Chad's São Paulo Diary: Bienal Day 2

Friday 28th October



The Bienal is sardine-packed with school kids today, as it has been every day. The educational department is fabulous, and they have teams of volunteers explaning the work to groups from pre-primary kids up to adults. Its incredibly nice to see (although screaming children can make it hard to concentrate on the art). This was our tour guide explaing Kendell Geers to us:




Three works really stood out for me today, and true to this Bienal all of them live and work in developing nations. Emily Jacir, an artist from Palestine, produced a work called Lydda Airport. The airport was once the largest in the British Empire, and she makes a gentle slow black-and-white-film around the old building. It takes its cue from two legends.




The first is the mysterious disappearance of a Hannibal, one of the largest passenger planes of the 1940's, which was based at the airport. It vanished one day over the Red Sea, without a trace of the plane, pilots or full complement of passengers. The second is the tale of Edmond Tamari, an airport official who received a message that he should take a bouquet to the airstrip and wait for Amelia Earhart. She never arrived. Recreations of these stories are set against a ruined and abandoned airport. I found the combiation of waiting, sadness and disappearance to be very moving, as a film and in the context of Palestine. A model of the airport was situated behind the film room:

Francis Alÿs produced a video called Tornado, in which he films himself running into tornados. With shaking camera and the sound clipping from the high speed winds, he runs over and over into the tornados. Its a mythical contest between a man and nature. A Sisyphean task. The video climaxes when he breaks through a wall of wind and dust and stands in the eye of the storm.

One hopes for some calm, some purpose to this useless task. But the quiet barely lasts a few seconds, before he spins out into the dust. Then a new loop begins. Alÿs has been working on this film for numerous years, and this accumulated time extends the one-liner element of the work.

Antonio Marcotela's work is about exchanges, time and economy. Something similar to Santiago Serra, but with a little more heart to it. Over a period of three yearshe visited the Santa Marta Acotica Jail in Mexico City. There, where people have time, but no ability to use it, he started a series of exchanges. He would undertake a task in the outside world for an inmate, and in return the uinmate would spend the same amount of time producing an artwork for the artist, though relating to the prison. An example, he tries to find the love of an inmates life, and the prisoner scratches out the centre of the Count of Monte Cristo.

The nice part about the work is that they are understated, and he doesn't show his parrt of the exchange. In another exchange he serenades a mans mother, or watches his childs first steps or finds someone's son. These are incredibly emotional works.

Chad's São Paulo Diary: The Fruit Man

27 October

Biennale's are hard work. They should have them in cities where there is nothing else to see. Sahara Biennale, something like that. We headed off to the Mercado Municipal, the major food market in the city. On the way we stopped off at Benespa, the State Bank Building. Here they allow tourists up for a strictly cntrolled 5 minutes on their roof. You get the most fantastic views of the city. Three-hundred and sixty degree skyscrapers.

To get to the market you have to walk through the district of kitsch. Its cheap jewellery, cheap vases, a whole shop of imitation flowers to put in them and, bizarrely, costume shops. its absolutely bustling, like these are the things necessary for existence. Refreshingly, but annoyingly, there is no tourist junk (annoyingly because a t-shirt even mentioning São Paulo on it has become the holy grail of this trip.)

The food market is marginally less bustling, but no less bewildering. If you want some sense of authenticity to counter the madness outside, this is the place. Loops of chouriço, rolls of cheese, chewing tabacco and olives. Fresh rabbit, honey, pimentos, cashews, pickled garlic and bacalhau. The last is a type of salted cod, which is the market's speciality. Very salty but really good. Us eating all of the above:

The fruit was pretty amazing too. Shapes that are a far cry from the humble apple and colours to give a solid blow to your average mango's ego. I was just beginning to feel like a Paulista natural, when the fruit seller totally fleeced me. He tried to charge me R$ 80 (Reais is the currency here) for a strawberry dates and a mystery fruit. This is almost R360. Managed to bargain him down through hand gestures and scowly looks, but afterwards I realised I had still paid 4 times the right amount. Been grumbling about the sly fruit man all evening. Looking forward to heading back to the Bienal, where for a short time we can pretend to be free of mercantile capitalism.

Chad Rossouw's Sao Paulo Diary: Day One at the Biennale

Wednesday 27th

Wow. Thats all I can say.

The last few days have been absolutely amazing.

The bienal is full of art, and it can be a little overwhelming to take it all in. Some works that have stood out are David Claerbout's The Algiers's Section of a Happy Moment. It's a single photograph of a man feeding seagulls on a rooftop in Algiers. Its a slideshow, which shows the same image from hundreds of different angles and viewpoints. Its a masterpiece of compositing, and complete freezing of every possible moment of the photograph.

Aernout Mik produced a silent film of a political gathering. Without any clues as to motivation or intent, he gestures of the crowd become very loaded and intense

Chantal Akerman produced a series of videos called D'est. Many of them are slow pans across the streets of Russian cities, during the early nineties. Very moving

Chilling in between stretches at the Biennale, in the Park Ibipeura

Joseph Kosuth: Amazingly boring in the flesh!

Chad's São Pualo Diary

Wednesday, 27 October
Accursed Internet! Online but struggling to upload images. You can see some stuff on Facebook here; http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=544318&l=d123b1e7fb&id=623495290

Chad's São Paulo Diary: Computer Says No

Struggling with connectivity today. Apparently a virus on my camera destroyed the computer at the hostel! I don't think it was me. Tomorrow morning I'll find an Internet Cafe, and put up a double post. Lots of action today.

Chad's São Paulo Diary: Bienal

Monday 25th October

Even Sunday's in Sao Paulo are mad. Traffic, both human and cars, pack the streets. We woke up early, and did a little exploring of our neighbourhood before the madness. There's this strange graffitti everywhere called pixaçao. It's a mixture of gangland marking and bravado. You see this stuff on top of skyscrapers and other impossible places (apparently people literally abseil of the buildings). It looks kind of runic, or pictographic. At the 2008 Bienal, the one with the empty floor, pixaçao artists broke in tagged the whole interior. This year, some artists got invited especially (perhaps to avoid the problem through official inclusion). But more on that later.

Some relatively tame examples of pixaçao

The architecture here is really wild. My camera died in the afternoon, so some of the crazy Modernist stuff is going to be left to the imagination (though think strange cantilevers and raw concrete slabs). Here are some examples just from our neighbourhood:

The skyline is 360 degrees. Everywhere you look you see more and more buildings.

We walked down to the Bienal at around 9ish. It sits in the fabulous Parque do Ibirapuera in the Ciccillo Matarazzo pavilion designed by Oscar Niemeyer. This building is made for art.

I'll talk a bit more about the work on the Bienal when I have had a closer look. But here is a work by Ai Weiwei, Zodiac Heads/Circle of Animals, consisting of oversize reproductions of the heads which used to adorn the Old Summer Palace in Beijing, before being destroyed in the Opium Wars:

Chilling after a hard days looking:

In the afternoon we went to Liberdade. It's the biggest Japanese community outside of Japan. There was a Sunday market, and I ate a fantastic Udon soup from a stall.

I'm not sure how I ordered this, because there is very little English spoken. Apparently, I have enough Portuguese to say "One Udon Soup , please."

And then home on the efficient metro.

I'll post some more images tonight, as we also managed to squeeze in a visit to the enormous Cathedral.

Chad´s São Paulo Diary: Wide-Eyed

Sunday 24th October
It´s just before 7 in the morning, and I am uncharacteristically awake. This time zone thing is pretty bizarre.

First sight of Brazil coming into Guarulhos Airport

The flight was long and arduous, with the Wedding Singer on repeat, and a lot of cloud outside. But as we came down to land I got the first sight of Brazil. Green and hilly.

Things get interesting already: I lose my custom declaration form (How?) while one of my companions on the trip Mohau loses his passport in his pocket. But we get through alright, grab a couple of cabs and head out. The road from Guarulhos Airport to Sao Pãulois stunning, and really gives you a first sense of the city. High-rises in the distance, palm trees, and lush flowering purple green things. We´re staying pretty centrally in a suburb called Vila Mariana, and to get there we head through the centre of town. It´s awesome, an architect´s wet dream. Modernist brutalist concrete next to tiny colonial buildings, next to Japanese pagoda style stuff. The scale just keeps on shifting. And suddenly between two enormous shiny glass skyscrapers a little house straight from the Alps. I couldn´t get a good picture, because it was dusky and taxi-drivers here follow the archetype. They drive bloody fast. (In fact, even Saturday night traffic is crazy. Hundreds of cars speeding down central highways. Bridges and tunnels and crossovers)

Went for a wander around the streets and dinner, beer and sleep. Heading off to the Biennale tomorrow.

Some of my companions, drinking beer and shaking off the post-flight blues.

Chad Rossouw's São Paulo Diary: Pre-flight Jitters

São Paulo is the seventh largest city in the world. You could fit half the population of South Africa into the city. Or 4 and a bit Jo'burgs.

It still hasn't really sunk in that I'll be flying out there on Saturday. But the ticket is booked, the money is changed, so I guess it is happening. I'm going as part of my Master's programme at Michaelis to see the Biennale. Its one of the major perks of this degree, and an exceptionally generous gesture from the school.

The São Paulo Biennale is one of the longest running and biggest biennales outside of the US or Europe. This seems really significant as an artist working outside of those spaces. After the 2008 Biennale was a strange beast (self-critical biennale with no budget) and not particularly well received, I'm curious to see what the curatorial team pulls together this year. The line up is massive, with more than 160 artists from around the world. The theme too is broad, dealing with the political in art. The title is "Há sempre um copo de mar para um homem navegar" (There's always a cup of sea to sail in), a line from the poet Jorge de Lima. I'm going to try with this diary to share some of the experiences of the art and the city. I'll try and keep it fresh everyday with loads of pictures and interesting commentary.

Unless, of course, the caipirinha's get me.