The Investigation of Instants in the Água Preta Stream

In São Paulo, the incomprehension of the territory is latent. Not only for the matter that overlaps geography, but because of the unceasing speed of life, which conditions the vision. In this scenario, this project questions the possibility of finding in this hidden element of Água Preta stream the opportunity to create new situations.

This is an investigation about the Água Preta stream, located in the districts of Vila Anglo, Vila Romana, Pompéia and Barra Funda, in the city of São Paulo. This work began with the mapping of the area, the recognition of the watercourse and its surroundings. It was then reported the presence of empty spaces nearby this route, from the beginning to the end of the path, as remnants that report the conflict between city and geography, side effects of construction policies. The project is built as interventions in these empty spaces, as an attempt to reveal this hidden layer: the stream that today presents itself almost completely invisible to the city. These interventions are associated with specific actions: addition, suspension, movement, subtraction, tension, revelation. As mechanisms that bring water to the surface in the public space, these actions are associated with events, programs, vocations. Each of them functions as an instrument capable of emerging water on the surface in a specific way, and consequently they also reverberate in different ways in the dynamics of the city. Actions appear as fragments, such as the existing evidence of the hidden stream nowadays. Revelation remains through evidence, through circumstance. Water is sensed not only through vision, but through temperature, humidity, light, hearing and touch. As it approaches the lowest level of the river, where flooding is frequent, interventions function as water containers, able to fill up and empty according to the flow of the stream. Water functions as space-forming material, as it moves, paths program and landscape are changed. At the same time that these actions reveal the relation between them, they are independent. They describe a succession of points whose hierarchy is not determined. There is no claim here to stablish a precise route. This arises only because of the hidden element that unifies the actions: the stream. This work is about multiple hypothesis about a single theme.