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Described in at least one travel guide as ‘an intimidating city’ São Paulo is the kind of destination travel agents will attempt to talk you out of visiting. It is the third largest city in the world, Brazil’s economic powerhouse and home of the São Paulo Bienal, which is rivalled in reputation only by The Venice Biennale. While the city itself might be trying at times, the Bienal’s venue, Oscar Neimeyer’s Pavilhao Ciccillo Matarazzo, situated in the Parque do Ibirapuera, is an oasis of culture appropriately removed from the relentless roar of traffic (and pollution). This thirty thousand square metre modernist pavilion is itself impressive and both artists and audience benefit from Neimeyer’s visionary design. The work moderismo negro (2004) for example, included ambitious ‘fictional’ alterations made to the first level by Britain’s Mike Nelson. Well known for work that exists between the actual and the imaginary, it is as if the building begged Nelson’s intervention, which referenced its history and architectural curvature.
As Brazil’s dynamic Minister of Culture, Gilberto Gil notes in his foreword to the catalogue, ‘The Bienal is in the heart of the city. And in the heart of its citizens’. As it turned out, 2004 was the fiftieth anniversary of the Pavillion and thus the Bienal had free admission, a ‘gift to the people of Brazil’. With substantial art education programs, thousands of often very young Paulistanos poured into one of the world’s great spectacles of contemporary art, an event of which they could rightfully be proud. A heartening sight, in the third week it appeared that a target audience of one million would be easily achieved, if not surpassed.
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