Eyes that look - but cannot see

How to say something in 600 words about a phenomenon that has no language? How to write about something that has a system that exists out of thousands of systems? How to bring it back to a collection of words, when it can only can be experienced by the subjective presence of the individual? How to say something significant when you don’t see a basic framework in which it operates? How to judge the extremes; both rich and poor when they are so far from your own reality?

We could purpose to isolate some details from the whole, but will things become more clear when they are detached from their complex environment? Is it still legitimate to keep using research methods that we use for Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Zurich – urban situations that are part of a complete different kind of reality? And what to think of economic, political, social, historical, and cultural parameters?

These are questions that I asked myself before, they form for an important part the reason why I joined this workshop. Not that I think that I will leave with answers, but I hope to enlarge my awareness on these subjects. (I think that already happened in a way.) 

Before I went to Sao Paulo I read some books by the Italian novelist Italo Calvino. I started to read his work because it can be seen as an ultimate struggle to describe things that are in fact impossible to describe. Through many of his writings the fascination for complex phenomena in science, nature and daily life becomes clear. For example the endless motion of the sea, the smell of nineteenth century Paris, or the star-spangled sky. It is not surprising that also urbanity is a theme that plays an essential role in his writings. For him the city is a symbol to ‘express the tension between geometric rationality and the entanglements of human life.’ In the book Mr. Palomar he writes an amazing chapter about that complexity of the roof landscape of Rome. To illustrate his way of looking at the world I give a part of the particular chapter: 

“The true form of the city is in this rise and fall of roofs, old tiles and new, curved and flat, slender or squat chimneys, arbors of reed matting and sheds of corrugated iron, railings, balustrades, little columns supporting pots, metal watertanks, dormers, glass skylights, and rising above all else the rigging of TV aerials, straight or crooked, enamelled or rusting, in models of successive generations, variously ramified and horned and shielded, but all of them thin as skeletons and  disturbing as totems. (…) pipescaffoldings of constructions in progress or left half-finished; large windows with curtains and little WC windows; ochre wall and burn sienna walls, walls with the colour of mold from whose crevice clump of weeds spill their pendulous foliage (…) great mansions which have decayed into hovels, hovels restructured into smart bachelor apartments; domes that make round outlines against the sky in every direction and at every distance as if to confirm the female, Junoesque essence of the city (…)” 

In his attempt to grasp the of only the roof landscape he uses an enumeration that is four times longer than I have give. But even this impressive, very detailed description fails when he tries to find the essences of what he sees. On the end of the chapter he writes: 

“(…) the panorama of the surface is already so vast and rich and various that it more than suffices to saturate the mind with information and meanings. (…) It is only after you have come to know the surface of the things, (…) that you venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface is inexhaustible.” 

This is exactly the feeling that I had, standing on the helicopter platform, overlooking a sea of light. Driving in the dazzling traffic, a polluting motion that never stops. Walking in the endless labyrinth of the favela’s, stone, stone, stone, mud, corrugated iron.

Under this inexhaustible surface we find the entanglement of human life. The everyday practiser in its very diversity: Alphaville – Louis Vuitton, Cortiços – childeren in underware, and everything that is in between.

 

And I am the sightseer, with eyes that look, but do not see.

 

 

“I was blind but now I see.”

I want to ‘walk’ through Sao Paulo with three different eyes: the architectonic eye, the artistic eye, and the photographical eye.

This means:

‘The architectonic eye’ is the eye that I open to see the city as a student architecture, an eye that is aware of the build environment, shapes, materials, technology and public space.

‘The artistic eye’ looks for urban phenomena that are difficult to map by the usual instruments of the architects and urban planners by naming and describing. It goes beyond drawing and statistics, techniques that are marked by abstraction.

‘The photographical eye’ is freezing and framing the rapid and complex life in the city. It tells a story by a collage of flashes and fragments.