Until six or seven years ago,  very few people in Sao Paulo – including those working with culture – could tell what Casa do Povo was. Cultural center founded in 1946 by progressive Jews in the district of Bom Retiro, the space was bitter about 30 years of crisis, with the closure of almost all its activities, and was more present in the memory of some generations than in the daily life of residents of the city. The fact is that in a very short time the house experienced an intense and vigorous recovery, consolidating itself as a prolific cultural center and one of the most open spaces for experimentation, political debate and multidisciplinary artistic practices in the town. Aimed at both contemporary production and the preservation of memory, Casa do Povo was inspired in its own history to gain fresh breath and life.

Nowadays, going to this space means to be faced with activities of the most varied and, at first glance, disparate. Depending on the season, one can witness a contemporary dance workshop to a journalism class for young people from the periphery; of a theatrical play made by secondary students to a Latin American publications fair; from an artistic performance to boxing offered to the neighborhood community; from discussions on health and female self-knowledge to production of workshops for graphic materials; from weaving workshops to free psychoanalytic services; from discussions on the integration of immigrants in the neighborhood to the rehearsal of a traditional choir sung in Yiddish; from a meeting about conscious eating to the distribution of meals. You can also consult a library and a vast documentary archive, purchase a copy of the newspaper Nossa Voz, edited by the institution, or leave from there with an audioguide to walk through the neighborhood of Bom Retiro and know its history.

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If the practices are so many and diverse – and the list above could go on – they do not happen by chance, nor are they inconsistent with the proposal of a contemporary space of culture and art, as explained by the curator and cultural manager Benjamin Seroussi, director of the institution and one of those responsible for the resumption. “On the one hand, artists ask to broaden the notion of art, they do not want to limit themselves to traditional practices. They do not understand art as separate from other spheres of production and other life activities. On the other hand, culture is not limited to the arts. Casa do Povo is culture, culture is culture, sport is culture”, he says. “So here is creation, activism, people in situations of social vulnerability. But we never fail to understand it as a place of art. But a place of art that is trying to experience, in real scale, other possible worlds”.

Experiencing other possible worlds was certainly what the progressive Jews who founded the space in Bom Retiro shortly after World War II and the Holocaust wanted in the 1940s. And it is only through an understanding of this long history of the House, strongly intertwined with the political and cultural events of the 20th century, that one can understand the performance of the institution today. “Because all the resumption was made from a rereading of history. But not with the look of the historian, say, but more with the techniques of the healer. The idea is not necessarily to look for factual veracity – not that this is not important – but much more to think about how to use, and perhaps abuse, this story in the present”, says Seroussi.

Desfile/Performance de Vicente Perrota realizado em 2018

THE ANCIENT HISTORY

The history that the curator talks about referes to the 1930s and 1940s, when thousands of Jewish immigrants fleeing poverty and persecution in Europe began to inhabit Bom Retiro, in São Paulo’s downtown, and when two narratives come together. On the one hand, the emergence of anti-fascist associations – as in various parts of the world – created during the war to combat anti-Semitism, support the Allied countries’ struggle and, at the same time, a secular Jewish culture. Also, the desire to pay homage to the millions of dead in the Nazi concentration camps. “It could be made a memorial, a sculpture, with the names, where they would put flowers once a year. A gesture of remembrance is ready”, comments Benjamin. What was done, however, was a “living monument”, a space that brought together anti-fascist associations – such as the newspaper Nossa Voz and the Youth Club – and at the same time honored the dead. “The two narratives meet: the cultural center and the memorial. So it’s a memory space, but a place to remember is to act. A place where history is not written on the wall, but it is inscribed in bodies and architecture, and it is up to us to activate it”.

With a project by Ernest Mange – architect who worked with Rino Levi and Le Corbusier – Casa do Povo gained its headquarters in 1953. With three large decks with almost no partitions and a terrace, the modernist building on Rua Três Rios became a cultural center and space for political action. “It makes a lot of sense for Mange to have designed a building with these free plants, which allows you to adapt the spaces. I imagine he must have thought that the best building to remember is one in which each generation invents their ways of remembering. Because we never know how, tomorrow, we’ll remember yesterday”, says Seroussi. The space also housed the Brazilian Israeli Gymnasium Scholem Aleichem, a children’s school of renewed education (a humanist pedagogical line similar to Constructivism), and in 1960, it inaugurated in its subsoil the Brazilian Israelite Art Theater (TAIB), designed by the architect Jorge Wilheim .

With the coup in 1964 and the establishment of the military regime, Casa do Povo enters a troubled period of its history. While the newspaper Nossa Voz was closed by the government, the school increasingly housed children of persecuted politicians (including many non-Jews), who won scholarships and, if necessary, false names. Teachers came to be arrested and tortured and the institution became a pole of resistance to dictatorship, especially through the activities of TAIB. In it were staged pieces of the Arena Theater – by authors like Plínio Marcos and Augusto Boal – and the Sesi Popular Theater, among others. At the same time as the presentations filled the theater and the school continued to function, many members of the Jewish community moved away, out of fear of persecution or ideological disagreement, and financial difficulties increased.

“From the 1980s the Casa do Povo loses the enemy – the Dictatorship – the friend – the socialist bloc – and the social base – the Jews who lelf the neighborhood and often move away from the left-wing”, sums up Seroussi. In 1981 the college closed its activities, emptying even more space, in a period that the center of the city also lives a growing abandonment by the elites and the public power. If Casa do Povo did not completely close its doors, being maintained by the almost heroic performance of some associates, it entered a long period of crisis that only ended in the current decade.

RECENT HISTORY

It was more or less the story told to Seroussi in 2011 – certainly with more details and emotion – by the women who continued to go to Casa do Povo every week to sing in Yiddish in the Coral Tradition. It was in this period that the curator, after years of work at the Center for Jewish Culture, began to approach the building, located in a now mostly Korean and Bolivian neighborhood and with its rather dilapidated building. “Casa was not closed. These women have kept it heroically alive, but working as much as possible”, says Seroussi, referring to figures such as Hugueta Sendacz, now 92 years old and still a master of the choir. At the same time, as a result of the launch of the book Vanguarda Pedagógica (2008) and a mobilization through social networks, a group of Scholem alumni also became involved with the House and discussed the future of space.

It was from 2012, with a new board – which already included Seroussi – and an embryonic team that things began to change. “I had no money or employees, but I remember thinking: with this place, this history, this architecture and without paying rent, or I make things happen or I change my profession”, he jokes. “And we decided to do the same way it was done there in 1953. That is, put groups to use space. There came a fashion group, one of graphic design, one of urban activism. And today we have 25 groups or collectives using the house”. This time, no more people linked to the Jewish community, but from the most varied origins, transforming the institution into a space for meeting and socializing among different people. “If the Jew is the other, par excellence, a Jewish house must be open to all others. It has to be a space of radical alterity, open to the trans people, the black population, the indigenous people and the immigrants in the neighborhood”.

From a questioning on what should be a cultural center of the 21st century, and more specifically in that space, three major axes of work were defined. The first, gedenk (“remember” in Yiddish), guides the performance of the house as a living memory space, which tells the story of resistance of the groups that have gone through it, but seeks to bring this history to the practices of the present and future ideas. The second axis, tsukunft (“future”) emphasizes the experimental role of the house and the desire to make it a space to think about new artistic and multidisciplinary practices. The third axis, Farain (“association”), refers to how the first two axes could be worked, that is, through the action of collectives, autonomous movements and neighborhood associations that started to inhabit the place, living together and using the spaces so flexibly.

he three axes relate directly to an unavoidable question, according to Seroussi: “Here were groups of a political vanguard. It was built a modernist architecture building, had an experimental school and a Brechtian theater. Then the place condemns us to dare. It asks us to do differently”.  Different even from what was done there in the 1940s and 1950s, in a radically different context. “When the Casa do Povo opened there were two or three cultural centers in the city. Today only that neighborhood places Pinacoteca, the Oswald de Andrade Cultural Center, the Sesc Bom Retiro, the Sala São Paulo, the Porto Seguro Theater, the Sacred Art Museum and the Container Theater. So we were going to make another place with exhibitions, theater season and shows? No, we wanted to do something else”, he explains. “Even because these spaces are fundamental, but I think they do not account for a series of contemporary artistic practices. Because I think they often separate culture from the other spheres of life”.

Today, with the groups and a schedule divided between what the institution organizes and what it hosts, the annual budget went from R$ 60 thousand in 2011 to R $ 1.2 million, captured between incentive laws, edicts, contributions from groups and associates, locations and an annual collection event – such as Caetano Veloso’s show in 2018. The institution’s library, after 40 years closed, was reactivated last May, representing another big step for the place in the sense of resuming its history and, at the same time, opening itself to society. “There have been several generations here, including many people who have died, but we have this collection, this archive, which is the hard core of the institution, which tells its story”, says Marilia Loureiro, curator and programmer at the institution. The next step is the restoration of TAIB, now quite degraded, in a planning that is already at an advanced stage.

The newspaper Nossa Voz, symbol of the institution, was relaunched in 2014 and is published annually with texts on current topics and collaborations of artists and intellectuals. In the last issue of 2018, the cover stamps the Herzog Vive! Manifesto published by the Jewish group for Democracy in the election period in reaction to the conservative rise and the possibility of the Bolsonaro election. On the following page, the transcript of the speech by the Israeli writer Amos Oz in June 2017, when he was on the house, shows a little of the spirit – past and present – of the Casa do Povo: “I really feel at home. Here is the right place to start a revolution, or at least, as my friend Lilia Schwarcz said, the right place to plan the revolution. Because it’s always nicer to plan it than to execute it”, he joked. If it will not be the epicenter of the revolution, the House is, returning to Seroussi’s statement, a place to rehearse other possible futures. “And everything that happens here confirms that our wishes were not crazy”, he concludes.

Few artists can update the radicality of Brazilian artistic production, where the body was part of the work, in the 1960s and 1970s, as Ernesto Neto. This is what can be seen in the Sopro show, which is on display at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo until July 15.

In his works and in an original way, Neto manages to gather both the proposals of collective experiences of Hélio Oiticica (1937 – 1990) in his Penetráveis, when he sought to create spaces for coexistence, as to the activations of the body through experiments with different materials, such as proposed Lygia Clark (1920 – 1988) in her Objetos Relacionais.

However, whereas 50 years ago these practices sought to reformulate the foundations of art, Neto, already free of this burden, has been working on a more current and necessary agenda: a “project of indigenization of life” in the definition of Els Lagrou, anthropologist and teacher of UFRJ, in the show catalog.

At the Pinacoteca, this practice is embodied in the installation of the octagon, Cura Bra Cura Té, which hosts five participatory activations open to the public throughout the exhibition period. The next ones take place on June 29 and July 13.

The relationship between the artist and the indigenous issue has been the subject of debate in recent years, especially when he participated in the Venice Biennale two years ago. The controversies are summarized in the question: What is the legitimacy of a white artist to appropriate the discourse of other peoples and cultures? Understanding the place of speech is currently one of the challenges of any kind of discourse that seeks to “represent” the other.

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Undoubtedly it is a bit strange when artists portray themselves as Indians and sell or expose these paintings without any major commitment to the issue. We are there in the field of mere representation, and it was exactly against this kind of posture that Oiticica and Clark rebelled.

Since 2013, however, Neto has been involved with the huni kuin people in Acre in an engaged way, participating in their rituals and incorporating them to their shows, in Brazil and abroad, as happened in Venice.

This participation, in Sopro, occurs in the octagon, in the activations around a large trunk “that needs to be cured” and, for that, is swallowed by an immense pendant.

“We are children of three continents, but we know of one, they only teach us one, we value only one”, writes Neto on the walls of the show, explaining the dazzle with the European culture of the “Brazilian crudes”, as Christian Dunker brilliantly defined in text published in ARTE!Brasileiros digital plataform.

“The time has come to listen to the spirituality of our land, our plants, rivers and trees, the time has come to listen”, argues the artist. It is here that this project of indigenization is made explicit, since the so-called forest peoples seek the intrinsically relational quality of every being, human and not human, what Lagrou defines as “Amerindian relational aesthetics.”

“It’s time to listen to pajés, babalorixás, yororixas”, says Neto, and the programming of activations covers these silenced voices in the history of Brazil, but which in recent decades has been gaining space. They are now at the Pinacoteca not only as a proposition of the artist, but as a consequence of the struggle that these people have been engaging.

Breath, however, goes far beyond the octagon and, in the various spaces where it occurs, reveals how it makes sense in Neto’s career the poetics he now defends.

This harmony with an indigenist cosmogony, where human and nonhuman are seen as part of a whole, after all is central in its various facilities, which ask for the presence of the other, that contaminate the environment with odors, that facilitate the encounter, that touch, caress and envelop.

The plasticism seen in the works of the 1980s to the first decade of the 21st century is dazzling: in forms, materials, volumes and dimensions. There is an organic structure in its language comfortable to all senses, which is even rare in contemporary art. But the maximum power now arrives in this “indigenist project”, politicizing what was discreet at once, and transforming Ernesto Neto into a kind of shaman in times of cholera.

At the  Moreira Salles Institute (IMS) in São Paulo, two exhibitions dedicated to important foreign photographers: the Italian Letizia Battaglia (1935) and the Chilean Sergio Larrain (1931-2012).

Letizia Battaglia: Palermo show brings together about 90 images, publications and films, with a special focus on the photographer’s performance in the L’Ora newspaper. She began her work as a photographer in 1971 in Milan, while writing as a freelancer for various publications, such as Le Ore, a tabloid newspaper and ABC, an intellectual publication. She was invited by L’Ora to return to Palermo, where she had been born, and it was during four decades that she documented the mafia war, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. This all without ignoring the daily life of the city and its inhabitants.

In the words of the photographer, “with the camera in tow, I became a witness of all the evil that was taking place. They were years of civil war: Sicilians against Sicilians. The best judges, the most courageous journalists, the politicians averse to corruption were murdered”. With curatorship by Paolo Falcone, the exhibition has already gone through Palermo, Rome and the IMS in Rio before arriving in São Paulo.

The exhibition Sergio Larrain: um retângulo na mão, traces a panorama of the work by the Chilean, who acted as correspondent of the Magnum agency during the 1960s. The exhibition presents more than 140 photographs, a video and publications, contemplating the periods of production of Larrain in Santiago, work as correspondent in Europe and South America and his return to the native land. Under the auspices of Agnès Sire, the exhibition has already passed through Arles, France, in several Chilean cities, Buenos Aires and IMS in Rio.

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Fotos: Sergio Larrain/Magnum Photo

In this version that is at the IMS, was added the work that Larrain did in the second half of the 1950s for the Brazilian magazine Cruzeiro Internacional, ran by Assis Chateaubriand. Owner of the magazine Cruzeiro – successful publication and responsible for the implantation of the photojournalism here with photographers like Jose Medeiros, Pierre Verger, Luiz Carlos Barreto, Marcel Gautherot -, Chateaubriand when launching its international version wanted to compete with American magazine Life and with the French magazine Paris Match.

The magazine was launched in 1957, Larrain produced for her little more than a dozen reports between 1957 and 1959. He was then invited by Cartier-Bresson to work at Magnum in Paris. The Cruzeiro Internacional ended in 1965 due to lack of advertisers.

In France, Sergio Larrain, who was a friend of Julio Cortázar, one day revealing the films he had made through the streets of Paris saw, in the background in a photo, a couple. He widened the negative and saw that the couple made love, leaning against a wall. He met later with the Argentine writer and showed him the magnification. The photo served as inspiration for the tale Las babas del diablo, one of five published in 1959 in the book Las armas secretas. The tale, in turn, inspired the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni who made the now classic and inspiring Blow-Up.

In Sire’s words, the curator of the show, who has worked at Magnum since 1982 and is director and founder of the Cartier-Bresson Foundation, “for Larrain photography was poetry, it was by no means a documentary issue”.

In a letter he wrote to a nephew in 1982, Sergio Larrain said: “Follow your taste and nothing else, believe only in your taste… When you have some really good pictures, enlarge and make a small exhibition – or a little book. Have it bound. And with that, set your foot on a floor. By showing them, you realize what they are by seeing them in front of others – that is where you feel them. To make an exhibition is to give something, it is like giving food, it is good for others to show them something done with work and taste. It is not showing off, doing well done is healthy for everyone”.

A striking feature of David Magila’s work, simultaneity seems to have an effect on his calendar as well. With three exhibitions inaugurating one after the other in the month of May 2019, the artist makes a striking entrance into São Paulo’s scene. They are three different spaces and with different vocations, in which it exposes a wide range of works, almost all of them unpublished, which together make up a very comprehensive panorama of the main issues that motivate it.

“It was a result of chance”, he explains, emphasizing that each of these shows has its own history, but without denying the existence of important links between the different expository hubs. The first of these projects happened in the garden of the mansion occupied by the Ema Klabin Foundation. It was conceived in the context of the Festival Labas, an initiative of the Lithuanian community in São Paulo, and led the artist to immerse himself in the history of his family, in the affective and symbolic memory linked to the locksmith’s place ran by his grandfather, who took refuge in Brazil in the 1930s, and where he learned the craft by welding bins.

The second show, which opened at the British Cultural Center, was marked by a dialogue with the British artist Hurvin Anderson. It encompasses not only paintings – language that the artist has been exploring more hard in recent times – but also sculptures, drawings and videos. Recent works of his own have also been exhibited in individual exhibitions at Galeria Janaina Torres. These last two hubs of works reveal, by means of a subtle yet intense dialogue, the at once fluid and coherent character of his poetics.

In Magila’s works there always seems to be a farther, more remote, starting point than the first appearances indicate. His painting, despite the ethereal character, is not an invented construction. The inanimate objects and scenes that emanate these constructions always derive from scenes of reality, which the artist collects as an explorer, usually in decadent and abandoned places, and recorded by photographs or drawings of observation.

This careful record of landscapes and details is part of your process. Graduated in arts by Unesp in the early 2000s and often as one of the highlights of the young Brazilian painting, Magila has a very diversified trajectory, marked by moments of exclusive dedication to graphic design and the search for an association between different forms of expression artistic

Empty chairs, debris from bars, umbrellas not only populate his screens creating a somewhat nostalgic scene, but also serve as a structure for the entire composition. “I do not paint the object, I paint around it”, he explains. The empty architecture, the deserted environments are their theme. They never see human traces in them, but we know they’ve been there. Magila confesses interest for places that have the mark of a certain experience, places that feed a series of works. This is the case, for example, of a beach in Iguape, which is being eaten by the sea and which is the source of several of the works shown in the British Center. In several visits to the site he collected not only scenes, but objects engulfed by the sea (any relation to an impulse of ecological denunciation would not be mere coincidence), later transforming these spoils into a large facility.

Despite the chromatic power of the screens, it is always from the drawing that the image is structured, in a series of re-readings to the final form. The mixture of techniques, the influence of his formations in technical drawing (by the Lyceum of Arts and Crafts) and the experience as graphic artist – area in which he worked for a long time – leave their marks in the work. And they contribute to create this feeling of a composition that does not necessarily seek a definitive harmony, but rather to promote the coexistence, somewhat ambiguous, of elements only seemingly disparate. His paintings seduce and defy the senses at the same time.

What can art? Hudinilson Junior always did what he wanted and the answer to this irreverence was to become a point outside the curve within the universe of Brazilian art. His trajectory is marked by the collapse of the subject, explosion of the relation with the object and radicalization of performances. With sophisticated poetic vigor, coupled with bodily and relational experiences, Hudinilson left a production closely linked to São Paulo, whether in performances, graffiti or art in xerox.

Many of his works emerge in search of the simultaneity between thought and visuality, as in the day when he surprised the city with the image of his penis xeroxed in a huge billboard, near the Ibirapuera Park. The reactions provoked by the boldness pointed to the dismantling of the hierarchies of the exhibition space, destruction of the power of location of the work and at the same time revealed the irreverence of the subject.

Every movement to trigger disruption runs through the works that now take the 600 square meters of the gallery Jaqueline Martins, whose owner is also the curator of the show. The novelties are the paintings on canvas, made when the artist was still an art student in the 1970s. A curious tension permeates the plurality of the work by Hudinilson, one of the pioneers of the xerox art movement in Brazil. Best character in his own work, in creating Exercício de me ver (1981), he disorganized critical thinking by simulating the sexual act with a xerox machine. It is intriguing to follow it in this experimentation by producing other meanings for man and machine. How not to remember Hélio Oiticica when he sentenced: “to try the experimental”? Hudinilson expresses himself, without shame, by means of several languages which, in some circumstances, becomes an instrument of speculation. For the critic Jean-Claude Bernardet, “the fragmentation of the body by the xerox, converts it into abstract landscapes, in which the fragments fade away”. In his performance with the copying machine, he uses his body as a matrix for the reproduction and investigation of visual possibilities.

In 1979, Hudinilson created the group 3Nós3, with the artists Rafael França and Mário Ramiro. The union by elective affinities was of friends who agreed art and form of making art. Until 1982 they intervened in several points of São Paulo, practicing the recreational and critical reappropriation of the city. The repertoire of actions ranges from the bagging of public monuments to intervention in the breathing hole of a tunnel, to the sealing of art gallery doors. All understood as a revolutionary mark against the rationalist and controlling determinations of the metropolis. Even acting with the group, he never gives up his individual production that lasts more than three decades.

From the beginning, Hudinilson maintains a strong relationship with collage, starting point for a commentator phase. To this are added experiments in the woodcut, support by which most of the Brazilian artists experienced, using decals of photographic images. Hudinilson spent long hours picking nude body photos taken from American magazines. In 1984, he abandoned these models and focused all his attention around himself when he dedicated himself to Narciso/Estudo para Autorretrato (1984). In this “essay” he dialogues with the myth of Narcissus and creates his own visual identity. The project involves a series of works, like a sort of “opera”. Narcissus becomes an obsession for him who, in the last notebooks of collages, reveals his interest in the study of the male nude.

In the 1980s, Hudinilson’s place for art is the street, where he invents graffiti with drawings embedded in writing, claiming a space for total freedom. His mentor and accomplice, Alex Vallauri (1949-1987), was the first Brazilian artist to adhere to graphite. Like him, Hudinilson works with masks or stencils in the search for a new formal space to create, a resistance in vain, as if some naturalness in art were possible.

In life Hudinilson saved himself from experiencing the illusory vertigo of belonging to the art market and participating in internationalization through repetitive marathons of fairs and biennials. It was only after his death that his work reached the exterior and he landed in June at Art Basel, Switzerland, the oldest and most revered art fair in the world.