Prisons

I must apologise if I've given the impression that nothing happens on time here. Just the other day I was wondering if the hot and humid summer in Sao Paulo would ever end. Well, it did, about a minute later. Yes, come March 1st and overnight - literally, I remember waking in the night and shivering - the climate was transformed into something altogether chillier. Sadly, the seasonal change hasn't affected the relentless rain. Now I'm nursing a cold.

Went to an exhibition down the road, in a building that was built as a train station by the British and then transformed into a notorious prison during Brazil's military dictatorship era. Curiously, the exhibition also included work commemorating the perhaps even more horrific behaviour by our Argentine neighbour. Pictures of innocent children playing with pretend guns, who just 10 years later would be dead for real, some of the many victims of that dark era.

On an upper floor of the building was an exhibit called Alphaville, by a Spanish artist, referring to the famous movie-inspired gated communities in Sao Paulo. Using a mass of advertising hoardings, especially for yuppie apartments, the exhibit featured a large set of intimidating gates, clearly a reference to the kind of gates surrounding almost all middle to upmarket apartment blocks in this city.

It's meant to symbolise a new kind of prison, as much for the richer but insecure "inmates" as for those locked out. The artist's anger is with Brazil's longstanding trend to privatise what should be public space. This unhappy social policy is accompanied by a crassly commercial culture which "tortures" bewildered consumers with an endless parade of supposedly aspirational but ultimately empty words - "Exclusive", "Customised", "Lifestyle", etc. The same trend that has now occurred worldwide.

So out of the frying pan into the fire, or out of the fire into the frying pan, or out of the fire into another fire .. ? Well, Britain never had military dictatorship so when we look back nostagically to the "good old days" before relentless commercialism I suspect we can be forgiven more easily by a Brazilian or Argentine who saw their best friend murdered by the state.


Nevertheless, I agree with the artist that there is a depressing brutalism about modern Sao Paulo, not helped by the awful Oscar Niemeyer-influenced architecture. To paraphrase Coleridge: concrete, concrete everywhere. Never has "Futurism" seemed so dated.

Thank god there's no more military dictatorship. But Sao Paulo, with its gaping chasm between public and private, all too easily ends up looking like a giant prison cell for all of its inhabitants.