BijaRi’s working space is located in Vila Madalena. They occupy a small house of two floors entirely, with nine people being the BijaRi collective’s core team. Another half dozen people contribute to their more commercial practice, which apart from art is their second work area. The space looks like a true computer lab. I meet Eduardo Fernandes and Rodrigo Araujo, whom I had seen in Santiago de Chile one year ago during a presentation at the Centro Cultural de España. We descend to the lower floor of the house, passing a car trees grow out from. It is the work “Carro Verde” (2008), which formed part of “Natureza Urbana”, a project connected to the idea of a green city, daring to think differently, and questioning the familiar.
Downstairs, Rodrigo and Eduardo show me a selection of their videos on a computer. We start with “Antipop Galinha”, the documentation of an action which the artist collective made in 2002. They released a hen in two very dissimilar places in São Paulo: One at Largo da Batata, a historical and popular traditional place where people from the less wealthy North-Eastern parts of Brazil come to live, and which is also a place of transition where the poorer bus commuters change for the subway to go to work in the city centre. The people interact with the hen, find it funny and entertaining. In the second sequence of the video, a hen is released in front of the Iguatemi Shopping Centre, a symbol for the rich and upper class of São Paulo. It doesn’t take long until security arrives to pick up the bird – as if it was a danger to the public. In a humourous way, BijaRi point at and analyse one of São Paulo’s most striking problems: the clash between rich and poor and the social division of people that also manifests itself in the physical structures of the city.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpMd60G0YtU&feature=player_embedded
In a later project evolving around the area of Largo da Batata, “Estão Vendendo Nosso Espaço Aéreo” (The Selling Of Our Air Space) , BijaRi broach the issue of gentrification, occuring in this area as it was subject to real estate speculations and “refurbishment”. The collective distributed posters, explaining the process to the people living in the area. The city of São Paulo is often quite unconcerned about the protection of its cultural heritage and also about conserving its folklore traditions. These can for example be found in the lively area around Largo da Batata with its merchants, markets, street vendors, foró bars with traditional music, hair dressing saloons, and general liveliness. Instead, city planners and real state speculators seek to “improve” the area by introducing anonymous and sterile commercial projects as signs of progress and change for the better.
The project “Cartazes Gentrificação” also deals with gentrification and aims at introducing and explaining the term to people affected by its occurence by placing posters in the affected parts of the city and talking to people directly. “Gentrification” nevertheless is to be understood in quite a different manner than in Europe, where the becoming expensive and “bourgeois” of certain Berlin neighbourhoods upsets the local bohemia. In São Paulo, the “Operaçao Limpa” (Operation Clean) took gentrification – socio-political change of an area by the settlement of wealthier people and driving off the poor – the other way round: police stormed a so-called vertical favela in the building Prestes Maia in the city centre, where 468 people lived who could not afford staying in one of the city`s high priced apartment blocks. They forced people to leave the building without providing any substitute housing. Media coverage only consisted in rambling about the “annoyance” of traffic jams the operation caused. BijaRi thus produced the polemic video “468” (2006) of the events and announce, rather than denounce by calling attention to the topic.
BijaRi aim at integrating their art practice with everyday life and triggering socio-political change: an interesting art practice that came to exist in a very different field compared with the European art context. The collective finds significant and powerful ways of producing political art that is informatory, polemic, funny, and penetrative at the same time.
Paula Nishijima
Biography
Júlia Frate Bolliger
Harum Marcio
Felicitas Rohden
Vinicius Spricigo
Beto Shwafaty
Stefanie Hessler
