Through devices installed along the railway, and working with the four states of matter, Ricardo Ribenboim articulates an urban sentence. A statement that narrates the destination of these places. An operation that combines factory contraptions and symbolic language in the scale of the city. A history told with the aid of the basic prime-matter of the industrial process: water. Vapor, traditionally used to impel the industrial machinery. Water in all the phases of its transformation process. At Luz, a structure of ice plates, among which people may walk, experiencing sensations of cold and heat. A displacement situation that is typical of train stations. The mutation of solid state into liquid serving as a metaphor for departures and arrivals. At the Mill, an extraordinary urban wound, it happens a purge of the material. The foundations of destroyed barns, forming a kind of shell, are filled with a bubbling material, in constant ebullition. The passage of the liquid to the pasty state gives sequence to the narrative. These structures serve as melting pot for purging all that was deprecated and soiled there.

Finally, at Matarazzo, a water curtain, raised at the train's arrival, in the constructions' perspective, looks like an erasing device. Water washes impurities, taking all things along. Matter starts to undo. That is the result we come to at the last device created by Ricardo Ribenboim: an vapor installation at one of the factory's chimneys. The vapor accumulated inside the chimney is liberated at regular intervals, rhyming with the punctuation of the trains' passage. Smoke is the last apprenticeship of disappearance: the statement is completed.

The cycle of decadence and revitalizing is closed: the rhythm of vapor leaving the chimney indicates that the space is pulsating again. Time is reintroduced in this suspended place. The processes of matter _ melting, ebullition, liquefaction and evaporation _ reveal the occult movement in this apparently inert world.

Fecha-se o ciclo de decadência e revitalização: o ritmo do vapor saindo pela chaminé indica que o espaço voltou a pulsar. Tempo é reintroduzido naquele lugar em suspensão. Os processos da matéria _ o derretimento, a fervura, a liquefação e a evaporação _ revelam o movimento oculto naquele mundo aparentemente inerte.