Photographic Atlas

Guilherme Wisnik

What is the true face of São Paulo? What are its limits? Is it possible to imagine in one's mind any image of this shapeless, tentacled mass that, due to its scale and complexity, defies any effort of human cognition?
These are unanswered questions that can only be taken seriously through two seemingly opposing positions: fiction, on the one hand, or scientific experiment, on the other. Based on very clear rules and methods, Tuca Vieira's work clearly flirts with the second path. The photographer wanted to get to know the city where he was born and lives better, and at the same time be able to record it photographically. But how to do this? Where to start? Faced with the evident impossibility of the undertaking, he chose an objective and impersonal criterion: to base himself on the city's street guide. In other words, his work consists of producing a photo for each double page of the guide, which, in turn, corresponds to a number. Thus, each number, or double page, represents a square section that divides the urban area of the metropolitan region of São Paulo into 203 equal parts.
It should be noted that the choice of street guide is not based on any criterion. While it covers almost the entire urban area of the metropolis, the guide also allows a tangible understanding of the city, since its scale is designed to enable the identification of all its streets and squares. Therefore, through the guide, there is a possible transition between the parts and the whole of the city, something that was key to the realization of this mapping project. Here a crucial element of the project comes into play: the real experience of the space. After all, why visit places in person that are fully mapped by Google and the city's georeferencing systems?
Hence the somewhat quixotic aspect of the project. We can imagine the degree of daily misfortunes faced in order to carry out the task, which involves immense displacements, traffic jams, fuel and equipment costs, fatigue and occasional security problems. And just as the street guide is an instrument that is completely obsolete today, the photographer also chooses to record the city not through light and portable cameras, but rather with a large-format handmade camera with individual plates, carefully mounted on a tripod, which makes each photo a clearly anachronistic scenic ritual.
Here I return to the fictional aspect of the work. For Tuca Vieira tempers the scientific method employed with an important halo of fictionality, typical of someone who knows that there are no exact answers, much less unique ones, to the problem in question: the portrait of the city. The result is a Sisyphean effort, somewhat inglorious, to carry out a work whose meaning seems to escape common sense.
After all, we can think of its cataloguing action as a silent act of parallel construction of another latent city that we do not yet see, while the city we see continues to transform itself continuously. Incidentally, as the French essayist Georges Didi-Huberman rightly noted, “if the atlas appears as an incessant work of recomposing the world, it is, first of all, because the world itself undergoes constant decomposition.”

Guilherme Wisnik is a Professor at the School of Architecture and Urbanism at USP. An art and architecture critic, he is the author of books such as Lucio Costa (2001), Caetano Veloso (2005), Critical State (2009), Space under construction (2018) and Inside the fog (2018). He is a member of the São Paulo Association of Art Critics (APCA) and was the general curator of the 10th São Paulo Architecture Biennial (2013).