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The region circumscribed by the patio of Pari and the cereal
wholesale zone, configured still during the city railroad restructuring, presents
exemplarily all the typical elements of metropolises in transition, where the
acceleration of urban mutations coexists with the residual material inertia.
In the same situations, the financial capital invisible forces and the governmental
urban policies coexist with old devices of ground occupation and transportation,
reduced to a state of complete anomie. Processes of incommensurable amplitude
and reach, impossible to be deduced from that we can immediately apprehend there.
The operation conceived by Jose Resende for the patio is concentrated, basically,
in its great dimensions. The flat terrain, without visual references in the proximities,
and the presence of innumerable deactivated wagons, blinding the vision, makes
the apprehension of the place pattern difficult. Impossible to draw the contours
of this vast and indistinct extension, to insert this immense emptiness in the
city cartography, to perceive its latent role in the global scale space restructuring
of São Paulo.
Resende does not take the wagons properly as objects, sculptural forms, but as
elements to configure a much larger space: the railroad patio and its outskirts.
When disposing the wagons in the area, he is establishing a peculiar organization
for the space: a conformation that cannot immediately be seen. Perception must
be, in principle, necessarily peripatetic. An itinerary around the configuration
traced by the compositions.
But this intervention is not obligatorily reduced to the installation of a
big sculpture, whose extension and opacity would demand a vision in movement.
When covering this itinerary, the observer discovers more than the wagons disposal.
The passage _ in a device that remember Spiral Jetty, of Robert Smithson _ also
discloses the entropic landscape around. The weed, constructions in ruins, rubbish
and abandoned railroad components. The iron gates and walls that separate the
patio from the adjacent areas and the remaining portion of the region. Finally,
the architectural landmarks that appears at distance.
The project of Resende consists in raising some of the wagons located in the
area, with steel cables and heavy blocks, in order to lean them over the others.
Powerful cranes and specialized workers, from the railroad company (CPTM), will
make possible the difficult operation.
These deactivated wagons, condemned to waste, are remaining portions of the
area old dynamics, overwhelmed by the immersion in the entropic disarticulation.
An interstitial space produced by the inform proliferation and perceptive indiferentiation.
The tensioning device created to suspend the compositions introduces new relations
of force, new vectors, in this space dominated by horizontality and inertia.
The wagons suspension also works to allow an apprehension of the large scales
involved. The raising of these extremely weighed volumes, unbelievably supported,
introduces a strong element of verticality, capable of opposing to the area overwhelming
horizontality and sending to the city powerful skyline, at far. The immense masses
involve weight ratios and structuring procedures to which we usually don’t
have parameters. They make us perceive the enormous complexity and extension of
urban interventions that may, from that area, completely modify the space configuration
of the metropolis.
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