The Call of the Street

The street had been grey, grey... Sometimes happy, sometimes sad, but always grey. But no, I am lying. The city was often bursting with color, with emotion that projected straight out of the concrete and came flying through the streets to grip my heart. I had been miserable many a time in Sao Paulo, but the markings on its streets, the drawings and letters and wild universes that encroached on its blind walls, these were always lifting me up. As I sat in buses, as I navigated endless, traffic-infested streets, these otherworldly visions pulled at me, came looking for me, calling at me like sirens.

And so I started to photograph these streets, first in my mind, then with a camera. When I found myself trapped in the chaotic soullessness of the place, I began to notice the symbols, the repetitions of patterns and colors. I grew affectionate towards certain street corners, underpasses, tunnels and blind alleys. What had been meaningless, a never-ending sea of blunt, ugly structures, an undefined wreck of postmodern times, a doomed babylon of souls caught in shiny metal boxes, this disturbing Sao Paulo grew to be more human, more playful, more approachable, and quite frankly, more livable.

It was these markings, these codes that built a different map of the city for me. I could edit out the monstrosities, or rather, put them side by side with the comforting signs of a human presence: graffiti. Graphs, markings of the souls that inhabited the monster. Pixaçao. Letters, leftovers of a heart beating inside the city. Emotion breathing out from the interstices of the stone walls.