I remember having discovered the work of Louise Ganz in 2009, in a speech by Breno Silva at the Centro Cultural São Paulo presenting the intervention “Lotes Vagos”. This is an urban intervention work conceived by Louise and produced by the two in Belo Horizonte and Fortaleza, in 2005 and 2008, as a series of experimental occupations in which the artists identify the presence of vacant lots in suburban areas of the city and plead the approval of temporary use of these lots as spaces for rest and leisure, equipping them with hammocks, folding chairs and other seating arrangements, or as areas for planting and coexistence with the residual nature of the city.
A little earlier, in 2006, I had presented a conference on Gordon Matta-Clark in the cycle of preparatory seminars for the 27th São Paulo Biennial (“How to live together”), curated by Lisette Lagnado. During my research, I was very interested in “Reality Properties: Fake Estates” (1973), a work in which the artist identifies and buys (for very low prices, at auction) a series of strange pieces of land in outlying areas of New York – especially in the Queens –, naming them as dead lots. While his best-known cuts in buildings create sculptures on an architectural scale, “Fake Estates” makes a powerful critique of the violence perpetrated by real estate speculation on the outskirts of New York, revealing the irrationality behind the ordered Cartesian grid that draws the city.
So, in 2009, when I was introduced to the work “Lotes Vagos”, I immediately had great interest. It is important to remember that at that time there were still no Arab Springs or Occupy Wall Street. The wave of insurrections in public spaces was in silent and underground gestation, and in Brazil the predominance of the automobile, walls, guardhouses and electric fences, and sociability inside shopping centers seemed not yet to be the object of any challenge. In São Paulo there was no talk of Parque Augusta, nor of Parque Minhocão or Parque do Rio Bexiga. In Belo Horizonte there was still no Praia da Estação movement, and the various practices of occupying public spaces in the country were still quite embryonic.
In the same year of 2009, I had a great impact when visiting the exhibition “Post-it city: occasional cities”, also at CCSP, which featured an installation by Louise Ganz. I now think, in fact, that Breno Silva's talk must have been given within the scope of the meetings promoted by that exhibition. Created in Barcelona in 2005, the “Post-it city” project makes an impressive inventory of ephemeral structures and actions in countless cities around the world. “Post-it” equipment, linked much more to informality than to formal practices and institutions, and which once removed can reappear in other places and contexts. Something that had already interested me since reading, a few years earlier, the book “Mutations” (2000, Actar), organized by the research group Project on the City (Harvard University), coordinated by Rem Koolhaas.
With this set of interests, reinforced by knowledge of Ganz's pioneering work, I read the text “Terrain vague” (1995), by Ignasi de Solà-Morales. Although he was already familiar with the situationist movement, the anthology of texts organized by Paola Berenstein Jacques, and the book “Walkscapes” by Francesco Careri, he had not yet fully realized the idea of the latent power that exists in the wastelands of big cities. And, studying the car “Lata-fogo” (1966) by Hélio Oiticica, I better understood this idea, and its opposition to the praise – more formal and pacified – of public space as we learned in architecture and urbanism courses and practices. I also understood the relevance and forcefulness of these ideas in the context of cities in underdeveloped countries (today referred to as belonging to the Global South, and outside the so-called “West”).
All of this became central to me when, in the explosive year of 2013, I curated – with Ana Luiza Nobre and Lígia Nobre – the 10th São Paulo Architecture Biennial. With the theme “City: ways of doing, ways of using”, we organized the exhibition as a network event, hosted in places connected by the subway, and including a series of ephemeral actions in different places in the city. Activist, that biennial shed light on the various ways of using the city, and not just designing it. There, within the scope of the Open Call for works that we selected from previous registrations, we included documentation from the project “Environmental bicycles – backyard economies” (2013), carried out by Louise Ganz and Ines Linke in Belo Horizonte that same year. Action in which the two artists, using bicycles equipped with bamboo poles, move through predominantly informal neighborhoods in the capital of Minas Gerais collecting and transporting things (especially food). Focusing on the city's microeconomies, they celebrate the meeting by carrying out actions in public spaces, in which transformed bicycles become tables and kiosks capable of bringing people together.
Ten years later, now, in 2023, we finally got to know each other in person, in the context of the exhibition “Lugar Imaginado, Lugar Vivido: 80 anos da Casa do Baile” (Imagined Place, Lived Place: 80 years of Casa do Baile), which I curated with Marina Frúgoli at Casa do Baile da Pampulha (Reference Center of Architecture, Urbanism and Design). Exhibition that celebrates the house's 80th anniversary and, at the same time, defines a scope of action for the Reference Center. In this context, we invited Louise Ganz, who presented the Outdoor Painting group, coordinated by her, to then carry out the work “Plains Vasts, other Fields of Stone”. This is a research group from the city that makes paintings on their walks, having as their object both pictorial practice and involvement with places and people in situations of environmental racism, and their various forms of resistance to it. In the case of the exhibition we organized, it seemed important to us to have contemporary works that could bring to the exhibition space elements present in the Pampulha neighborhood and its surroundings, but seen from angles not glamorized by modern architectural heritage, but rather more attentive and close to the precariousness and to the informality also present there – and, at the same time, to the support and collective networks that underlie these places, providing other understandings of what public space is.
On their walks, the group finds and portrays a series of places in the process of degradation, promoted both by the action of clumsy infrastructure works and by the predatory practice of the real estate market. In effect, it also records the way in which this practice of devastation is superimposed on resistance movements, where people meet the land and waters, to plant, live and fight for spaces and the right to life, in urban agriculture projects, in movements for the preservation of open streams, springs and urban forests, in movements of occupation for housing, in backyards and terreiros, reigns and quilombos. What can be clearly seen, in the case of Pampulha, in the group’s meeting with Ocupação Dandara – which, not by chance, also has an important presence in Louise’s work with Ines in 2013, in “Bicicletas Ambiente” (enviromental bicycles).
If painting allows a slow and dialogical approach to places and people – very different from photography, for example –, reinforcing human bonds, the conceptual approach, in a complementary way, sheds light on environmental issues, dismantling a traditional and canonical reading – unfortunately still very present in the case of looking at Pampulha – of separation between the built heritage (culture) and nature (lagoon). Critical in relation to this perspective, what the group's work shows us is an experience of the territory in which buildings, people and landscapes are intertwined, and constitute, in an indivisible way, the very core of the problem to be faced. In Louise Ganz's trajectory, painting is also a performative strategy for investigating the city in an expanded field.
Guilherme Wisnik
October 2023
