CIDADE DE CINZAS (THE CITY OF ASHES)

In São Paulo, let's say in a small portion of it, I spent a couple of weeks, too little to even understand where I was. Time has been barely enough to look for a shelter, a place to start to have a glimpse. I barely had enough time to wonder what I might need and what could look like a cover. I pick out one detail so as not to get mauled by the total picture, which is SãoPaulo wich expense end somewhere after the horizon. Someone called it 'A Cidade Cinza' (The Grey City). It does not resemble any place that can be called such. The Grey City is something that extends beyond the concept of place. The Grey City is a crazy idea that appears before your eyes without following the criteria of linear perspective (how terrifying is the absence of an escape point where you expect t to be?). To fight anxieties, I gave the metropolis a new name: 'A Cidade Cinza' (The Grey City) became 'A Cidade de Cinzas' (The City of Ashes). Slightly different from the original but consolatory from my point of view. That name gave me the impression of being in a place where something awful just happened. I built a starting point from where I behave like a witness at the scene of a fire. I gave myself the necessary illusion of being in a safe place. But you are never safe when you put your heart on the line, and that is what happened to me in São Paulo.

It took me two years to have the emotional distance to allowd myself to look those photos again.

During all this while, I thought a lot about all the boys I met in Praça Roosevelt and all those friends I carry in my heart. Looking back at those photos, always the same, I thought about how much that experience, which now seems far away in time, changed me forever.

I developed the first rolls of film of this work in Venice when the memory was still fresh and the Jetleg not yet fully absorbed. I made the first scans in one afternoon, which had not yet been a week. I built a box to put all the body of work in when Leo wrote to me from São Paulo. He tells me he had cancer and that he could see in me the father he never knew. Few weeks after hard-drive crashed, along with all the work. That same day Leo was arrested for murder. I didn't sleep for two days after taht. I've picked up all the material again just now once I knew there might be an exhibition at the beginning of 2016, so I've reconnected with all the guys I met and portrayed in those early September days in Praça Roosevelt, Leo is unfortunately was still in jail, at least he was alive.

 Everything is different now. Memories are distant, thoughts are more lucid, smoothed by the passing of the days. This work is the story of what has changed in me, for the space around me and, partially, for all the people I have met during these two years of walking.

'Cidade de Cinzas' became a book and an installation. I worked on it while living in Santiago de Chile. The exhibition opened in September 2017 at the Virgilio Gallery in São Paulo. After 6 years old friends from those days stopped by to say hello during the opening. Unfortunately, none of them knows anything about what happened to Leonardo.