![\"1979-23-Mulheres-e-crian\u00e7a\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/revistazum.com.br\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/1979-23-Mulheres-e-crian%C3%A7a.jpg?ssl=1\")
<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n S\u00e3o Paulo is a city that always surprises. I say this objectively, not as a clich\u00e9. Of course, all cities surprise. The city is, by definition, the locus of chance. A space for unplanned events. The place for the non-trivial and the out-of-character. But that\u2019s not what I mean: I mean that S\u00e3o Paulo always surprises me both by its social and cultural history and its physical structure.<\/p>\n A clear example of this, in my mind, is the Vila Nova Concei\u00e7\u00e3o district. When I went to live for the first time in S\u00e3o Paulo, at the end of 1974, I ended up at a great address: 1, Purpurina Street, Vila Madalena, in the former district of Risca Faca, with its pubs, bars, and its football field. It was a white, one-storey house, almost on the corner, with a tiny backyard. Years later, Vila Madalena exploded and filled up with high-rise apartment blocks, bars and shops, in a way that I have seen happening more recently in Vila Mariana. But what I mean is that when I moved to Vila Madalena, Vila Nova Concei\u00e7\u00e3o, which nowadays boasts \u201cthe most expensive square metre\u201d in S\u00e3o Paulo, was still a rural district. Almost a farm.<\/p>\n In the mid-1970s, Vila Nova Concei\u00e7\u00e3o was a curious place, hidden away in S\u00e3o Paulo. People had heard of Ibirapuera, but not of the now famous neighbourhood. Vila Nova Concei\u00e7\u00e3o had the feeling of a rural town, somewhere left over from the calmer days of the distant past. A place full of trees where a cheerful little stream called Uberaba flowed, over which H\u00e9lio Pellegrino Avenue was later built. It was a district of mansions and villas, where one could buy locally-produced milk and fruit, or see the cattle grazing. But it\u2019s not just the story of S\u00e3o Paulo\u2019s urban design. As I said, the city\u2019s social and cultural history also surprises me. And now I need to face up to the old V\u00e1rzea do Carmo.<\/p>\n At the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, the city of S\u00e3o Paulo can be visualised as two-dimensional. One dimension is that of a city that is modernising in the European way. The other is that characterised by floods of immigrants \u2013 especially Italians. In the first case, shorter after the end of the Paraguayan War (1864- 1870), we begin to see significant physical changes in S\u00e3o Paulo\u2019s urban landscape. A rapid and obvious process of urban reconfiguration profoundly changed the city over the last decades of the 19th century, extending into the first decades of the following century. It is the period in which S\u00e3o Paulo made the leap from a rustic looking, provincial settlement to the \u201ccapital of coffee.\u201d In his book Forma<\/em>\u00e7\u00e3<\/em>o hist<\/em>\u00f3<\/em>rica de S\u00e3o Paulo <\/em>[the historical formation of S\u00e3o Paulo] (1954), Richard Morse speaks of a \u201csurge of physical and economic growth\u201d that erased at least the external traces of the city\u2019s colonial past. S\u00e3o Paulo now became the city of Paulista Avenue (1891) and Viaduto do Ch\u00e1 [tea viaduct] (1892), a bridge made from pre-fabricated metal structures produced in Germany.<\/p>\n On the other hand, as I have said, S\u00e3o Paulo also became an immigrant city, full of Japanese and Jewish people \u2013 and many more. But it was mainly the Italians who took over the city, populating it with an emerging working class, promoting anarchism (they even spoke of \u201cfree love\u201d), starting to climb up the social ladder and beginning to generate wealth. The town house built by the Sicilian businessman on the Paulista Avenue at the end of the 19th century and the construction of the Martinelli Building in the 1920s are visible, even ostentatious, symbols of the process which changed Brazil\u2019s demographic makeup and culture forever.<\/p>\n But in the middle of all this, V\u00e1rzea do Carmo tells of a different reality. When we look more closely in that direction and discover its look and soul, it gives us the sensation we are dealing with another city, not S\u00e3o Paulo. V\u00e1rzea do Carmo is quite the opposite to Campos El\u00edsios, first residential area in S\u00e3o Paulo to mimic Europe. And it has nothing to do with the Italian Francisco Matarazzo and his \u201cindustrial complex\u201d nor with the poorer Italian immigrants. However, it is not another city. V\u00e1rzea do Carmo is S\u00e3o Paulo. The issue is another. S\u00e3o Paulo is not one city. It is many. Made up of several. It is a multiple and mobile city.<\/p>\n Jorge Americano writes in S<\/em>\u00e3<\/em>o Paulo<\/em> naquele tempo <\/em>[S\u00e3o Paulo at that time] (1895-1915)<\/em>: \u201cV\u00e1rzea do Carmo (now Dom Pedro II Park) became a swamp in the rainy season. In the dry season, the Tamanduate\u00ed river flowed through two channels which formed an island between the Gas\u00f4metro and Carmo districts in the centre of the city. One of the channels is that used by the river nowadays while the other ran parallel to 25 de Mar\u00e7o Street, until it joined up with the main channel near where the Municipal Market is now. Down Glic\u00e9rio Street and all across the central spine of the city, washerwomen would clatter down to the river in their clogs, carrying bags of washing and washboards. At the edge of the water, they pulled the back of their skirts through their legs to the front and tied it in a knot, making a sort of improvised breeches. Hitching up the material at the top, they would tie a bit of string round their waist to keep the skirt at knee level or a little above, so they now looked like padded shorts.\u201d<\/p>\n And that reminds me of the washerwomen in Bahia City, in my childhood. Or of the washerwomen of the River Plate in Buenos Aires, who were portrayed by Jos\u00e9 Luis Lanuza in Morenada. <\/em>And of the washerwomen in the novels of James Joyce and William Faulkner. Washerwomen who are fundamental characters in any history of women in Brazil. But it wasn\u2019t just the washerwomen. V\u00e1rzea do Carmo was a place for poor people and mestizos, blacks and mulattos, giving it more of an air of Bahia or Rio de Janeiro than Italianized, urban-industrial S\u00e3o Paulo. And that is where they say the first football match was held in Brazil, in April 1895, using a leather ball brought by Charles Miller. We forgot about all this, as well as the rivers and streams of the city, which are only now being remembered.<\/p>\n V\u00e1rzea do Carmo mustn\u2019t be forgotten. It has already been deleted from the townscape. The area was filled in and levelled. But it should not be lost in the same way from the social history of S\u00e3o Paulo. Here was an area that flatly contradicted the official view of the city that was imposed on us. A space that was ostensibly \u201cprimitive\u201d with its fiery black women and its African healers, in the context of a city that was striving to become a metropolis, which wanted to embrace the modern and hygienic, expelling the whores and beggars from the region surrounding the Municipal Theatre. An area occupied by poor mulattos, living their own culture. A space for the excluded who, once again, would be driven away, so the local authorities could put a municipal park in their place. Anyway, the project was to extirpate that blot from the city landscape, that den which housed the opposite of the physical and moral cleanliness that the privileged classes of S\u00e3o Paulo wanted for the city. And so they did, filling the site in and landscaping it, destroying the Mercado dos Caipiras, an informal country market, banning the black and mestizo herb sellers.<\/p>\n And it is from that point of view that I look at Raul Garcez\u2019s beautiful photos, which show another world, a Council housing estate built on top of what was covered over. I\u2019m no art critic, but I have to say two or three things about Garcez. I always think it is interesting to recall that he was an Engineering graduate from the Polytechnic School of the University of S\u00e3o Paulo (USP). Because for us he was a photographer \u2013 but he brought to his photographs the constructive instincts of the engineer, celebrated, by the way, in the poetry of Jo\u00e3o Cabral de Melo Neto. At the same time, his compositions enchant with their delicacy. If we look at the semantic and syntactic aspects of his creativity, we can say that he had social conscience and knowledge of the photographic language. Hence, he became a pioneer of photographic documentation and, at the same time, a subtle and rigorous photographer, with a powerful and expressive visual language.<\/p>\n The photographer and professor Jo\u00e3o Luiz Musa expressed this perfectly: \u201c[Garcez] had an interest in topics related to Brazilian reality and, at the same time, a clear intention to discover how much photography had advanced as a visual language: he was a systematic researcher, an artist. This attitude was reflected in the way he approached his photographic work: he would try out techniques and review his collected material to exhaustion, always wanting to get closer to his object of study: the space, the people, their social relations. Over the years these concerns were turned into various photographic essays, which resulted in some of the most beautiful and serious works of Brazilian photography available to us.\u201d<\/p>\n We see this in the photo essay focusing on the V\u00e1rzea do Carmo which Garcez produced between 1979 and 1980. But looking at the spaces and the people that Garcez photographed, the first thing that comes to my mind is to say that it seems history does not forgive. It seems that the characters Garcez photographed had inherited the bad karma <\/em>of the expulsion of the old population and the destruction of the old place. A people that might be beautiful, but so very sad. The laughter of those original inhabitants no longer persists in those walls, in the midst of those people. Even the kids look at us with a blank, disconsolate and sad look. The joy of the place is gone. There is a suggestion of bitterness. Isolation. Loneliness. An essential helplessness in the face of everything. But, above all, sadness. They are no longer a part of a noisy melting pot of races and origins. They are part of a middle class that does not seem to have found its place. A poor middle class. Tacky. Apathetic. Colourless. Though still with vestiges of some hidden, lost, restrained beauty. What to do with those children? In what mazes or featureless haze do they live?<\/p>\n Poverty is not necessarily sad. On the contrary, Bahia and Rio are examples of places where joy is stronger than misery. S\u00e3o Paulo too, in the strongly northeastern culture which permeates the outskirts, a sequence of joyful and vital neighbourhoods surrounding the more staid \u201cexpanded centre,\u201d which is repressed, controlled. But here, in Garcez\u2019s almost poignant photos, what we see is a sad poverty, a poor sadness. Very sad. Where everyone seems to be the same age: 100 years of solitude. \/\/\/<\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n Raul Garcez <\/strong>(1949-1987) graduated in Civil Engineering from the Polytechnic School of the University of S\u00e3o Paulo. During the 1970s he was part of a group of photographers who got together to exchange information and experiences in the photo lab at the Architecture and Urbanism Faculty of the University of S\u00e3o Paulo.<\/p>\n Antonio Ris\u00e9rio<\/strong> (1953) was born in Salvador. He is a poet, translator, anthropologist, essayist, and musician. In the 1970s he edited several experimental poetry magazines. Ris\u00e9rio was a member of the strategy and marketing teams for Lula\u2019s two presidential campaigns. Amongst his writings is A cidade no Brasil<\/em> [the city in Brazil] (2012). He has written screenplays for film and television.<\/p>\n \/\/\/<\/p>\n Get to know<\/a> ZUM\u2019s issues | See<\/a> other highlights from ZUM #6 | Buy<\/a> this issue<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" RAUL GARCEZ (1949-1987) photographed the V\u00e1rzea do Carmo housing estate, the oldest in S\u00e3o Paulo, between October 1979 and April 1980. His images recorded the intimacy of the residents in a rare combination of anthropological viewpoint and formal investigation. The housing estate V\u00e1rzea do Carmo was designed in 1942 by Attilio Corr\u00eaa Lima for the Industrial […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":35327,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1624],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2226,1816,2225],"class_list":["post-45783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-zum-magazine-6"],"yoast_head":"\n<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\nThe housing estate V\u00e1rzea do Carmo was designed in 1942 by Attilio Corr\u00eaa Lima for the Industrial Workers Retirement and Pension Institute, following the best principles of urban modernism \u2013 little ornamentation, lots of space between buildings and areas for public recreation<\/h4>\n
<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\nTo accommodate the growing industrial middle class in S\u00e3o Paulo, 107 buildings with 6,918 apartments were planned. In the end, only 22 buildings were built, with 602 apartments.<\/h4>\n
<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\nThe estate became an emblem in the history of public housing by representing both the ambition for major projects and the obstacles confronting Get\u00falio Vargas\u2019 public housing policy.<\/h4>\n
<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\nRaul Garcez approached the residents through the local recreation centre, built by them to house a boccia club.<\/h4>\n
<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\nGarcez made 780 images. He showed 42 in his only solo exhibition entitled Conjunto Habitacional V\u00e1rzea do Carmo<\/em> [V\u00e1rzea do Carmo housing estate] (1980), at the Pinacoteca do Estado, in S\u00e3o Paulo.<\/h4>\n
At Home<\/h1>\n
by Antonio Ris\u00e9rio<\/h5>\n