Construction work.
This word has always populated my imagination, my father talking about his coming and going to the construction work (works) while preparing the snack for me and my brother before leaving us at school early in the morning.
This word “materiality” taught me to see the city of São Paulo and all the others that I have ever stepped on; we know that each profession has its vocabulary and I learned from an early age that of the CONSTRUCTION WORK – this applied teaching was perhaps my father attempting to enchant me and make me become an engineer or an architect; it did not work, I became an anthropologist.
Ironically, 20 years later I am part of the curatorship of the 13th International Architecture Biennale of São Paulo.
The world goes around, yes, nothing is luck, everything is devotion and work.
CONSTRUCTION WORK
Excavators, jackhammers, BobCats, electric saws, grout, cement, dust, lots of dust and noise.
More and more men, helmets with labeled with functions, names, and nicknames, water and land in many states.
These men leaving the construction site, the smell of lavender, the smell of roses, hair combed back, the light shining on their bodies at the end of the day, a wind coming in and shaking their shirt, something to refresh, after so much dust.
Between construction works, there was one that lasted for years and years and transformed my father in a way that I had never seen or caused something that I didn’t know to emerge. It took me a while to understand that this place would become Sesc May 24th.
The one of the crossroads downtown, right in that sacred territory full of stories of black movements, dances, exchanges, affections, and insurgencies. I once heard of a woman I admire that we always return to the spaces that were populated by our ancestors, my father, my great love, a black engineer stepping on, collectively producing that work.
I called that place construction work for so long that to up to day I get confused in calling it Sesc; there is in that place a vocation for encounter.
Is there a more collective enterprise than a construction?