One of the most powerful exhibitions I have visited recently is not part of any museum or cultural institution. It has received no kind of financial support whatsoever, and it has no commercial aim. It’s not a miracle: It’s nothing but a desire to build something together.

In a small lane branching out of Martins Fontes Street, in São Paulo City center, there is a long wall covered in graffiti that reads, “Quem não luta tá morto” (“If you don’t fight, you’re dead”). This is the motto of the dwellers of the building behind that wall, known as Ocupação 9 de Julho (July 9 Occupation). Just like others in the same area, this occupation is organized by MSTC (Movimento dos Sem-Teto do Centro / City Center Homeless People’s Movement), led by Carmen Silva, a 59-year-old woman from Bahia state who has a bold proposal to minimize lack of housing for low income citizens. One of these days I’ll write an article about the Occupation’s model—which is one of the projects presented at the Chicago Architecture Biennial, now open until January 5, 2020.

Under Carmen’s lead, buildings in São Paulo City that have been abandoned for years are occupied in an extremely orderly manner, rigorously observing necessary criteria to re-adequate spaces so that dwellers can live in safety and with quality of life in a mutual cooperation environment.

I am a regular at lunches organized by Cozinha da Ocupação (The Occupation’s Kitchen), working as volunteer. I feel at home there, surrounded by cool people, good food, good music, a loving atmosphere. Art is part of the joy, art that is often produced right there through many different workshops organized by dwellers and artists who, just like me, are great fans of the Ocupação community.

There are artworks everywhere, inside and outside the building. But it’s on the third underground flour that it gets really intense. That is where the Reocupa Gallery is located. Since last September, the space has been hosting O que não é floresta é prisão política (That Which Is Not a Forest is Political Prison), an exhibition that at the time of publication gathered works by sixty different artists. Each week, the exhibition is activated by a guest artist and the process goes on with no end date in sight. There is a simple reason for that: The forest is continuously threatened, and prison is an imminent threaten for many, many people.

The exhibition’s essence is collectivity. Everything is collective and self-funded: conception, realization, schedule, educational action. There are two starting points: The forest and the prison. Below, I quote the pamphlet that is handed out at the exhibition space:

“Forest, earth-forest, for the Yanomamis [it is] the earth’s skin, flowing, unbounded. [It is] Mother Earth and her auto-adjustments in order to answer to her needs of producing and sustaining life. A lawless, cooperative system that doesn’t dilapidate resources and ensures its continuity. Even today, it seems that Original Peoples are the only human beings who know how to compose and cooperate in forest areas. It would be, then a being capable of opposing so many different forms of domination. . .

“Prison. It is impossible not to think of Brazil since 2014 as a huge, uninterrupted prison. ‘Why do I talk of a small prison? Exactly because, eluded by a self-proclaimed free society, we actually live in a giant, bigger and bigger, prison . . .’ wrote Igor Mendes in his account from prison . . . He—just like Rafael Braga, Preta Ferreira, Carmen Silva, [and] so many other, both female and male, endure persecution from State instruments because they open the way towards freedom and to build collective [devices].”

Much before the Amazon fires and arrest warrants for leaders of pro-housing movements, this artists’ collective was already working with these themes to put together this exhibition, understanding the forest as an organism that works collaboratively and the prison as restriction of all forms of expression. The exhibition’s opening coincided with the forest fires and the apex of a judicial battle to grant habeas corpus to Carmen Silva and her daughter Preta, who was under provisional imprisonment for 109 days.

Each work displayed at Reocupa has its own power, enhanced by the whole. The spirit of the forest is present, nurturing a cohesive, generous whole to the individuality of each element. This a forest lush with life, capable of bringing down prisons incarcerating bodies who fight for the right to live. This forest is not in flames: It resists and grow.

There couldn’t be a more coherent action than installing Reocupa on the underground floors of a building that has been unoccupied for the past twenty years, since INSS [Brazilian Social Security] left. Reocupa occupies a space that was once a sophisticated hall with double high ceilings, wide staircase and marble covering: The monumental entrance to a public building at 9 de Julho Avenue, which was the main hub between São Paulo City center and the southern area of the city for decades. That space has been in degradation for years. It is blatant evidence of public expenditure: fortunes invested in physical structures destined to degradation and minimal investment in human capital. Thanks to the actions of MSTC, now society rationally uses material resources that belong to them, recovers and give meaning to something that was destined to crumble even before it came into existence.

O que não é floresta é prisão política is an exhibition not to be missed. Collective vitality on full power. We are together. If you don’t fight, you’re dead.

Visitation from Thursday to Sunday, from 2:00 pm to 8:00 pm
Open-ended
Weekly schedule available on social media

Image gallery of the July 9 Occupation

By Flávio Paes.