The SESC east tower - and the industrial set where is located - is so large that it seems to embrace the whole region. All the elements of this enormous terrain vague, with no historical meaning or architectural identity, are concentrated in this agglomeration of sheds and empty buildings. Megalopolis confronts us with the immensely great, for which we have no measure.

A crisis resultant of metropolitan and global integration: there are no more parameters to represent the new space and time scales established by communication and transportation development.

What it is in question here are the limits of figuration, the human mind incapacity to represent the enormous forces of the metropolis. A way of representing a spatial organization, a network of power and control, that is of difficult understanding for our imagination. We still don’t have the perceptive equipment necessary to face these new spatial dimensions.

These disconcerting spaces turn impossible the use of the old volume language, since they cannot be apprehended. This spatial mutation exceeds the human body capacity to organize perceptively the surrounding space and to map cognitively its position in the exterior world. A disjunction between body and urban environment that evidences our incapacity to understand the complex reorganization processes of contemporary metropolis, the enormous global network of de-centered production and communication in which we are imprisoned as individuals.

It appears a problem of non-measurability between construction and project, the built and environment, the different spaces of the city. It becomes impossible to represent. The space today is overloaded by more abstract dimensions. There is a representation problem: although affected in the daily life by the corporate spaces, we don’t have how to mentally shape them. A radical rupture between the daily experience and these abstract spaces models occurs.

Confronted with something that they cannot apprehend, our faculties of knowledge enter in crisis. What escapes them provokes the feeling of having reached the insuperable limit. Perception is suspended, in commotion, by this shock. In this break, the thought interrupts the adequacy to that it believes to know, allowing the judgment to assimilate what exceeds its capacity to apprehend and recognize as sensible phenomenon. The incapacity to represent this non-measurable phenomenon turns it into the index of a non-presentable object. Incapable to figure the absolute, we experience _ through this sensation that refuses all form _ its presence. Only art, says Lyotard, in a world dominated by control and technique urgency, is capable to excite the non-presentable, what does not have measure nor form.

The intervention of Nelson Félix is an approach on the impossibility to apprehend the non-measurable large. A situation where the proper size of the building, independently of its eventual uses and programs, constitutes the question.

The contemporary sculptoric production is still made, essentially, under the principles of experience and vision. It supposes a relation of the observer with the work that mobilizes him to apprehend a larger field, conformed by the articulation of the sculpture with the environment. A perception mode that abandons the fixed point of view, to be made in movement, as we walk through the situation. But it is also a phenomenological device, based in the experience of the situation and in the ocular perception.

The operation contained in the Nelson Felix proposal opposes completely to this device. Here, as in the artist intervention in the building of the Central Mill, during last Arte/Cidade project, the presupposition of an inserted sculptoric form in the construction or the landscape does not exist, a situation that is apprehended from the observer presence in this extended field. The intervention scale implies other spatialization and perception standards.

The proposal: in the tower 1° floor, to insert two iron profiles - of about 8 meters long and 40 centimeters height, each - through the sustentation pillars, at short distane from the soil. Divided, the pillars will support themselves only on the new elements. Two wedges, forming a straight angle that cut the pillar. Under pressure, the plates extend in the direction of the neighboring pillars, without reaching them, accenting the critical balance of the situation. A careful study on the structure weight distribution and on the function of each pillar was carried through to determine the most appropriate place for the incision.

The whole building structuring is the question of the operation. The intervention in a precise point, in one of the many pillars, actually works with all the building sustentation system. The structure is entirely mobilized: is a “sculpture of 600 tons". There is a weight redistribution: all the forces that support the building are redirected. The construction already exists, in the old industrial patterns, but the intervention introduces, in this rigid and compartmentalized structure, the main predicate of the large dimension: the unexpected. The possibility to provoke other events within this great container. The attack to the pillars, base of the fixed structure, suggests a flexible and dynamic architecture. A liquid architecture.

An operation that takes the observer to reflect not on what he has immediately under his eyes, but on a bigger and more complex pattern, the whole building, the entire area. It produces a non-visual space. Similar to other projects of the artist, that work with wide time scales. An action that deals with immense forces and tensions, with uncommon volumes and weights, in a scale that escapes to the experience and perception. A so extensive space and time dimensions that they are not apprehended by individual experience, when the conventional sculpture is based on instigating an experience of the situations.

Here, the space reconfiguration and the peripatetic vision - still belonging to the sculptoric procedures, based on the experience and the optic perception - are not enough. What is in play here doesn’t appear to experience, is not given to vision. It occurs in a space and time dimension that exceeds the immediate local situation. It requires the apprehension of a space pattern that cannot be reached by direct inquiry.

In situ, what we see is apparently a local intervention. But is because it happens on something whose form and dimensions we cannot apprehend, whose immense presence can only suggest. It is this combination - between precise and circumscribed action and space amplitude - that confers signification to Nelson Félix project. Paradox of a procedure that does not adjust itself anymore to the sculptoric notions of space and time, but operates with the global metropolises scales.