Urban Interventions

Using street performance/ intervention we will create a social experiment addressing different themes: love, altruism, community living/support and informality as a real alternative of autonomous social organization for this new era of change of paradigm, crisis and peak oil. We will make a space to explore, listen and learn.

A research exercise on the typology of place and interaction with its inhabitants, asking questions to understand our surroundings. What is most important here? What is significant that might not be obvious? How is a place idealized? What should be changed and how? data collected will be deposited in an urn as a collective daydream to be buried in the public square. the act of storing, rather than displaying.

The central questions of this action are related to responsibility and the death or contamination of trees, water, air, earth, etc. the questions are written on little strips of paper. The people can take one or many, or not, they can read them or not, return them to the basket or not, associate them with an old and strange woman who is trying to balance branches, or not.

We request passage to delight and agonize; we are the unidos da Praça roosevelt and here we come to tell its stories. With our presence we want to give life to memories buried in the concrete, in the tectonic layers of urban time; with our butoh-samba we want to embody the spirits of those buried by “revitalizations”; we want to dream elegies and pay homage to those that public policies have tried to exclude.

This project explores guerrilla lighting and squatting as urban activist methods and their relations to urban development. We will investigate how to develop tools for  communicating with light through movement. In collaboration with the MSTC movement (Movimento Sem Teto do Centro) and squatters in the neighbourhood Luz, in the center of São Paulo.

Residents of communities lacking resources, voiceless minorities, quilombos, prisons, homeless shelters, and hospitals will share their concerns with the Heroes. these are fastened immediately to helium balloons and sent into the space together.

The privatization of the public scene. The theater of representative democracy. the mischaracterization of citizenship transformed by its attachment to consumerism, money and the possession of goods. The transference of citizens’ political power. A scene that, in discussing theatre itself and its structures, is constituted by a search for detachment of the big protagonists and big political stages, a gesture towards deviant micro-powers.

Images are installed as “advertisements” at different points along a thoroughfare. on them, the author appears cross-dressed in men’s outfits corresponding to different indigenous dances of her country, seeking to question and generate dialogue around gender identity, the terms “machismo” and “feminism,” and advocating for the idea of a body of sexual multiplicity, balanced between its multiple options, free of social prejudices.

Public intervention of streets and plazas in and around the perimeter of encuentro’s main site in São Paulo. The performance evokes the disconnections and alienation of migrants in major urban centers. Canonge will roam the streets of São Paulo asking people to tell him a little bit about the history of their place of origin.

A city crowded with people, vehicles, plazas, buildings; an ordinary citizen, a bicycle, a small boat and a briefcase: indispensable prostheses for this individual who inhabits this metropolis. A journey that brings to light shocking element of the illogical, with the goal of intervening and directly reproducing the madness and lack of solutions in which man and society find themselves.

Please bring an mp3 player and download the Revolution imaginary podcast prior to the performance. it is available in english, Spanish, and Portuguese at http://revolutionimaginary.blogspot.com. the artists also have a limited number of cd players and MP3 players available to lend. Please e-mail This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for more information.

The Autonets workshop participants will develop a performance piece based on the concerns and desires of the group to be performed in public space. In previous iterations, these have addressed issues of resistance and protection, resistance to violence both structural and state, protection from violence using community based methods.

The Urban Camping Project is a series of experiments. It’s an experiential proposal for urban bodies to actively exchange with the city - to embody the urban environment as an organism, looking at the body of the city, the body and the city, the city as a body. We want to arouse the cities within.

Role Model is an interactive performance that poses the question “What can Brazil teach the world?” to a public audience at the Encuentro. Typists working on manual typewriters will take dictation in answer to this question. Initiated in Russia earlier this year at the Art Prospect festival, the project examines beliefs in these two fast-growing economies and people’s ideas for creating a model world.

Aimed at the city and its imaginary, this action intends to generate dialogue and reflection around the permanent historical tensions between hegemonic cultural/political power and the popular expression of resistance in activist and fringe art throughout the Americas.

Our aim in this project is to draw attention to the network of urban encounters that parallel the official Encuentro program. In seeking to validate quotidian acts of tourism as expressions of personal and political passions, the project takes up the Encuentro themes of how we mobilize and are mobilized by the places we go.

Endo-Screens is an action performed in the city’s mass transit system by two female performance artists who wear small, portable video screens on their bodies displaying images of entrails and body fluids, as well as mirrors that capture ephemeral situations.

The herd advances chaotically. The sheep are ill, exhausted. They’ve come from very far away, from the sea, from the shipwrecks, from Medusa’s raft, from immemorial times... Among them, the soothsayer of evil, Cassandra, and a blind man, bring the plague, a tempestuous future. Some get lost on the way. Others clamor for a ludic fate, a hospitality like the Caraíba, the Tupi, the Tupanimbá. Tupi or not Tupi? Amid chaos are born thoughts, anarchical manifestos, struggles, futures.

This project lives somewhere between public and private, between socio-political urban intervention and installation, to focus on a specific problem: blindness and its relationship to the city’s symbolic and linguistic codes. it is a reflection on the importance of putting oneself in someone else’s shoes in order to understand other ways of moving through, decoding, and experiencing a shared city.