the period 1956-60 – proved a heady one for Lina. She became infatuated with the possibilities open to Brazil and in particular, throughout her life, with its rich tradition of folk art, much of which is on display in her home, including an immense iron-framed, papier machê goat sculpture from Bahia, in the space below the house. A recorded testimony given by the architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, played in the same space as part of the exhibition, praises her ability, as an outsider, to appreciate the best of Brazilian culture.

He cites a phrase from a samba, ‘Tu pisavas nos astros distraída‘ (‘you stepped on the stars, distracted’). ‘I think she [Lina] saw as like that,’ Mendes da Rocha says – ‘as people stepping on the stars absentmindedly, and wanted to tell us about the wonder that existed here. … If she had remained there in Europe with her erudition, she would certainly not have created this work. She might have produced a beautiful oeuvre, but never with this lyrical and poetic character, with this power.’

Climbing the stairs into the house, there’s a sense of vertigo as your gaze slips between the granite slabs that form the staircase. And inside, vertigo again as you admire the slender columns that punctuate the main space, piercing the blue mosaic floor – and as you realise these are the same pilotis holding up the entire front section of the house. Cool, calm and utterly understated, the house was created to approximate its inhabitants to nature, and to get out of the way in order to do so, rather than being ostentatiously beautiful.

Lina never wanted it to be ‘like a closed house that shies away from the storms and the rain’, as she wrote in a 1953 text in the magazine Habitat. It never was a closed house: the Bardis entertained and put up countless friends and acquaintances in the Glass House in the forty years they lived there, until their deaths in 1992 (Lina) and 1999 (Pietro, at the age of 99). And on a wet April afternoon last week, circulating through the house’s exquisite spaces and admiring the art inspired by it, with rain lashing the windows, the tangled green foliage outside dripping and swaying, and strangers’ children darting about, it felt wide open again. You should go.

Above, an image from the short film Feitiço, by Pedro Barateiro – at SESC Pompeia, where part of the exhibition, ‘The Insides are on the Outside’, also takes place. 

Lots of people could save plenty of money, even if they take taxis everywhere. Above: São Paulo, a terrifyingly beautiful mega-metropolis. With too many cars.

I live in São Paulo, and I can afford a car. Why don’t I buy one? Because it doesn’t make any sense. Personally, I enjoy the rare luxury of being able to walk to work, so it would be wasted money.

But a fantastic new article and graphic tool shows that owning a car is a big waste of money for lots of people that do have to commute to work. And that isn’t just taking into account the obvious economic benefits to be had if they swapped in the wheels for public transport, walking, or biking. That’s not practical for everyone, anyways – the metro and bus system don’t get you everywhere easily.

No, what the numbers show is that many people can save lots of money even if they take taxis everywhere. Since taxis here are ubiquitous and excellent, that hardly seems like a less comfortable solution. But still, more and more cars, everywhere, every day.

In São Paulo, owning a car, like most everything, is expensive. If you add up gas, taxes, parking, insurance, maintenance costs, and what you are losing in the car’s depreciation each year (not the mention the sky-high cost of the vehicle in the first place), having your own is going to cost you more than taking taxis, unless you drive far, every day.

São Paulo is a beautiful and terrifying mega-metropolis, pulsating with energy and culture. I like it a lot. But I think most of us agree it would be a bit nicer with less cars.

So why do so many people keep buying so many of them?

I can venture two theories. The first is that people simply don’t know about this economic calculus. Since a lot of the car’s costs don’t immediately appear in the monthly installment plan presented at the dealership, a car may look like a good investment, even when it isn’t.

The second is psychological.

A car is status, it is personality, it is control. You power a big machine, you have your own music. All of this is freedom, and bliss.

At least, that is what the advertisers tell us. And if that didn’t work on lots of people, there would be no reason to have car commercials in the first place. If buying an automobile was an obvious utilitarian choice, those companies wouldn’t have huge marketing budgets. Sort of like you don’t see many flashy spots for rice or beans.

And, this being Brazil, there is an obvious class element, too. It makes foreigners’ heads spin to hear that some upper-class Brazilians never take the metro, even though it is so much faster and cleaner than counterparts in New York and London. If the train actually goes where you are going (and this is far from assured) the ride is a breeze.

But for a lot of people, including the rising middle classes, even the elegance of taxis is not enough. A car is a crucial status symbol. An expression of success. Even if purchasing one is the opposite of an investment.

So, those are the two reasons Paulistanos may be wasting so much money on cars, and choking the roads with them. Neither is a very good one.

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And if you have any Portuguese at all, click over to the full Folha article, with interactive graphic

Claire Rigby takes us behind the televised spectacle and into the free and fluid world of the street party – Rio’s true Carnaval. Above: The outskirts of a bloco in Leblon, on Tuesday morning.

By Claire Rigby

From the world-class razzle-dazzle of the sambadrome to the endless, hedonistic celebration that takes place in its streets, Brazil is more compelling than ever during Carnival. I spent it in Rio de Janeiro, where the sambadrome reigns supreme – if you’re looking from outside Brazil, that is, where images of the floodlit parade ground, the Marquês de Sapucaí, have become synonymous not only with Carnival, but sometimes with Brazil itself.

But there’s way more to Carnival, and Brazil, than that.

Growing in popularity over the past ten years or so, the street carnival has seen a huge resurgence in Rio, where millions this year took to what seemed like a never-ending festival over four full days. ‘Blocos de rua‘ (street Carnival groups) are the heart and soul of Carnival in places like Olinda, in North-East Brazil, but have become a much-loved fixture in Rio too – and in São Paulo, where they go hand-in-hand with a wave of new, politicized interest in street life and street culture.

In Rio this year, hundreds of blocos comprised an endless, rolling, moving party, from young pretenders like Toca Rauuul and Boa Noite Cinderella, and favourites like Sargento Pimenta and Santa Teresa’s Céu na Terra, to the gigantic Monobloco, and 95-year-old Bola Preta – the latter took place in Rio’s Centro on Saturday morning and is said to have pulled a crowd of more than a million.

What goes on in a bloco? Music, dancing, drinking and general carousing in the style that Brazilians were apparently born to do best. (For a glimpse of one particularly musical bloco in action, see video: A street bloco during Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, 2013, on Vimeo.) Dressing up is de rigueur, and some go all out with their costumes, often in teams of uber-coordinated friends. One of the best this year in Olinda, in North-East Brazil, was a group dressed as a rollercoaster, rolling down the street in a long train, two by two, each dressed as one of the cabs. A favourite of mine from Olinda another year was a platoon of fruity soldiers with hollowed-out half watermelons for helmets. But not everyone goes full melon jacket: as Rio resident Dom Phillips noted in his expert Pre-Carnaval post before the event – just a sequinned tie, a sparkly eye mask or a sprouting of feathers are enough to mark you out as one of the gang –

— or one of the gangs, plural, since there are blocos kicking off throughout the day, with some of the best starting out as early as 6am. People carouse from bloco to bloco as the day wears on, stopping off for a dip in the sea, a break on the beach or a mid-afternoon disco nap before heading out again. And despite complaints from local residents about blocked roads and litter, drunkenness and noise, there’s very little of the bad behaviour you’d associate with no-holds-barred drinking and frolicking elsewhere. Naming no names but staring guiltily at Northern Europe. 

Roaming the streets and the beaches since the early morning, we encountered the true spirit of Carnival on Saturday night, under a small clutch of trees just up from Copacabana beach. A motley crew of musicians, refugees from some bloco or other, were playing a ramshackle set of sambas under the trees on drums alone, while an equally ramshackle, eclectic set of people, drawn like moths to the samba as they passed along the road, swayed and sang or simply gathered round.

It’s a long way from the excess, the precision, the sheer spectacle of the sambadrome – and at the opposite end of the commercial spectrum. Street Carnival is by its nature free – open to all and free to join, whereas the institutionalised form of Carnival – the sambódromo – is a hyper-commercialised sugar rush of grandiose, magnificently gaudy floats, casts of thousands singing their hearts out, and goddess-like, gold-dusted Carnival queens.

The sambadrome has to be seen to be believed; but for good old-fashioned fun it’s hard to beat the big-hearted bagunça (mess) of Brazil’s street blocos, with their fancy-dress gangs of teddy bears, tipsy girls in day-glo wigs in the early morning light, the just-met couples up to who knows what on the beach in the darkness, and the thousands upon thousands of men dressed as women. Carnivalesque.

All images (c) Claire Rigby.

South America’s largest country is finally, hopefully, on its way to patching up its woefully lacking infrastructure. But fixing one problem sometimes means dealing with others.

By Dom Phillips

Living in Rio can at times feel like living on a construction site. Construction is all around: a new metro line, new highways, the whole decayed central port area being redeveloped, Olympic facilities, the Maracanã stadium. Not to mention all those people doing up their houses.

It’s not just Rio. Brazil is in a frenzy of construction. And much of it is around infrastructure.

Because infrastructure is something that Brazil sorely lacks. Trains, for instance. There is no train between the country’s two biggest cities: São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Just planes and buses. There is no train between any of the four airports in these cities and their centres. Just buses and taxis.

Or cars, which seems to have been the only default transport option successive governments thought of in Brazil. And now much of the population has a car, and the roads in big cities are jammed.

Too many cars, not enough roads, not enough railways to carry cargo so it goes on trucks which fills up the roads further. So the government’s announcement recently of a public-private partnership to build 7,500 kilometres (4,660 miles) of roads and 10,000 kilometres of railways, involving R$133 billion ($66 billion) over 30 years was broadly welcomed.

Even the government admitted it was long overdue. “The first structural initiative to endow the country with an adequate transport system, after two decades of low investment,” the government declared in its announcement document. Given that the ruling party, the Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT, or Workers’ Party, has been in power for one of those decades, one can’t help wondering why they hadn’t thought of it before?

A taxi driver bemoaned the lack of transport options to me the other day, as we trundled through the endless Thursday night traffic on the way into town from the Riocentro centre, out past the Rio suburb of Barra de Tijuca. A carioca (Rio native) said the same thing, as he explained the traffic problems in the suburb of Jacarépagua: all this stuff grew up without any expectation that anything more than a car or a bus would ever be needed to get there.

Riocentro is where the Rio+20 United Nations sustainable development conference was held. This week it hosted the enormous Rio Oil & Gas conference. 50,000-odd turned up to both. Both times there were shuttle buses to central points. But obviously, no train. “Back when they built Riocentro, this was all outback,” said the taxi driver. “But today everybody has a car.”

The Olympic Park is going to be situated nearby. So the government are extending a metro line which will go some of the way then meet a highway that will have a bus rapid transit link (BRT). BRT sounds flash. But it’s still a bus.

Then there are bigger state-sponsored projects, such as potentially vast sub-salt oil reserves, thousands of metres below the sea bed, hundreds of kilometres off the Rio and Espirito Santo coasts, that government-controlled oil giant Petrobras is going to extract.

Petrobras is getting as many of the rigs and production platforms constructed in Brazil as it can to meet government rules on ‘local content’: essentially, requirements to build a large amount of this stuff in Brazil because we want to grow our domestic industries.

Brazil used to have a decent shipbuilding industry, but it fell into disuse and disrepair. Now the government is hoping the sub-salt boom will help to revive it.

Politically, this makes sense – more jobs, more votes. For Petrobras shareholders, it means a slower journey towards increasing production of oil and gas, because some of the shipyards where their rigs are going to be built are themselves still under construction.

In the North of Brazil minerals giant Vale is duplicating the one-track railway line it has that runs from its iron ore mine in Carajás, in the Amazon, to São Luís. It’s there that development hits rural reality. Not only does the track run through land where around 100 members of an uncontacted tribe, the Awá live, it also passes near quilombos, which are agricultural settlements of the descendents of slaves.

In July a judge in São Luís suspended work on the railway because of its environmental impacts. The ban has now been lifted. But there are still legal problems looming for the railway project. But there’s also a gigantic quantity of iron ore to be moved from the mine, which the company is expanding – as it is, in 2011, Vale exported 109.8 million metric tonnes in 2011. The view from São Luís is of a constant line of giant cargo ships, steaming out of Vale’s port near the city. That number is going to increase to 150 million metric tonnes by 2014.

But Brazil needs the income those iron ore exports bring in, much of it from China. Just as it wants the income from all that oil it’s going to produce – 4.2 million barrels of it a day in Brazil by 2020. Just as it needs the electricity that will be produced by Belo Monte, the controversial hydro-electric project in the Amazon, whose construction involves flooding hundreds of kilometres of rain forest, threatening the livelihood of tribes who live there.

This is the problem with development – once you start, there’s no stopping it. You can’t grow the income and industry of a country this big without making a mess. You can’t do this without dramatically impacting on the lives of the populations that live in isolated places like this. On one hand, the economic benefits works like this could bring to these isolated rural populations, on the other, the environmental impact inevitably involved cutting down trees and dramatically affecting the life of those same populations.

“Brazil without misery. Rich country without poverty,” is the government’s slogan. But at what cost? Never mind the economic benefits, is all of this just going to expand the country’s army of consumers? Will they be happier? Will the Amazon just be decimated into a series of theme parks criss-crossed by highways and dotted by mines and dams, with islands of biodiversity, like in the film Jurassic Park?

Business daily Valor ran a story on what 12 indian tribes affected by the Belo Monte dam wanted as compensation. 40 four-wheel drive pickups with air conditioning were included, along with 303 houses with indoor bathrooms were included on the list. And 1,300 heads of cattle, 500 of them from the Nelore breed. Not to mention 12 cellphone towers with wireless internet capacity.

The Indian tribes didn’t think of asking for a railway line development. Pity. Vale – which bought a 9% in the Belo Monte project in 2011 worth $1.5 billion – is apparently pretty good at them.

In São Paulo, the true elite skip the streets, buzzing between the tops of the skyscrapers that dominate the city, and passing over the plebes stuck in traffic below. Restrictions have come up in last few years, but in the ongoing tussle over the skies, the heli-set is now striking back.  Photography by Robert Bellamy, all rights reserved.

Text by Claire Rigby

These are dry days here in São Paulo, where a long spell with no rain is heading for its third month, and where in August a mere 3mm fell, compared with the usual 39mm average. Yesterday morning a desultory layer of the city’s eponymous drizzle, garoa, briefly settled – this light precipitation that once gave São Paulo the nickname ‘terra da garoa’; but it was so slight as to not even trouble the met office’s measuring equipment. Its rumoured appearance promptly made the front pages.

But the lack of rain isn’t the only thing that has some Paulistanos tutting at the sky. A long-running tussle over the limits of helicopter use above this business-centred city took a new turn this week with the fruition of a series of court cases challenging City Hall’s restrictions on helipads – and consequently on the rights of high-flying execs to dodge the traffic chaos and the crime below, and beam themselves straight to their next meeting in some glassy tower.

A sky dotted with humming, darting helicopters is a familiar motif in contemporary São Paulo folklore, and it’s the opening image of dozens of foreign-language profiles of the city. There’s some statistical truth to it: according to ABRAPHE (the Brazilian Association of Helicopter Pilots), the city is host to around 400 registered helicopters, much trumpeted as one of the largest private fleets in the world.

Helicopters have become rarer, though, since 2009, when a Prefeitura (City Hall) clampdown reduced the number of high-rise helipads in São Paulo by 30 per cent, from 272 to 193. At the time, an incremental increase in helipads had led to complaints about noise pollution, as executives darted in from Guarulhos and Congonhas airports for meetings on Avenida Paulista or out in gleaming Berrini, or buzzed up from Avenida Faria Lima for appointments in Alphaville, an out-of-town hub and home to divisions of companies like the bank Bradesco. At some of the city’s chic hotels, guests fly in from the airport and alight in style – on the top of the svelte Emiliano hotel, for example, in the heart of Jardins, particularly around the annual Formula One event in November, when helicopter use reaches a zenith.

The Prefeitura’s 2009 ruling set strict restrictions, banning the use of helipads within 300m of a school or hospital and judging them on a series of environmental criteria, including noise levels. It shut down the landing spots atop dozens of buildings, including that of the powerful FIESP (the Federation of Industries of São Paulo State), a striking, slope-fronted skyscraper on Avenida Paulista. Twelve cases have recently been brought against the ruling by the owners of high-profile buildings like the Faria Lima Financial Center and the Office Tower Itaim, or by businesses that operate inside them, including Santander and Itáu. The latter bank is the only one of the plaintiffs in the five cases to have so far been heard that has won its case, arguing that its helipad’s existence predated the school erected nearby in 2008 with the blessing of planning authorities.

The helicopter problem isn’t just a Paulistano one: in Rio in August, flights around Christ the Redeemer statue and Sugarloaf Mountain were reined in, with helicopters banned from flying around the tourist attractions and ordered to climb to 1,500m, as opposed to the 1,000m previously in force.

Meanwhile in São Paulo, a bill to reform the rules around helipads is currently being proposed, and may yet be voted on this year, that would reduce the 300m distance between helipads and schools and hospitals to 200m, and make exceptions for helipads already in use and those producing less than 95 decibels of noise.

But amidst all the commotion of court cases and political jockeying, one local business is just fine with the rules and will even, it hopes, soon be thriving thanks to them. The Maksoud Plaza, once São Paulo’s flagship luxury hotel and now a fascinating, retro-kitsch wonderland, where the sense of staying in a 1980s timewarp is an inescapable and charming part of the experience, has just unveiled its long-awaited helipad. ‘Take down the coordinates!’ crowed its press release (23º 33’ 47″ S / 46º 39’ 04″ W), announcing its fully licenced landing spot high on the ridge of Avenida Paulista, on top of the 441m building. With permission to receive flights from guests and non-guests alike for a touch-down fee of R$400 a time, the hotel is promising a new bar and restaurant to go just below the helipad. Just the spot for a refreshing shandy, scanning the sky looking for the next rain to fall. A new garoa infusion is expected – half-heartedly – for the morning of the 19th.

A mostly pointless post in which I quickly and subjectively compare the two countries, and share some (slightly) juicy, but meaningless, gossip about glamorous Argentine President Cristina Kirchner.

I just got back from Buenos Aires, and it has occurred to me to do a very quick post on the (very significant) differences between the two countries. But this is all based on cursory investigation, stereotypes and first impressions, and is extremely subjective. I know a lot about Brazil but much less about Argentina. Actually, I am just comparing Brazil to Buenos Aires. I will also share some stories about Cristina (reportedly) acting a bit important.

This post isn’t journalism – just a blog. Don’t take it too seriously, if you even read it.

Argentines care more about politics. A lot more. One could call Argentina a place where your man on the street is extremely politicized. Extremely. One could not say the same for Brazil. You stumble across all kinds of protests in Buenos Aires, and quite earnest ones – I saw a large one complete with Che flags, covered faces, and clubs – and barroom conversations turn to politics quickly. Brazilians are indeed tuned into the social issues they live with daily, but the response to them and the ongoing conversation are not as explicitly political.

As one Brazilian said in Argentina: “It’s incredible. All the graffiti here is political. In Brazil, most of the graffiti is the name of the tagger or his gang.”

Or as another said: “It’s crazy here. These people talk about politics like we talk about football.”

Argentines take themselves more seriously. This one smacks you in the face quite quickly and is one of the most often-repeated stereotypes. I find it’s broadly true. Brazilians are laid back and extremely unpretentious. Argentines are many things. Unpretentious is not one of them. Even for the most intellectual Brazilians, being able to laugh off your ego and hang out in an extremely laid-back manner with absolutely anyone is a prerequisite to social behavior. In Argentina, you’ll come across a remarkable amount of people with purposefully challenging haircuts who want to talk about all the very difficult books they read.

I’m not sure which I like better. Something in the middle, is probably the easiest answer.

Argentines only eat red meat and red wine. That is the only thing they eat. The only thing. This makes for a fun couple of meals, kind of like having ice cream for breakfast, but it didn’t do my system much good in the long term. In Brazil, yes, steak is central, but it will invariably be served with rice, beans, lettuce, tomatoes, and onions. In Buenos Aires you are lucky to get some french fries on the side.

Brazilians aren’t anti-American. At least, not like that. Perhaps the clumsy, sunburnt, fat American tourist is viewed as an idiot (where isn’t he?), but not so much as a representative of Empire. In Buenos Aires I was called bourgeois and yankee a few times, and only as a half-joke. Most everyone liked me, but thought I was Brazilian at first, and most were often a little let down when I was American. They were quick, though, to insist, relieved, that it must have been because I realized my country sucks and decided to leave forever. This stirred fond memories of my time living elsewhere in Spanish-speaking Latin America.

Buenos Aires is nicer. São Paulo is a terrifying mega-city which brings to mind 20th-century visions of a post-apocalyptic future. Blade Runner, most notably. I love it, and I love its energy, but it is not nice. In São Paulo, you need a lot of money to live well, and for a large section of that (hyper) rich population, living well just means hanging out in impossibly tacky shopping malls.

In Buenos Aires, you can cheaply enjoy a very high quality of life in a sophisticated environment that reminds of Paris. It’s neat urban space with stunning architecture and natural interactions with other people in public areas. São Paulo is totally closed and private.

Rio is set within a stunning natural environment, but the city itself is not nearly as nice as Buenos Aires. The inequality gnaws at the conscience of most foreigners in Rio, and it’s also deadly expensive.

I’d personally rather live in São Paulo. It is more exciting, more is happening, and the city and Brazil suit me, especially at the moment. But Buenos Aires is nicer, hands down.

Brazil is more “investor friendly”. Brazil has emerged as an economic and global power, during a period in which the government established macroeconomic stability. It’s an environment in which citizens and investors know more or less what to expect. It’s a vision much more in line with what the US-educated banker or economist thinks a country should do to grow. In Argentina, you are immediately struck with the realities of a more heterodox, more old-school Latin American, approach to development.

As a foreigner you can change your dollars at the official rate, or you can go to a black market dealer, who will pay you more, because the government is currently limiting the amount of dollars Argentines can buy with their pesos. So those who need more than they are allotted go to the black market. And there was of course the famous debt default a decade ago, which cut off access to capital markets. Locals don’t trust the system, either – you have to buy your home in dollars, and nowhere takes credit cards as payment.

In Brazil, if you tried to tell a favela resident that they couldn’t change their money to dollars, or that they couldn’t use plastic to pay for lunch, they’d stare at you in disbelief.

I’m not taking sides – a lot of smart and earnest people support the current economic policies in Argentina, and the default, few would disagree, worked out fairly well. But Brazil certainly feels more like the US in the way the economy works.

They treat the government differently. Argentina is a classic republic – like most of the rest of Latin America, a nation originally founded through struggle and bloodshed, inspired by 19th-century republican ideals. Brazil is a different, more subtle story. It is a huge piece of territory that was handed down from monarchy to empire to democracy, to dictatorship, and back to democracy. And all of this, remarkably, happened with comparatively little direct confrontation. Brazil is not a revolutionary country, like Mexico or the US or France or Argentina.

This may or not be related to the fact that the government and its symbols are treated with more reverence and seriousness in Argentina. Or that may just be an issue of national personality. Or, it may be an issue of the personality of the current president of Argentina, who is rumored to, as it turns out, take herself a bit more seriously than Dilma or Lula.

According to two figures in the São Paulo business and political community, Cristina acted a bit funny on a trip here. It is totally harmless, pointless stuff, but serves to illustrate the way Brazilians see Argentina. The story comes from two figures high enough in the Brazilian business and political community that their opinions matter, but not high enough that you can figure out who they are. I can’t confirm they are telling the truth.

They say that when the food was served at the first official lunch with then president Lula, Cristina presented a problem. She would not be having the Brazilian food which had been elaborately prepared for the foreign visitors. She had brought her own from Argentina, they said. This caused great offense until Lula smoothed things out.

Then, they had planned to shuffle her into a helicopter to the next event – this is extremely common in São Paulo. She refused. Doing that would mess up her hair, the story goes, and she was going to be photographed later. So she preferred to go by car. Everyone had to wait three hours to be able to shut down massive Avenida Paulista and bring her a motorcade.

As they told the story, it was clear the Brazilians thought this was a little bit annoying, but very hilarious and mostly, preciously Argentine.

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Public scenes of teeming life are harder to find than you might expect in São Paulo, and some of the best examples are under fire

By Claire Rigby

The streets of São Paulo, for a city of almost 20 million, are far from teeming. Quite the opposite. Where other Latin American cities are characterized by busy street life and a palpable density of population, you can walk through some whole swathes of São Paulo and barely meet a soul. It’s an odd feeling to walk through parts of up-market Jardins, for example. Walking from Avenida Paulista down towards Itaim, once you leave the relative bustle of Rua Pamplona and cross Avenida Estados Unidos, you can walk for blocks and blocks past the high-walled houses without seeing anyone but security guards and maybe a maid or two, out walking dogs, and sleek cars that emerge from electronic gates, and whoosh away.

Other neighbourhoods, though, are teeming with life, much as you would expect in a megacity – those around Centro especially, and nowhere more so than Rua 25 de Março, just a couple of blocks from the Mercadão municipal market. The road is famous the length and breadth of Brazil for the intensity of its cheap-and-cheerful ‘popular’ shopping experience [see photo above]. Out-of-towners dream of seeing it one day, and flock to it when they finally make it to the big bad city; and it features as the country’s biggest ‘open-air shopping mall’ in countless tourism brochures and pamphlets, including those of the city’s official tourism body, SP Turis.

For a galvanizing sense of being one face in a crowd of thousands – downtown city thousands at that, all bustling and jostling about their business – this is the place.

Or it was until this week, when decades of street trade in the area finally, suddenly, ground to a halt.

Rough trade

Announced by Mayor Gilberto Kassab in May as part of a crusade to clear the streets of traders by the end of the year, the revocation of the street-trading licences of hundreds of stallholders – ‘ambulantes’ or ‘camelôs’ – has been hastily put into practice this week in pursuit of streets, says city hall, that are freer for pedestrians.

Still in the throes of an on-again off-again process of court orders and counter orders, protests and meetings, the ruling affects traders all over São Paulo, from Lapa and Brás in the west and east of the city to Jabaquara in the south, and has had one very obvious result: the banning of stalls from 25 de Março, complete with the human fallout from that decision for the suddenly unemployed traders, and what looks like the resultant abandoning of the area by a high percentage of the pedestrians who have always thronged the street.

To the satisfaction of some of the shop-owners in the area, the wide street is suddenly a breeze for shoppers to negotiate. Except that there’s little reason for pedestrians to crowd the street any longer. The sewing supplies shops and the costumiers, the knick-knack emporiums, the jewellery sellers and the countless weird and wonderful other shops along the street will always attract custom. But the thrill, the edge and the sparkle have vanished along with the cheap trinkets, the one-use-only bad umbrellas, the hand-crocheted teatowels and the cheap hairclips, and the pirate and borderline pirate good too, from knock-off bags and phone accessories to Sumsung, Polystation and Quingston gizmos.

Street eats

The regulation of food hawkers is another nebulous area. SP isn’t especially notable for its street food, but there’s plenty of informally sold food here if you pay attention: vans and carts selling drippingly fresh fruit – great chunks of pineapple and watermelon, bunches of bananas and the delicious fruta do conde. Other handcarts serve heaped dishes of sweetcorn carved off cobs and served with salty margarine; and espetinhos de gato – ‘cat-meat skewers’ – can always be found being grilled on late-night streets outside bars and clubs, consisting of pork or beef cooked over embers then rolled in farofa, a meal made from manioc.

But when Time Out São Paulo hit the streets a few months ago to uncover the street food scene, finding traders prepared to be photographed only resulted in a very footsore reporter and photographer, and a set of images of more interest for their close-up artistry than for their reportage.

A movement to discuss, promote and enrich São Paulo’s street food culture is set to take up the problem over the next few months, with a newly announced Revirada Gastronômica (‘gastronomic all-nighter’), inspired by the wild popularity of the street food section of the Virada Cultural back in May – see my blog post on that here. As reported by Folha’s Marcelo Katsuki, the event will see 150 food stalls set out all over the city’s downtown on the 25-26 August weekend, featuring food from some of the city’s finest restaurants as well as dozens of lesser-known gems.

Act up

The situation of São Paulo’s street performers is, at least in theory, better: a mayoral decree last year (decree no. 52.504) guaranteed the right to perform in the street, and to pass a hat to collect contributions from passers-by. Tired of still sometimes being moved on from Avenida Paulista by police, some performers have taken to carrying a copy of the decree, and the band Mustache & Os Apaches (see video) have published a ‘manifesto’ on their blog that might equally, arguably, apply to street culture in general, cheap handbags, plastic hairclips, cat-meat skewers and all:

‘Seeing colours, hearing music, dancing, change the atmosphere. We choose to perform in the streets. We choose to take people by surprise and transform their routine. Art creates a more pleasurable environment that’s more alive, and directly influences the day-to-day life of a city.’

Links:
Fashion designer Pedro Lourenço on his love for 25 de Março (New York Times)
Shock and Awe kind of Beauty (From Brazil)
Raul Juste Lores (of Folha) on the domination of private space (in Portuguese)

Claire Rigby is the editor of Time Out São Paulo, in English. She was previously the editor of Time Out Buenos Aires, and has worked as a freelance journalist for titles including the Guardian and the Telegraph.

She writes for From Brazil every other week.
Follow @claire_rigby
Time Out São Paulo

São Paulo will install 300 bicycle stations, each with 100 units available for rental. The scheme is similar to those in Paris, London, and Rio de Janeiro.

They will likely be free to use for the first hour or so, then incur charges after that. They’re sponsored by Brazilian bank Itaú.

It’s a bit of an understatement to say that São Paulo is not a bicycle friendly city. The streets are completely packed with cars, many of which appear just as happy to take out a cyclist as they are to slow down and go around them. Many who cycle to get around in London, Paris or New York would never think of trying it here.

But that could be changing. As the number of cars skyrockets, deciding to sit in traffic makes less and less sense.

There is still an outdated social status attached to driving a car here. But that has disappeared in much of the world, even in car-crazy California.

Ten years ago no one in Los Angeles used a bike to commute. Now it’s perfectly normal. Twenty years ago few in London were doing it either. Now the mayor of London bikes to work. It’s hard to imagine São Paulo mayor Gilberto Kassab doing the same.

But for the sake of the environment and urban harmony, let’s hope the rental scheme is a push in the right direction. Extremely powerful Itaú is behind it, and it has been a success in Southern Rio de Janeiro.

But it’s a different world over there. The Zona Sul Carioica is a flat beach community and people there go through life leisurely. That is not the case here.

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