The persistence of the relationship between art, nature and the city finds symbolic and narrative elements in the collective Common Place: crossings and collectivities in the city, the 10th 3M Art Exhibition. Well curated by Camila Bechelany, the ten unpublished installations, developed by six guest artists and four selected by public notice, were distributed by Parque Ibirapuera, placing the visitor in a state of progressive immersion in a field of listening and perception. One of the assets of the collective was to place the interventions in a context of confrontation and meaning with the different currents existing in this area. The expanded field of image and sound is found in the work of Lenora de Barros, within the context of earcology, work to be heard, with profiled speakers and a talking drone that flies over five points in the park. Lenora created a special poem for this work: WHAT HEARS IS ALREADY / YESTERDAY IS ALREADY / TODAY, TOMORROW IS ALREADY. “In the five different readings that I do in the course of the speakers, I use different intonations and pitches, I seek to generate various meanings, focusing on the message that each moment is the result of the previous one and the future is the result of yesterday, now, the moment- already". The starting point is John Cage’s sentence: “The world is transformed according to the place where we fix our attention”, spoken by her and emitted by the drone that dialogues with the poem. WHAT HEARS. The word “já”, according to Lenora, is the guiding thread of the vocal performance and is repeated during the journey, until it becomes an “inverted sound” in which the phrase “act now” is heard. Lenora worked with Cid Campos, musician and composer, and together they created a work without digital resources, having only the artist's voice as raw material.
Installations slow down and stretch time. Camila Bechelany leads the curatorship taking into account that each individual is an active and receptive participant in the urban environment. “In this sense, the issue of access to art becomes imperative and urgent in the face of growing social exclusion in the contemporary world.” Common place it is experienced as a cultural ecosystem with characters already established, others less so, and there are emerging ones in which it has bet. Shared project, brings art into the daily flow with the installation Geography, from the series Unus Mundus by Cinthia Marcelle. Tens of meters of hose throw water into the lake, doing the opposite of what was expected. Numerous reflections are raised. One of them is to dispose of water, a vital element, as a subjective construction of silence, within the narrative of acoustic ecology. Marcelle reinforces Argan's thought: “Nature is the material with which men manufacture space”.
Also in this sense, Camilla Sposati creates unique territory with its Archaeological Park Theater, a prospective intervention that observes Ibirapuera as a founding territory, creating a work of sound, performance and impermanence. She promotes combinations between the complex relationships that overlap in the same environment with her ceramic sculpture-instruments, inspired by two previous works – Earth Anatomical Theater e phonosophia. Where is the best place of the word? THE public pulpit, Matos tide seems to answer the obvious when discussing the “stage” space as an atrium where the community can and should have a voice. The phrase “Living is very dangerous”, by João Guimarães Rosa, finds its equivalent in The Glow of Freedom Before Your Eyes and High Astral work of Rafael RG inspired by the life of Harriet Tubman, an American activist who in 1820 saved dozens of slaves, like her, tracing an escape route from the observation of the North Star constellation. The celestial chart was produced in the park in backlight, as a process of understanding the spheres of light energy. Harriet's story was made into a movie and, in a unique tribute, her face was stamped on the 20 dollar bill.
The work of Luiza Crosman it's hypothetical, The World Versus the Planet touches on the different functions of science, proposes the understanding of the difference between earth and planet and the observation between art and science. The themes of aesthetic and political renewal materialize the present by revisiting the past with issues such as gentrification and erasure. The subject is the trigger of the intervention Between the World and Me – On the Way Home, by Diran Castro, who has a friend whose humble relatives lived on the land of Ibirapuera before the construction of the park for the celebrations of the fourth centenary of São Paulo, in 1954. The artist studies themes of decolonization and its installation, a city on a reduced scale, it was made with aesthetic and civil disobedience as a warning to widespread gentrification.
The generous distance between the installations creates bridges for perceptual experiences, especially the soundscapes linked to acoustic ecology, theorized by Murray Schafer, a Canadian musician and environmentalist. The hybridity between sound, image and time guides the installation Horizon object, from Collective went to the fair, composed by Clarissa Ximenes, Gabriel Tye, Luís Felipe Porto, Matheus Romanelli and Raysa Mucunã. A transparent sphere of self-reflection invites the visitor to record an audio message about the city of the future, which is sent to a receiver that transforms the voices into random insertions, like a time machine. Making use of essential elements for survival, several artists dedicate themselves to agro art making gigantic interventions (land art) or reduced as the Suspended Site, Narcissus Rosario, a set of boxes on easels where the vegetable is part of a sensorial and organic collection. Art is a ferment of immediate combustion and creative energy. By creating a bakery in the park, the duo Gabriel Scapinelli e Otávio Monteiro attracted the observer-performer by introducing him to the art of making bread, thus creating a system that begins in art and ends in what Joseph Beuys defined as social sculpture. Common Place: crossings and collectivities in the city contributes to a critical reflection on the place of art in the public sphere of a city.
