BRAZIL’S UNDERGROUND ART TRANSCRIPT

Dateline's video journalists - our intrepid VJs - get to some of the world's most interesting spots, not to say some of the more unusual. But this next tale gets close to taking the cake, the mud cake at that. For the sake of art - not to mention a good yarn - Aaron Lewis descended into the sewers of Brazil's largest city.


REPORTER: Aaron Lewis

ZEZAO, GRAFFITI ARTIST (Translation): This is one of the entrances to the Cabucuri Baixo gallery, it is a rainwater gallery in the Sao Paulo sewage system. The gallery runs for 10 kilometres in these three tunnels and it goes down to the Tiete River.

I've come to Sao Paulo to meet its world-famous 'graffiti' artists.

ZEZAO (Translation): I don’t know how many there are, I have done this for eight years. There could be over 100. This is just one of them.

This is about as underground as art gets. Sao Paulo's public art movement has moved past the streets - in some cases it's moved into expensive galleries in places like New York City, and in this case it's moved all the way down into the sewers in Sao Paulo. Increasingly in this kind of art, the environment it's placed in has more and more to do with the message of the art itself.

ZEZAO (Translation): In this long tunnel which we are about to go down, it is very common to find all kinds of garbage and weird objects and occasionally the dead bodies of animals, like dogs..

We walk deep into the sewer tunnels. Zezao is armed only an aerosol can and a cigarette lighter to use as a blowtorch in case we're swarmed by cockroaches or rats. Finally he chooses a wall and gets to work. Most graffiti artists choose highly visible sites for their canvas, but for Zezao, his art is more personal than public.

ZEZAO (Translation): 99% of the street artists in Sao Paulo want to work on the big avenues, do grand works placed high up so that people can see them. I don’t know why, I guess it’s about becoming famous, being up there in the avenues and being seen.

Zezao's art is as much about adventure as it is about asthetic.

ZEZAO (Translation): One time I was walking through those very sewers when the batteries in my torch died while I was still exploring. Today, if my torch battery died again, I’d know where I was. But that was when I was still exploring the place. I’d walk two kilometres and then my batteries died. It was a terribly insecure moment, I was horrified. Thank God I made it back by feeling the walls. That was a moment I won’t forget, another one was when I stepped on a nail, then there was the tsunami, when someone opened a drain and I had to run so as not to be swept away. More or less like that, I could go on forever. This symbol is a signature made with two colours, an abstract calligraphy that I use to mark some parts of the city, like here.

While Zezao's stylized signatures can be found in places that are a lot easier to get to than the sewer, he only works in areas of shocking environmental or social decay. If the work can't be seen from the street, Zezao takes a photograph and uses it to draw attention to Sao Paulo's pollution problems.

ZEZAO (Translation): I do this work mainly for environmental reasons. The destruction of the environment in big cities like Sao Paulo which has such a huge population, a population that generates a lot of waste with no control at all in certain parts of the city.

I set out to check out the rest of Sao Paulo's graffiti scene. This city is famous for pushing street art in new and daring directions. Isolated from graffiti's origins in New York and London, Sao Paulo's aerosol pioneers have pushed the art far past tagging or hip-hop imagery. African roots, South American surrealism, and a Brazilian playfulness have combined into a masterful public canvas that anybody can contribute to. For the last 20 years, San Paolo has developed a unique public philosophy about graffiti. Sao Paulo itself is a grey concrete jungle and so for the last 25 years, colourful graffiti has been encouraged by the public as a way to help beautify the city. This has helped push street art past simple tagging, called 'picachao' here.

ALEXANDRE ORION, NIGER STREET, GRAFFITI ARTIST (Translation): What is the difference between lagging and graffiti? Graffiti is an art, like something in a museum. It’s something that’s public. Tagging is a form of vandalism here in Brazil. But my graffiti does not have guns or people fighting and dancing, like in American graffiti. Brazilian graffiti is much more about the art.

Alexandre Orion is a respected and subversive street artist. He says that the city's turbulent political history has helped define both the concepts and the techniques of Sao Paulo's unique street art.

ALEXANDRE ORION (Translation): Sao Paulo had a history of political tagging during the junta, there were artists from this first generation who were greatly influenced by the dictatorship and they used stencils and fast work techniques at that time or just after the end of the junta. They adopted political, comic and ironic approaches but with a strong aesthetic strain. That influence is still with us however much the street artists may deny it. It is part of our culture.

Sao Paulo's top street artists are increasingly pushing out into new mediums, fusing architecture, sculpture and, in Orion's case, photography, into internationally acclaimed art. For the Metabiotica project Orion stencilled images around Sao Paulo that were designed to provoke a reaction - he calls these stencils 'interventions' - then he waited from a hidden position armed with his camera for the world to wander into his frame.

ALEXANDRE ORION (Translation): This project has two stages, the first is when I give shape to this pictorial composition, in the second stage I wait for the interactive moment when I take these photographs. These interactions are all in fact spontaneous, lots of times, to get a good photo like this, I have to wait from one and a half to two and a half months.

The Metabiotica photographs were exhibited in major galleries in New York and London. But for Orion, time he spends on the street remains central to his art.

ALEXANDRE ORION (Translation): In fact, waiting for the moment of interaction is the most important part of the process. Because I try to control things, like I’m crazy, choosing the right place, painting to exact proportions for the interaction to happen..But when you have to wait you lose control of your work and anything can happen. And it is always better than what you’d planned. People end up being the co-authors of my work. And waiting for them.. is like waiting for closure, waiting for someone to bring the work to life.

I’Metabiotica is only one of Orion's projects. He recently caused quite a stir in Sao Paulo with his 'reverse graffiti', this was part of the project he calls Art Less Pollution.

ALEXANDRE ORION (Translation): The project “Art Less Pollution”, as its name says, uses pollution itself to produce art but in a critical way by scraping the soot off the walls of the tunnel. I draw 3500 human skulls, the purpose of this work, besides being the first stage of the “Art Less Pollution” project, was to make people question the definition of crime. Is graffiti a crime?

Orion says he was approached by police over 100 times during the 17 nights he spent creating his reverse graffiti skulls.

ALEXANDRE ORION (Translation): The traffic authorities would show up, they would try to stop me from doing the work and I would say “I’m cleaning it.. just cleaning it.” There is no crime in cleaning, the crime is to pollute or to leave it as it is.

Orion then took all the pollution-covered rags from the tunnel and used them to make paint.

ALEXANDRE ORION (Translation): This is the soot I took from the tunnel, it was on the rags that I used in the tunnel. I kept all the rags, after I washed them I kept the water with the soot, waited for it to settle and drained off the excess water. Once the water had evaporated what was left was this black stuff which is carbon emitted by cars.

Orion then took the soot, mixed it with an acrylic medium and turned it into a unique pollution paint.

ALEXANDRE ORION (Translation): These are the first paintings I made with that same soot I collected from the skulls job. These paintings are all made from soot, it is all to provoke a reaction. These images always contain people, animals and vehicles, they are all made from the same soot. The meaning of it is that the skulls that are out there are also here. That is the provocation.

Orion believes that the reason Sao Paulo is at the cutting edge of street art is that it's a city with a lot to say.

ALEXANDRE ORION (Translation): It is a major commercial centre in a Third World country, this makes all the problems we face, because of capitalism and other issues in today’s world, seem much more striking here. In other words, the lack of respect for history is much more striking here than in a First World country. The lack of respect for people here is more striking, the contrast between beauty and ugliness and poverty and wealth are even more striking. This pulls me in both directions and this is what gives my work the meaning and purpose it has. I imagine that in a different city where problems are more subtle or camouflaged I would not have the same inspiration to create.




Reporter/Camera
AARON LEWIS

Editor
SUE BELL

Fixer/Translator
ALI ROCHA

Subtitling
ADRIANA GASPAR NEUMEYER


Producer
ASHLEY SMITH

Original Music composed by
VICKI HANSEN