In mid-2015, we were invited to participate in the SIMBIO project to be held at the Mari’Stella Tristão Gallery at the Palácio das Artes. Our initial proposal: to install a bridge linking the Palácio das Artes to the Municipal Park. The invitation also carried an open provocation — to produce the work collectively, together with other collaborators.

From there, we invited Adriano Mattos to work with us. In turn, Adriano extended the invitation to his students from the Research and Extension Group of the School of Architecture at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Architecture and Translation. Thus began our partnership in the conception and production of the Bridge.

Soon after, Adriano and his students, prompted to reflect on the project and the collaboration, produced a questioning essay within the academy. A textual debate quickly unfolded between us, along with the desire to publish the texts in such a way that one would pass through the other. We immediately began here, with Adriano’s informal writing taken from an email exchange:

One piece of writing provokes another...

...thus unfolds a series of arguments that gain force and voice when they oppose one another, overlap, add themselves together.

I believe the format of a multiplied conversation-dialogue (and note that the text we sent already stems from many voices), such as the one adopted by Paul Valéry in Eupalinos or the Architect, gains consistency through the heated unfolding of the debate between Socrates and his disciple Phaedrus — one and the other flay, divert, slide, deceive, strike true, pull rugs from under each other, and join forces in the undertaking.

I suggest a layout for the publication in which the texts overlap... converse, attack one another, and accumulate, opening breaches and failures for the experimental reader to also enter the writing.

Thus the texts follow, rearranged freely and essayistically. So much so that, from time to time, one may lose track of where the provocation originated.

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De Passagem risks transposing the instituted borders between entities that affirm themselves: one promoting ART — the PALÁCIO DAS ARTES — and the other preserving NATURE — the MUNICIPAL PARK. Neighbors in downtown Belo Horizonte, the two entities are separated by a fence and by strained regulations and operational rules.

The challenge of crossing a fence just over two meters high becomes irrelevant before the undertaking of overcoming the differences between these two institutions — recognized in our city as AUTHORITIES concerning ART and NATURE. Such PROPRIETARY ENTITIES are bastions sustaining order and a homogeneous spatiality defined by exclusion and exclusivity. The purpose takes on heroic tones when the difficulties involved in realizing a simple “bridge,” capable of crossing the fence and connecting the two ENTITIES, reveal countless technical and bureaucratic obstacles. Such an almost unpretentious intervention, naïve and at the same time ironic in its compositional principles, acquires the airs of an epic film such as Fitzcarraldo by Werner Herzog. A staging that recounts the saga of an Irish visionary who, in the second half of the nineteenth century, struggles to manufacture ice in the middle of the Amazon rainforest in order to finance the grandiose project of building an opera house in the jungle, to be inaugurated by the Italian tenor Enrico Caruso. In the film, after the character embodied by Klaus Kinski is treated by the rubber barons as a “conqueror of the useless,” Fitzcarraldo decides, obsessively and alone, to undertake such a mission. To do so, it becomes necessary to drag a boat over a mountain in order to reach the bed of another Amazonian river (a feat carried out literally, in the middle of the jungle and through the sacrifice and effort of some 270 Indigenous people, by the film’s no less obsessed director: Werner Herzog). In his civilizing mission, intent on establishing a colonizing connection between ART and NATURE, Herzog and his character deliriously wish to bring the SUPREME ART of OPERA and CINEMA into the Amazon jungle. The epic climax of this undertaking reveals Klaus Kinski, maddened, his white suit progressively stained by the earth and muddy waters of the Amazon river throughout the film, holding a gramophone playing Caruso in the middle of the jungle in an attempt to appease the Indigenous people and the savage nature of the Amazon. A delirious, limping, fragile hope reveals an insignificant man before the foretold ruin of a presumed dominant civilization.

At the opening of Fitzcarraldo, over the image of a distant gaze projected upon the Amazon rainforest, the filmmaker announces to the inattentive spectator or traveler: “(...) the Indigenous people call this territory Cayahuari Yacu, ‘the land where GOD did not finish creation.’ They believe that only when mankind is extinct will GOD return to complete His work.”

Called upon to produce a “contemporary” and “collaborative” artwork, the two artists find themselves confronted with the necessity of technical reports and approvals from various normative instances: a fire-risk report from the Fire Department, an authorization report from the Fundação Clóvis Salgado (manager of the Palácio das Artes), a report from the Parks and Gardens administration (manager of the Municipal Park), an engineering report concerning responsibility for the structure of the proposed object, an approval report from IEPHA (the State Institute of Historical and Artistic Heritage)...

If the contemporary is the “untimely” — “a reckoning with one’s own time, taking a position in relation to the present” (as announced by Nietzsche and developed by the Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben in the essay What Is the Contemporary?) — then we are confronted, in the civilizational present of our community, with the regulation and codification of our contemporaneity. Thus we orient ourselves according to a homogeneous society, ‘empowered’ and ‘dictatorial’ in its norms for our survival; that is, one which imposes upon us the principle that we are incapable of singularly inhabiting and experiencing the PRESENT.

If we imagined that CONTEMPORARY ART, through the very intrinsic meanings of those two words, would make itself “untimely” and propositional of “difference,” announcing other ways of inhabiting the PRESENT and excavating the FUTURE, we encountered the opposite: the ARTIST has been molded into a FUNCTIONARY of a “civilizing machine,” part of a program that has codified desires and interdicted the possibilities for experimentation at the borders established by this civilizing pact.

It is there that the artist realizes that he finds himself alone and restricted to the isolation of his own instituted aquarium.... (here, as announced by Flusser, we attempted a non-alphabetic writing, proposing other modes of reading beyond linear text composed of chained words: we propose ICONS that may be manipulated in diverse ways by whoever dares reflect upon contemporary art — we suggest that the reader cut out these ICONS and attempt to assemble the equation diagrammed here in other ways).

In the case of the proposed installation, the artists developed a series of possible approaches to the aquarium to which they had been subjected. Part of a generation of artists who came into the world already castrated and limited by the interdiction of their desires and experiments in the PRESENT, the two nourish in PLAYFULNESS the possibility of survival for a FUTURE. Understanding PLAYFULNESS, contrary to what would be the contemporary announced by Agamben and his friends, as adherence to the present time without taking distance from it. Are we then practicing occupational therapy? Perhaps a kind of alienating dystopia like that of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury: where firefighters burned books — prohibited because they enabled critical reflection and thus represented a threat to the system — so that people would instead content themselves with wall-sized televisions in special rooms where they could entertain themselves and interact with characters called “family.”

And thus we can ‘fleetingly’ play with the ICONS codified in the installation proposed by the artists: (we also propose, as in the previous diagram, that these ICONS may be differently manipulated)

And we have no doubt: irony tyrannizes us. Our diffuse cultural irony is at once so powerful and so frustrating because it is impossible to know clearly what an ironist wants.

— excerpt from Irony by David Foster Wallace

Aware, though not convinced, that in the debate surrounding art the critic and the artist must at times pass through the refinement of irony, we continue the discussion. From object to text, one asks: does every activity become merely an exercise in translation into words? Would we not arrive at the careless desperation of Occupational Therapy through the annulment of things in their application to everything or almost everything? Since we are not a fenced institution, we return to our Fitzcarraldian tasks alongside the proposed discussion. And, thinking about it carefully, it is good to consider that an innocent artwork might ignite discussions across so many rigid instances.

After the invitation to participate in the exhibition at the Palácio das Artes and the decision to install the bridge over the fence, we entered into a cadence of endless bureaucracies. From the outset, we knew that through this device we would enter the repeated, already non-human pathways that systematization had solidified. An image might more or less simplify the undertaking: one document can only be validated upon presentation of another document which, in turn, can only be validated upon presentation of another document, and so on, systematically and infinitely repeating itself. Or another even more distressing image: a first document can only be validated upon presentation of a second document which, in turn, can only be validated upon presentation of the first document, as in an impossible cycle to close. Added to this were meetings that clarified very little and — returning to Calvino’s literary reference at the opening of this publication — placed everything on a conciliatory, vague, procrastinating plane. Also, innocent verbal agreements being shamelessly undone. The image of the mud in Fitzcarraldo is not mistaken. The mud that hindered footsteps, making them slower, and then helped the ship slide backward freely and despairingly over the few meters it had managed to advance.

If we can no longer inhabit the primary residence of things, because it is no longer possible to access them in their freshness, let us content ourselves with a “simulacrum” of the world. The idea of the “simulacrum,” developed by the cultural thinker Jean Baudrillard and considered by many one of the foundations of what came to be called “postmodernism,” criticized and defined certain architectural configurations as the “secondary residence” of things. For example: parks would be nature’s “secondary residence,” shopping malls and hypermarkets the “secondary residence” of goods and commerce, museums the “secondary residence” of works of art, and the various screens we are led to handle all the time as the “secondary residence” of our imagination. And thus, there is no longer space in our daily lives to exist and experiment within the PRESENT.

And thus are configured the PALACES OF ART and the MUNICIPAL PARKS — each one, in itself, instituted PROPRIETORS acting as guardian-promoters of ART and NATURE, a TERRITORIAL RESERVE that enables them to endure crises naturally and remain sustained by the right of PROPERTY.

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When a work assumes a utopian position, it may seem simultaneously to admit that proto-action was incapable of instituting novelty (and that it is but a small flare), but that the persistence of the movement maintains the noise. There lies the stigma of the utopian: appearing innocent, hysterical, or square. If the history of Western art is remembered through seismic shocks, it is natural that criticism would rely upon these and forget the movement of termites or entropy. Therapeutic boastfulness may simply be a lack of poetry.

Yet perhaps precisely because it attempts a Fitzcarraldian journey, entering into the labyrinths of solid machinery, the undertaking comes closer to the concrete-utopian than to accommodated occupationalism. And excavating the future, unlike movement from past to present, would it not instead be movement from present to future? The free passage between objective and subjective may end up concealing what belongs to one and what belongs to the other — one eclipsing the other. If the narrative of the undertaking reveals latent striations, the undertaking itself might induce a sway in invisible fences.

There are three pillars in De Passagem:

I – the installation of the bridge over the fence;

II – the series of fabulous drawings;

III – the documentation for the realization of the bridge.

I – A bridge over a locked gate is an antagonistic and paradoxical figure. The image that should signify union, free passage, and the shortening of distances seems instead to point toward its opposite. Precisely because of the incompatibility between fence and bridge, the installation points toward a symbolic distance greater than the physical one. Thus union indicates separation; free passage, interruption; proximity, widening. A sudden détour sweetening the relaxed deliriums of those thirsty for encounter and free circulation.

II – It is always good to flee from the empty irony of the point of view or point of departure. Thus, attending to playfulness as a self-ironic game may also camouflage a sincere feeling of the ordinary citizen, diminished by ordering forces. Or is the ordinary citizen forbidden from entering the institution?

Thus, to produce today what we still attempt to name CONTEMPORARY ART, from within such a limited and exhausted territory-repertoire, has become a great challenge for young people aspiring to recognition as ARTISTS. Identifying cracks in the domain, narrow remnants of ground, unmapped scraps, frayed borders, failures in the codified system of the contemporary world... revealed and yet-undomesticated recesses are surveyed and rapidly appropriated by the PROPRIETARY institutions on duty. And once unveiled, domesticated, commandeered, and reproduced to exhaustion, these tiny things that seemed to offer a breath of freshness are quickly consumed, digested, and catalogued. Such apparent “originalities,” apparent “transgressions” of the instituted model, are rapidly transformed into entries in the ATLAS of the arts (as Didi-Huberman would attest). They are promptly naturalized. What had been heralded and published as some “novelty” becomes normalized. The artist is framed with the badge of yet another FUNCTIONARY of art.

A green fence separates the MUNICIPAL PARK from the PALÁCIO DAS ARTES. All that remains for the slaves is to play CAXANGÁ: take, place, put back... let Zé Pereira play! Warrior with warrior make ZIG ZIG ZÁZ!

As a PLAYFUL act announcing the wait for another or COUNTER-CIVILIZATION that may someday arrive to replace or surpass (if such an operation is even possible) the separation between ART and NATURE, between the MUNICIPAL PARK and the PALÁCIO DAS ARTES, let us play CAXANGÁ: awaiting this COUNTER-CIVILIZATION announcing another way of inhabiting and conceiving a shared territory between human beings and the radically other existences inhabiting this same planet.

Or is such a fence merely a MIRAGE to entertain our bodies and minds? A TRAP to capture and pacify the pulse that still stubbornly insists on pulsing? On desiring EXPERIMENT?

Holder of the suit jacket, the book, the gallery, and therefore criticism itself, the small-great institution also possesses a pretentious morbid seriousness and acts, once again, through its disqualifying hierarchical fences. The great palace with its formal attire and serious exhibitions. A palace closed within its fence to those who do not belong to seriousness, shutting its doors during market hours and annulling encounter. To disqualify the masses is to endorse alienation. Yet the possibilities of escape seem as simple as crossing a bridge.

III – The narrative of the undertaking fulfills the prophecy of obstruction. Within the infinite lines of permissions, fantastic literature smiles in reverse.

In this sense, Kafkaesque corridors might be the first memory of such a deliriously obstructed undertaking. Yet the curious biblical reference to Job, through the inventive game Caxangá, juxtaposes the patient and degrading movement of that character with that lived by Klaus Kinski’s character in Fitzcarraldo. Ironically, one recalls the episode in which Job’s friends encounter him and end up interrupting a hopeful recovery, or else reigniting inert despair.

Does the cunning purpose of the ironic device test BORDERS? Or is it merely another reheated therapeutic practice? Is it a collision capable of scraping the impenetrable smoothness of the PROPRIETARY INSTITUTIONS that claim ownership over ART and NATURE? Or is it a perverse tangent announcing yet another toy to compose our contemporary amusement park?

Supported by the thesis defended by architect and artist Breno Luiz Thadeu da Silva, concerning the supposed “homogeneity” opposed to “urban heterology” and the “interdiction of experience in cities,” and also referenced by the French thinker Georges Bataille concerning “experience,” we may reflect that worse than the homogeneity imposed upon named and designed urban space is the homogeneity of conception, or of ideas about life in this common territory. A task which everywhere replaces exterior objects, or the radically other, with classificatory, exclusionary, and exclusive series or rules.

As though the fold emerged spontaneously in the perverse smoothness of rhetoric.

In other times, or through other mouths, art proclaims itself protagonist. An innocent or vivid elusion forgets the naturalization of themes by generalized disciplines, which are devoured by endemic systematization. But if the system tends to naturalize every impulse, within the terms of appropriation and reappropriation — so often pointed out in street countercultures and in their impossibility of being “against” or “outside” or of generating only a freshness, an air, a breath — if we are all functionaries of order, including through possible disorder, then how can dialogue occur? Is dialogue impossible? Sampling the question from our partnership: worse than insistence, are not classificatory rules themselves? The pettiness of aspiring toward institutional recognition is a latent object distributed in crumbs by the tyrant. Thus classificatory rules insist on enduring, and fences continue to be erected beside signs in giant letters:

“ONLY HIGH ART MAY ENTER HERE.”

The park gates of Parque Municipal offer, on a daily basis, shortly before 6 p.m., a melancholic spectacle. Yawning guards hurry the last visitors to leave the green oasis and return to grey avenues crowded with cars. Only children, heads bowed, tend to ask: why?

It is the question my daughter asks every time we are invited to leave by men in combat boots. It is also what friends from elsewhere invariably ask me. Between ironic smiles and incredulous looks, they learn that our main park is not only fully fenced, but also has opening hours — from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. — that are prohibitive for the vast majority of the population. Why?

Central Park in New York is open 24 hours. Hyde Park in London is open 24 hours. Bois de Vincennes in Paris is open 24 hours. Villa Borghese in Rome, like most North American and European parks, also has no closing time. El Retiro in Madrid stays open until midnight in summer. The Bosques de Palermo in Buenos Aires do not close. Parque Rodó in Montevideo does not either. Ibirapuera Park in São Paulo stays open until midnight. Parque Farroupilha in Porto Alegre does not close. The Flamengo Park in Rio de Janeiro does not close either. Parque da Jaqueira in Recife closes at 10 p.m. Most of them also have extensive nighttime programming.

These examples, moreover, shatter the comfortable fantasy that Brazilians are not inclined to use public spaces — as is the case with our Municipal Park. In the downtown area of Belo Horizonte, easily accessible to residents from all parts of the city, it receives up to 16,000 visitors and passersby per day during the week. The demand for leisure and the park’s potential public beyond its “business hours” becomes even more evident when we look at weekend numbers: more than 60,000 people from all social classes walk, play, or occupy the lawns with colorful picnic blankets.

Even so, the executive branch chose to veto, at the beginning of this month [October 2014], a bill that would have changed the park’s opening hours, extending them from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. Why?

The extension of hours, explained the mayor’s veto letter, would bring additional costs and negative impacts on fauna. As for costs, the executive merely reiterated what was already known: it is obvious that extending operating hours would generate additional expenses — with security guards, staff, lighting. But that is not the point. Public administration exists to think the city for its citizens and manage expenses. No one expects the park to remain open for free. It is simply a matter of weighing costs and benefits.

As for fauna, what about the more than 40,000 trees cut down in the city between 2008 and 2012 alone? Insects, birds, and small mammals are hardly celebrating the progressive and intense annihilation of their habitat. Nor are they likely to rejoice when more than 1.5 million micro-lights are turned on to decorate Christmas, disturbing their sleep with a kind of extravagance that, incidentally, costs around 2 million reais.

Why not open such a diverse and generous public space later into the night? Why not tear down the fences altogether? It is necessary to respond with sense and honesty. Only then will we be able to reclaim the exuberant human fauna that today remains confined, after 6 p.m., to shopping malls.

From its conception, Parque Municipal Américo Renné Gianetti has undergone constant changes in both its area and intended uses. From the original project, begun in the 19th century with an initial area of 62 hectares—more than three times its current size—which planned for a casino, a restaurant, and a meteorological observatory, little was actually built. However, the fact that it became one of the city’s main venues for events contributed to the imagination and active participation of users who came from all parts of the city, and who experienced there what, today, might seem like entirely utopian ideas. The Velo Clube hosted large sporting festivals with bicycle, velocipede, and foot races. In the 1920s, alongside the construction of the bandstand, tennis courts, and a skating rink, the park received the installation of an iron fence.

In 1941, Mayor Juscelino Kubitschek initiated the construction of the Municipal Theater—today’s Palácio das Artes—on one of the park’s corners. The project was born within a park that had already lost its fences—recently removed under the influence of the modernist movement in the city—and was therefore integrated into the green territory. Without fences, a series of events took place: open-air piano performances, football, “peteca,” tennis, and especially swimming and rowing.

In the 1950s, the club pavilion was replaced by another building—the Francisco Nunes Theater—and the democratic and social dynamic that existed there was replaced by yet another cultural facility subject to capacity limits. Around the same time, equipment built in the same architectural style was inaugurated in Pampulha, pointing toward a new form of leisure in the city: private leisure. As a result of these substitutions, autonomy and freedom in the occupation of public space weakened, and the sense of belonging seemed to exist only through tickets that proved that part of the space was reserved for the single user who possessed them. At this point, the cultural facility performs an immediate segregating role and begins, within a public park without fences, the construction of a sociocultural barrier.

The completion of the Palácio’s construction was taken over by the state government, which inaugurated it in the 1970s and presented, at the opening event, the manifesto From Body to Earth and the exhibition Object and Participation, which occupied, respectively, the park and the gallery, still within a single territory. Doors were opened to a marble foyer and white galleries, an aesthetic choice that configures an inhibiting architecture, distant from what is found in truly public structures. Regardless of free entry, this choice ends up selecting who enters and who does not. Seven years after its inauguration, the fences that had already surrounded the Municipal Park decades earlier were reinstated, adding another fifty meters of green iron railing that continue, to this day, to divide the urban oasis—controlled by the municipal administration—and the Palácio das Artes, a state institution.

The park is an example of how public spaces have been understood in Brazil. Like it, many other common-use areas in the country have been fenced off, following hygienist policies that sought to displace the growing number of homeless people from public spaces—proposals always disguised as initiatives aimed at public safety. In recent years, some artists have focused on exposing the absurdity of these fences, which often create boundaries around large empty areas, accessible only at set times through gates that limit entry and make crossing the space difficult, leading people to prefer going around the fence to reach their destination. In 2009, the art collective Opavivará! carried out the action “Pulacerca” in Rio de Janeiro, in which painter’s ladders were chained to fences, allowing passersby to access the interior of Praça da República from other points. In 2011, the square became free of the fences to which the collective had chained the ladders. This movement has been carried out in several other Brazilian cities, but in Belo Horizonte the Municipal Park remains fenced and closes at 6 p.m.

In 2012, 35 years after the installation of the iron fence, the discomfort caused by the lack of connection between the two neighboring institutions served as one of the central guidelines of the “White Night in the Park.” The project sought to recognize artistic initiatives that intervened in the city’s everyday dynamics, creating an environment for a single night in which proposals collectively invited a reintegration of the theater with the park and, more importantly, of the park with the city. Artists Shima and C.L. Salvaro built a table and benches that crossed the iron bars and served soup to both audiences, those inside and those outside the fence. The action took place near the point where homeless people—who during the day use the park’s facilities—receive food at night from different social organizations. The benches and tables created by the artists functioned as a possible clandestine entrance to the event, which initially had only one access point: the doors of the Palácio das Artes.

For one night, the 50 meters of fence separating the park from the palace were removed by the organizers of “White Night” and stored away, in a symbolic and hopeful gesture that the permeability experienced that evening might inspire both administrations to avoid reinstalling it—which, of course, did not happen. Thus, at 8 a.m. the following morning, welders hurried to solder the large iron panels back into place.

The year after “White Night in the Park,” the building of the former Imaco School—present in the central area of the Municipal Park for nearly 60 years—was demolished to make way for yet another cultural facility, a Multiuse Space designed by architect Gustavo Penna and budgeted at R$12 million. The school, which could have expanded access to cultural and critical foundations for the effective use of such facilities, once demolished makes clear the lack of vision of our planners. Even after the results of the Praça da Liberdade Cultural Corridor project had already been experienced—five years into its existence, with more than five devices lacking public use—construction continues on yet another apparatus.

The boundary is always double, never a single line of separation or transgression that leads to emptiness, but rather a line that borders two sides and functions both as inclusion and exclusion. In this sense, the fence reveals itself as the materialization and reinforcement of a barrier that has been constructed over many years. It is the result of discriminatory planning that shapes culture and art as elitist alternatives through impactful architecture, in contrast to truly public, creative, and horizontal experiences.

The intensification of political debates on urban issues, especially after the June 2013 protests, created a favorable moment for new proposals. Parks and squares in Brazilian cities have seen fences removed and operating hours extended to 24 hours. Belo Horizonte, in turn, completed the Municipal Park Master Plan, designed for the next 35 years, developed by a recently arrived European office in Brazil through a public-private partnership. Part of a larger project that has been implemented over recent years—the “revitalization” of the city center—which responds to part of civil society’s demands, it strategically designs a differentiated environment so that the city’s wealthier population may feel more at ease in a space that has never ceased to be alive, unpretentious, and popular in character. The plan, which naïvely (or perhaps as publicity) aims to revive the pioneering project designed by landscape architect Paul Villon in 1897, must acknowledge that the sociocultural barrier built over a century of the park’s existence cannot be undone simply by cutting down iron fences. Permeability is one of the concepts that allows a built urban environment to be alive, represented by a space’s potential to offer paths through itself and toward other parts of the city. Although the plan presents such possibilities, it still requires genuinely committed social policies for the common appropriation and use of public space.