Gardens of Time

I’m from São Paulo City just like Pazé, who produced these 110 never-before-seen works for this exhibition. Just like him, I would also like to see my hometown full of parks. Pazé has invented a way to give São Paulo more green areas for leisure. His proposal is to repurpose four City cemeteries so that they can include botanical gardens. Pazé, who is an agricultural engineer as well, has researched the subject for eight years and invited me to curate this exhibition three years ago. Drawings, watercolors, photographs, blueprints, and even a short film show how to transform a city through the creation of gardens. The exhibition will be open to the public at CCBB in São Paulo from August 17 to October 28, 2019.

My curatorial essays and images from some of the works give an idea about the project, but being in direct contact with artworks in an unparalleled experience. If you can, don’t miss this exhibition! 

Gardens are human inventions. They have existed for centuries in many different areas of the planet and in different cultures, but always with the same purpose: to offer those who visit them a harmonious experience of the world. In large cities, public gardens are spaces conceived to alleviate every day’s pressures, inviting to leisure and to get in contact with different living beings.

Life happens in a series of phenomena. Birth, development, and decay are phases of the life cycle repeating through time. Seeing that time is life’s greatest mystery, as life always happens in the present since that which is gone is no longer alive and that which will be is nothing but potentiality.

In a garden, seeds become plants that grow and perish, leaving more seeds behind. Taking good care of them is the first step to form a culture, a cultivation practice. In a garden, life’s cycle presents itself in all its phases, favoring memories of the past and projections of the future. A garden is a place to take part in culture.

Gardens of Time is a proposal by Pazé for São Paulo, his hometown. It consists of offering the population four different botanical gardens cultivated with Brazilian flora species in public areas used solely for burials. Repurposed, these spaces would be reinserted in urban culture so that they can be enjoyed for leisure and community gatherings, along their primary function.

Gardens of Time invites visitors to get to know the potential of a seed planted in a place where contact with life’s riches is an encouragement for cultivation of peace.

Cultivation Spaces

Public spaces in cemeteries such as Araçá, Vila Nova Cachoeirinha, Vila Formosa, and São Pedro (Vila Alpina) account, together, to an area of over 320 acres—larger than Ibirapuera Park.

When these areas were purposed as cemeteries, their relative distance from the city’s center were a relevant character. Decades ago, however, São Paulo’s urban zone’s intense growth invalidated this standard. Once far removed, these areas today are located within intensively populated areas, widely served by public transportation. However, even though they are now central and accessible, they have been progressively abandoned, creating environmental and property harm, as well as being disarticulated from urban life.

Making Gardens of Time

Transforming public cemeteries into gardens involves repurposing their burial areas into vertical blocks, creating lakes to collect rain water and a water purifying plant to serve surrounding areas, terrain adjustments to create accessibility and construction of areas for gatherings, education, and leisure, as well as nurseries to cultivate edible and medicinal species, tree planting, and reorganization of existing vegetation.

Araçá

With a 56-acre area, Araçá is one of the oldest cemeteries in São Paulo. Founded in 1887, when the current Emílio Ribas Hospital was being erected at an area far removed from the city center.

Its area is occupied by two burial structures erected at different times, having completely different artistic and architectonic values. The oldest structure, occupying about 22 acres of the cemetery’s area, presents a rich heritage of tombs that are in advanced state of decay. This heritage would be restored and kept in its integrity. A park and a vertical block would be created in the remaining 34 acres, almost three times as big as the area covered by Trianon Park at Paulista Avenue.

Vila Nova Cachoeirinha

This necropolis borrows its name from the district where it’s located, in the northern area of São Paulo. Founded in 1968, it covers an area of roughly 86 acres surrounded by residencies and commercial establishments.

The space includes a chapel, which would be restored. Three modules of 330-foot wide vertical blocks, each one dived in two, would be created to offer better usage of the space, replacing a large area where most burials have been made lately in shallow graves, in direct contact with the ground, contaminating the soil and the water table.

In addition to these vertical blocks, areas for gatherings with lounges, reading rooms, café, restaurants, bathrooms, plant and bird nurseries, classrooms, and leisure areas with sport courts and playgrounds would be installed. The area aimed at leisure would be equivalent to that of Park of Juventude, also located in the northern area of São Paulo, four miles away.

Vila Formosa

With almost 190 acres, this is the largest public necropolis in Latin America and the fourth largest green area in São Paulo. Here, burials are made directly in the soil as well, in provisory tombs, being a constant source of contamination since its foundation in 1949. Remains exhumed after three years are stored in ossuaries built in walls following the outer wall with no standardization whatsoever.

Located in the eastern part of São Paulo, Vila Formosa is one of the areas most lacking in public leisure spaces. The cemetery’s extensive area is like an island within a 37,000-acre area of residential buildings with rare trees. 

Vila Formosa has extensive areas with underbrush that could be replaced by a .6-mile wide lake. Just like the lake conceived for the spaces in the Gardens of Time  proposal for Vila Formosa, reproducing the shape of the Ninfeias Lake at the São Paulo Botanical Garden, it would have the crucial function of collecting rain water, which would be purified in a small plant similar to that of Ribeirão da Estiva in the Rio Grande da Serra municipality located in the metropolitan area of São Paulo. Adequately collected and treated, the lake’s water could be used to irrigate the gardens and to supply the community living around the park.

Besides its utilitarian character, the lake is key in the landscape design of the park, attracting native water birds.

São Pedro (Vila Alpina)

Situated in the eastern part of São Paulo as well, in Vila Alpina, the São Pedro cemetery was inaugurated in 1972, covering an area of about 55 acres attached to the Professora Lydia Natalízio Diogo Park, whose 17 acres would be added to the project, as well as sport courts located nearby. The garden’s total area would cover more than 86 acres, much larger than the Worker’s Sports, Entertainment and Education Center, located three miles away.

Just like in other public necropolis, the tombs at São Pedro are provisory and burials are made directly in the ground. However, it possesses a notable tree collection, particularly rich in fruit-yielding species that attract a great variety of birds.

To the existing botanical collection, which would be rearranged, more than twenty different Brazilian species would be added, many of them risking extinction, such as pau-ferro, Brazil wood, guariroba (Syagrus oleracea), jequitibá-rosa (Cariniana legalis), araucária (Araucariaangustifolia), and jatobá (Hymenaeacourbaril). Cutting scions from these trees would be cultivated in a nursery and available for sale.

Botanical Gardens

Brazil possesses extraordinary flora, corresponding to roughly twenty percent of the world’s botanical species. Thousands of native species are nutrient-rich and possess medicinal properties. Brazil nut, sapucaya, araçapiranga (Psidium acutangulum), grumixama (Eugeniabrasiliensis), and cereja-do-rio-grande (Hexachlamysedulis) are some of these species represented through fruits in a series of watercolors by Pazé, the seeds of Gardens of Time.