Marcelo Cidade

Marcelo Cidade (São Paulo, 1979) is an artist whose work is rooted in the urban experience and the tensions between the public and the private. His view of the city is not limited to mere observation, but also extends to an active engagement with it, incorporating and questioning its elements in his work. Marcelo examines public and private architectural structures, especially those that might otherwise go unnoticed, even though they have an impact on how we live in the urban environment. In our conversation, the artist shares his creative process, the influence of São Paulo on his art, and reflections on hostile architecture and exclusionary mechanisms in the urban landscape. Check it out:

Marcelo, thank you very much for having me in your studio. I’d like to ask you to introduce yourself, giving any information you’d like, thinking of an audience that doesn’t know your artistic practice.

I’m Marcelo Cidade. Born and raised in São Paulo, Cidade is my real surname, not an artistic one [laughs]. I graduated in visual arts from FAAP in 2002.

Your work is greatly influenced by architecture and public spaces, especially the urban environments of São Paulo, as well as the contrast between the public and private spheres, which are recurring themes. How do you see the issue of public space in São Paulo in parallel with the situation in other cities around the world?

My work comes from experiencing the structural contradictions of a city in the Global South like São Paulo, with all its social problems and daily urban violence, and translating these issues through art. I’m interested in everyday life, in small gestures, actions, which at first may seem banal but, when repeated, become social standards, reinventing reality, breaking with normality. A large part of these issues interests me because I experience them on a daily basis, and I see this shrinking of public space through its privatization and the loss of common social space and social well-being. The city today is only “public” for those who have the money to consume this so-called “public” space. It’s a space increasingly related to speculation and the spectacle of consumption.

São Paulo is a city with a 1960s structure, which is growing horizontally in an extensive way, and the capital is developing according to certain issues. This is very much related to the difficulty of having a city hall with capital that is entering into public space. There’s always a brand behind it or a private entrepreneur, and mistakes happen because, in my view, there’s no other way out. The social problems of hunger and low-income housing are so absurd, they’re urgent! 

Public space is increasingly in the hands of entrepreneurs and private capital. We see this in Ibirapuera, Anhangabaú, and now Pacaembu. This creates these grey zones, where people who were brought up in condominiums, who use private healthcare, who have private cars, whose children go to public schools, develop an agoraphobia of public space. They are conditioned to it and avoid public space for fear of muggings, dirt, homeless people, and everything that is seen as bad in society. When these people go to France, they say that they travelled on the Paris metro, that they visited museums. Here, people don’t go to museums, they don’t use the metro – for reasons of class and elitism, from my point of view. My work comes from this provocation because I was brought up in a condominium, I went to a private school – I wanted to go to public school, but my mum wasn’t keen on the idea. My way of escaping from this social lobotomy was to take my skateboard and leave the house. I’d go and skateboard in Anhangabaú or Ibirapuera Park. I made friends with people from different parts of the city, from different social classes, and realized that there is life beyond the wall of the condominium. I understood that people in São Paulo tend to lead very private lives, and public life is becoming less and less public. For example, during the pandemic, nobody used public spaces anymore because of the isolation. People who still lived in their studio apartments lost their jobs and ended up on the streets because of the economic crisis caused by Covid. The public space was transformed into a giant housing estate in the center of São Paulo. Now, with a more left-wing, more welfare-oriented government, together with popular housing institutions such as the MSTC that organize occupation, the situation has improved, but we can still see the privatization of these spaces.

Making public space re-inhabitable is actually a cheaper solution than equipping every new building with a swimming pool, party room, and barbecue area. However, I see a growth in gated communities, which become almost cities in themselves, minimizing the need for interaction with the outside world. Even popular buildings from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s still depended on neighboring public spaces, such as squares, public swimming pools and gyms. Today, everything is concentrated within the condominiums themselves.

There are some condominiums with more than 20 buildings that have everything you need inside. There’s no need to go outside. They are micro-cities within cities, and you become more and more isolated from the outside world. When you have to leave the condominium, you leave in a rage.

I lived in the center of São Paulo for a long time because of my work, even though I grew up further away. At that time, all the gay and alternative spaces were concentrated in the center, in Augusta. Nowadays, it’s totally changed, but it was a space where you had contact with other people, because you needed to be there. There was no app yet. It wasn’t that easy. At that time, there was also a lot more prejudice than there is today, in other spaces that we are now able to live in more openly. Today, I wouldn’t be surprised to see groups of friends getting together in condominiums instead of in bars.

My parents live in Taboão da Serra. I spent my entire adolescence on a bus in Francisco Morato. What I feel a bit is that there was also, as you mentioned, this need to go to the center. Nowadays, there’s a decentralization of the city of São Paulo. Post-Covid, we understand that the center is no longer the same. Take Augusta, for example. The center has become much more difficult to go out in at night. During the pandemic, after eight o’clock at night, you couldn’t cross Praça da República without being mugged. Things became much more hardcore. There were small robberies and groups of people arriving to clean up and disappear. The police disappeared too. There was no more policing in the center. Now life is returning, but through revitalization projects by the big groups that are buying up old buildings and renovating them for the upper class, with all the tax concessions that enable these projects to take place. There’s a rumor going around that, in reality, this deterioration of the center of São Paulo is, firstly, to deliberately drive people away – it’s become too dangerous and not viable to live in the center – and, secondly, as speculation, to sell to a group. They say it will boom in a few years, but in the private sphere, like in Anhangabaú. The Anhangabaú, nowadays, they’ve done a big refurbishment, put in burnt cement, some fascist light fittings. I grew up skateboarding in Anhangabaú, so I had a very strong emotional relationship with that place. I went there to skate, I made friends, I had a relationship with the area. Suddenly, they threw it all away, cemented it over and filled it in. Now it’s full of railings. When electronic music events take place, they close everything off and you can’t get through; you have to go round and round. And it’s become a backyard for rich people who pay R$700 to see a show at Anhangabaú, when it used to be free. These public-private concessions are always much more private than public.

Yes, there’s a certain perversity to this notion of public space, almost as if it had a life of its own, which it doesn’t. I was reminded of St Andrews, a university town in the north of Scotland, where members of the royal family studied, and which is considered one of the best universities in the world. There was a railway station there, which closed in 1969, and a new one is currently being built. Although it is not open public policy, it is questionable whether this was done to limit access.

I first began to understand this relationship of hostile architecture, not here in São Paulo, but in Holland. I think Amsterdam and Rotterdam are cities that used to have such open architecture, but recently, with privatization and more right-wing governments, they’ve started to privatize these public spaces. There’s an architect I really like, Aldo Van Eyck, who in the post-war period was already working with the Amsterdam city council. He started using the vacant lots between buildings to build playgrounds. They weren’t playgrounds for children, but for adults, so that people who had been traumatized by war could live together again. He designed these living spaces. I became very interested in him and studied him a lot.

I’m not sure if this is common in São Paulo, but there are some public spaces with areas where you could sit or lie down. Now they’ve put small stones in these spaces. You can even sit down, but only for a short time before you leave. This also prevents anyone from sleeping there.

Yes, they exist in various places in São Paulo, usually under viaducts. Here, in the center, there’s a very particular situation. I usually arrive at the studio and there are people sleeping or using crack near the steel door. I’ve learnt to deal with this situation, but some people throw water on them to get them to leave. Some people cruelly throw soap powder around, between spikes, bars, in front of the gate and everything else, so that they don’t lie down there, because it’s unhealthy to breathe soap powder. Another situation I noticed was the absence of everything made of iron and steel in the city. The economic situation and poverty were so great that homeless people started stealing everything from sculptures, bus stop handrails, iron benches, and manhole covers. They would pass by at night, rip up and take away even hostile architecture. It became a sub-economy within the economy.

It’s an act of unthinking rebellion.

Completely unthought of. When I arrived here for the first time (in my studio) something very curious happened: the lock on the steel door, which is a brass shackle, disappeared. When I saw it had gone, I panicked, but everything was in place, nobody had got in, the computers were intact. I went to the shop where I bought the lock, told the salesman the story, and he told me that a person sits down, takes a hammer, hits the lock and opens it. I said: “How can something you’re selling me, which is meant to hold, open so easily?” He explained that, instead of opening the lock to break and enter, the person just steals it and takes the lock to exchange for drugs in the scrapyards themselves, in a parallel economy. They no longer exchange scrap metal for money, but directly for crack. So here in the center, it’s become a kind of gold rush. At the same time that Bolsonaro was encouraging people to go to the Amazon to mine for gold, here in the center they were mining for iron. You had this super dubious relationship, in which everything iron disappeared. A couple of weeks ago, I was working here, and I heard a banging noise. I opened the door, and it was a guy trying to break in. I said: “Oh, my friend, you’re crazy!”

This relationship is important to me, being here in the center, dealing with these people… I tried to understand this problem existing for a more human reason. Returning to the point of my work, I realized that I was becoming a bit of a function of outsourcing production and that was bothering me. I would sit in the studio with my assistant, design a project, have it made, and it would be ready. I was missing out on this whole process and the human part of getting my hands dirty, which is something I like so much, and I was losing that. I was becoming as cold as all human relationships. I was locked away, not seeing friends, not seeing people, not having contact with anyone, in a crazy depression, outsourcing work as if I was a company. It was bothering me, so I said, “I like painting, I like spraying, let’s reinvent this.” I believe that humanism comes from this practice of the hand of the artist, from the act of making… But also rethinking a painting that was conceptual, where I don’t put my hand in, because I use a spray can. I have a practice that is much more related to industrial gate painting. In fact, for me, it’s more like an engraving than a painting. I redraw the gate on the computer, sharpen it, design it and trace it with a matt pen. Then I come in with a spirit level, taking and giving the exact measurements, mask everything with masking tape and come in with spray paint. I try to use a bad spray paint, not a professional graffiti spray paint, because they’re plastic, they’re flat, it looks like you’ve stuck something on. I was a bit interested in the dirt. I was interested in seeing the translucency of the paint, sometimes the color underneath comes back, because the paint doesn’t cover as much – it is an industrial paint for painting cars.

Marcelo, could you tell us a bit more about the exhibition you’re currently working on? How do you plan to present the works in the space?

The exhibition will be called “Pânico na zona sul.” In principle, it’s a title in honor of the song by Racionais MCs, but I’m also interested in bringing up this notion of what this south is. Mano Brown talks about the south of Capão Redondo. I come from the west, from Taboão, but in Rio de Janeiro we have this geographical difference between the south of São Paulo and the south of Rio. In Rio de Janeiro, the south zone is the richest area. So Panic in the South Zone is about bringing panic from São Paulo and throwing it into the south zone of Rio. The space is a white cube gallery, and my idea, at first, was to cancel out the white cube by filling the gallery with donated blankets, but I’ve been rethinking the exhibition project, and I think that, as the paintings are large-scale, there could be redundancy… The works I’m going to show are five white spray paint paintings on donated blankets, those used by homeless people during the winter here in São Paulo. The paintings are based on a typology of car garage doors from houses and buildings in the city that I’ve been researching for some time. This series is called “Sociedad Anonima.” I also have works that are paintings in which I reproduce, using white spray paint, concretist paintings by artists such as Alfredo Volpi, Ivan Cerpa, and Judith Lauan, also on blankets, which are called “Projeto (re) construtivo.” I want to explore not only the constructivist side, but also the copying of, through appropriation, a kind of false constructivism. I have also a project on the façade of the gallery, called “hyper memoria arquitetônica” (Athena gallery), which works as site specific. I’m going to build on the façade the shape of the old house that stood on the site before it became a gallery; a restitution of architectural memory using metal sheets, the kind we see on building sites here in São Paulo.

One of the reasons I ask how it’s going to be exhibited is that when you put the works in a white cube space, and someone suggests, “oh, cool, but let’s put a frame, shall we?” then, by putting a frame, a piece of glass, we fall back into the trap of protection, of separation, of making another shield.

Exactly. My idea is to fix it to the nail and hang it on the wall. I’m interested in the relationship between the (rigid) paint and the material of the blanket, which is more organic, so I’m not interested in using a chassis (in this case). But I still have some doubts, because the fabric can wear out. I’m interested in the relationship between the rigidity of the paint and the malleability of the material and its deformation. It doesn’t have a rigid shape, it’s all a bit soft, and I’m developing and moving in that direction.

With this movement in mind, were the works in the exhibition “The Rhetoric of Power,” inspired by Frank Stella’s black paintings, made with shoe holders?

Yes… But… Those weren’t paintings, they were objects, it was a black-colored channeled sheet. That stuff is used in markets, in 99 cent shops, they put metal through it and fill it with products. It’s like a channel where you can hang things.

And also thinking about the formal aspect of this architecture, especially in the United States, it’s interesting to see in contrast to your work Expansion by Subtraction, where you have the moldings with the broken glass. This strategy of breaking the glass, placing it in the walls, in the still wet cement, creates something that is almost the opposite of this separation strategy, because it’s much more organic.

This work comes from another one, in which I drew a window, dividing the white cube between inside and outside, but whose inside and outside are the same, and the only thing that divides it is this shard of glass. In this work, the shard of glass is very aggressive because it’s aimed at us. When I showed it at the gallery, it was one on each side, so you’d enter into the space, and you’d be in the center. Anyone who came too close would be ripped. It created a really imposing situation, but at the same time there was a very direct relationship with the history of art, even more so with painting, with the idea of the frame that divides the inside and outside of the painting. The Renaissance painting will always try to reproduce the idea of perspective, or bringing the landscape inside – for example, the idea of bringing the landscape of France inside a castle – and it’s these relationships between inside and outside that interest me. This work comes from this situation of having the shards of glass on the wall, but I did it first at the São Paulo Biennial, which I took part in with Lisette Lagnado, in 2006. I put the shards of glass on top of the wall where Gordon Matta Clark’s works were and this work functioned almost as a glass crown for Matta Clark, though it was still hidden. It was like a fake wall with a small piece of glass on top and the works underneath, almost like an ornament. The light hit it, it looked nice, it stayed away. It was aggressive, but it didn’t protect anything, it was just there. And in this second moment, it was much more aggressive, because it had a direct relationship with the body. They were two opposite situations.

In your research, how do you see these different levels of architecture being used for this separation? We talked about the shard of glass, which is the lower class, the middle class with the gates. There’s also the social issue, where the government puts up these barriers.

The upper classes live very far away. At the top of a building in Alphaville, there are always these distances. Distance is a very interesting issue when it comes to understanding how modern architecture may, or may not, work. When I went to Brasilia for the first time, I began to understand how modernism works and how the distances between the poor and the rich are an issue. In the superblocks, you see nature entering the buildings without bars, everything is volatile. When you move from one place to another, it’s functional, because the working class wasn’t envisaged there. Niemeyer knew very well where the working class would be, so much so that the boundaries in Brasilia are very visible. When you come out from the metro, you see Brasília end and the satellite city begin and, when you get to the satellite town, you see a city like any other, subdivided, with all its problems and characteristics.

Distance is an interesting and very subtle element. There are houses in the Jardins with open entrances and large gardens. Of course, there are cameras. So it’s obvious to a person who wants to break in, that there’s this barrier where you feel almost as if you’re in an open field, where someone could shoot you at any time.

São Paulo is a very crazy city when it comes to this. We saw in the 1950s, with the private developments of the gardens or City Lapa, that these cities were already envisaged as these Los Angeles-style neighborhoods with lots of houses, and tree-lined, with streets that aren’t too big, but with remote places where the outskirts don’t fit in very well. You take a car and go to City Lapa, or Alto de Pinheiros, and the streets are so curvy, so big, that you get lost in them, and you need a car to get there. I’m saying this because I went to see a project by Carla Juaçaba in a modernist house in Alto de Pinheiros. It was a super beautiful modernist house, and the boundary wall of the house was small. It was amazing. Next to it was a huge wall, full of barbed wire and cameras and I was talking to an architect, the niece of the owner of the house, who said that they had never been broken into, precisely because it’s all open. It reminds me a bit of Holland too, this relationship between architecture and how, the more visible and open you make your life, the less you owe society. In this dynamic, nobody will rob you, because they know there’s nothing in there. Now, the more you protect your castle by adding more security elements, signs and so on, the more interest people have in breaking in, even if you have nothing. For me, this relationship is very intriguing. I go out in flip-flops, talk to homeless people, offer them water. The person comes in here, takes some water, uses the toilet. I’m not afraid of being mugged, because the person knows I’m not here sporting a Rolex. I believe that this relationship between violence and the invasion of private space has a lot to do with how you behave in society. If you drive around in an imported car with a Rolex in a low-income neighborhood, you’re stimulating social anger and accentuating differences. And that difference is often what generates violence.

This ends up creating a kind of double antagonism, this disagreement in society.

And this is a question of bringing the human back. In fact, my great human project for São Paulo is to try to remove railings everywhere. The other day, I was looking at some photos of Higienópolis from the 1950s and 1960s – photos of modernist buildings, none of which had railings. It was all empty, the garden went down to the pavement and people could sit there. Nowadays, it’s all railings. This is the result of social fear. The city is really exhausting, people live in fear and there is a lack of human exchange because there is less and less public space.

It reminds me of when the Cidade Jardim Shopping Centre opened, and you couldn’t get there without a car. Thinking now about the new architectural projects in São Paulo, even those who have an interest in the public fall into these traps.

 Armed violence affects me the least, but I live with all the other types of violence generated by social inequality. For example, in winter, I have to jump over bodies to get here. Literally. When I don’t come by bike, I come on foot, under the Minhocão. Cleaning up human feces outside my studio has become common practice. At first, I was very scared. Nowadays, I can handle it, and I feel really good. What’s the guy going to do? There are no public toilets. The guy has to defecate. I’d love to come here and do a beautiful oil painting, a landscape… But no, my life is about dealing with these contrasts and translating them into the reality of the white cube gallery, of collectors, of people who consume art, and showing that this also exists, that we live it. My job is to live this situation. To coexist.

Interview made on 11 March 2024 at the artist’s studio in the Barra Funda district of São Paulo.

---