Contra_Uso
By Marcelo Campos

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Walking through the city—this is Márcio Almeida's situationist strategy. His artistic production articulates materials, methods, and concepts that fray disciplinary boundaries, expanding or applying the meaning of "art," in quotation marks, to everyday events. One looks at the city, and attention shifts to the very indiscipline generated by those who transgress the rules, who forge skewed paths, and who occupy it by force instead of accepting the regularity of official layouts. Rogério Proença Leite terms this "counter-uses," since the physical and symbolic demarcations of space, according to the author, are qualified by use. And it is precisely in a study on the revitalized neighborhood of Recife that Leite points out that which did not halt, but rather remade itself through counter-ordinary use.

The exhibition Contra_uso [Counter_use], a solo show by Márcio Almeida at Santander Cultural in Recife, corroborates these observations, drawing from the artist's previous interests and opening up other creative possibilities. Composed of photographs, video, drawings, and sculptures—not to call them installative objects—the exhibition stems from works that problematize the idea of occupation. Today, we speak of urban interventions, artistic projects of interference, and experiences in houses, squares, residencies, and galleries, blending public and private space. And why not look at the city? The city itself as occupation, intervention, and, above all, contradiction. "Is the city an operational concept?" asks Michel de Certeau, who evaluates it through three lenses: the production of a "proper space," the establishment of a "nowhere/no-time," and the creation of a "universal subject." Within just these few degrees of temperature regarding what constitutes the city's plurality, we can already glimpse several undone utopias.

In "Waiting for Work," Márcio researches laborers in civil construction sites. In this series of photographs, the workers appear resting during their lunch hour, waiting to return to work. There, we preconceive the urbanization of a place without any notion of what the final result will look like after the building is completed. The construction of the proper space, returning to Certeau, must "repress all physical, mental, or political pollutions that would compromise it." The artist photographs precisely the pathway of contamination: laziness, rest, the breaking of order. In the photograph's palette, we see the yellow of the uniforms, the orange of the warning signs and safety gear, the suede-tone of the concrete, and the silver of the metal beams. We focus on the body and on laziness—eternal threats to progress and obedience. In Brazilian history, laziness was the target of laws, especially after the abolition of slavery, when the African population was not officially tamed. Here, the work brings together varied ancestral lineages and demonstrates that any pocket of time in a day of labor can stimulate small abolitions. We see asbestos tiles serving as beds, improvised clotheslines in communal areas, and bodies previously tensed by the posture of work dissolving into sleep and slowness (malemolência). For a few moments, the docile bodies wait for the return, the repetition.

Within the same research, Márcio observes what he calls "Icaruses"—workers hanging between beams, close to abysses. The body strikes poses and contortions like birds, threatening to leap, clinging on so as not to plummet. The dance evidenced by the photographs holds a certain degree of irony; instead of physical strength and prominent muscles, as seen in the dockworkers of Pierre Verger and Henri Cartier-Bresson, we see scenes of a melancholy vastness. These are driven by the geometries of civil construction, through spaces destined for support, safety, and the certainty of durability—even though today, not even the tallest tower in the world is safe. Márcio Almeida touches upon this contradiction.

The project "Entre o novo e o nada" [Between the New and Nothing] configures another occupation of the city, no longer as a work officialized by construction companies, but through strategies of invasion and the occupation of someone else's land. In Sapucaia de Dentro, a borderline neighborhood on the periphery of Olinda, the residents' condition demonstrates the counter-use of that place. Márcio Almeida had won a grant to exhibit in an official institution, a museum, and decided to reflect on the actual character of this borderline condition. He placed a real house, built of wood and appropriated materials, inside the exhibition space. The house existed on squatted land in Sapucaia de Dentro. Márcio negotiated an exchange with the family, which consisted of a couple and a son. The shack sat behind a dump, with all the miseries of pollution that this entails. The building materials and household utensils were permeated with odors, according to the artist—odors of use and decay. Márcio went to several squatted areas with the proposal to trade for a legalized house, purchased for the artwork using the exhibition budget, in Bomba do Hemetério, also a peripheral neighborhood in Recife. Sapucaia is a completely flat place; Bomba do Hemetério is a hill, an elevated place. The couple accepted, and the artist transported the entire house, including its furniture, to the museum. Here, in Contra_Uso, Márcio exhibits the video of this entire process. The artist left the family living in the new house and never returned, accepting the silence of time and recording opaque images of memory regarding that experience.

In drawings made exclusively for the exhibition at Santander Cultural, Márcio Almeida creates the series "Inventário das ressignificações" [Inventory of Resignifications]. In an impressive dissonance between symbols, words, and everyday objects, the artist recalls the squatted house and its utensils. Within the circularity of the paper's white space, Almeida selects chairs, clay water filters, and beds, adding poetic words: sea, dream, air, "blue for the extreme sea." Much like the research on the hardships of unchecked Brazilian urbanization present in the participants of the Nova Objetividade Brasileira [New Brazilian Objectivity]—a historic 1967 exhibition at the MAM in Rio de Janeiro—Márcio Almeida touches upon the urbanization of cities. In that exhibition, artists dealt with the contradictions of urbanism: the living boxes of Rubens Gerchman, the popular culture reviewed by Nelson Leirner, and, above all, the favelas of Hélio Oiticica. Attention was paid to social differences and the precarity not only of materials, but of ways of life in the big city. In the works of that era, words like "air" declared the insufficiency of population control and of an urbanization polluted by diesel smoke. If we understand this condition in a cross-cutting, trans-historical way, we once again perceive the air we lack—from the toxic gases produced by garbage to unsanitary housing conditions; from the uses officialized by urban revitalizations to the counter-uses undertaken by those who actually experience the cities. In such contradictions, the incompetence of urban planning projects becomes evident in dealing with the alleys, the narrow streets, and the poorly calculated "passageways" for circulation, which are perfect for hiding furtive sex and criminal activities.

In Márcio Almeida's drawings, this denunciation functions as a dream, a will, a desire. Filter for a lean-to roof (meia-água), says the drawn phrase. And here we think of the poor houses that cannot achieve the double-pitched roof of colonial heritage. The meia-água, life with a small share, the desire to be potable, healthy, and potent. At the same time, being "from Within" (de Dentro), like the very name of the place, further from the coast, from pleasures, from the beach illusion. Here, I open a parenthesis to reveal a conversation. Márcio Almeida told me that he writes and repeats "air, air, air" (ar, ar, ar) because he wanted to be like Dorival Caymmi, who became absorbed with the ending of a song whose phrase said: "the good thing about the land is that which cries / but pretends it doesn't cry / when we leave / the good thing about the sea (...)" the ellipsis opened, and Caymmi waited years to discover that the phrase, the predicate for the good thing about the sea, would be a pleonasm: open quotes, "the good thing about the sea is the sea / it's the sea / that carries us along for us to fish." Here, Márcio assumes his contemplative side, his taste for the sublime in the beach songs of the Bahia native. 

Still under such influence, the inventory of re-significations generates this contradiction: it makes poetry out of what is lacking—a lack we all feel. Faced with a single beach chair from the squatter house, Almeida decides to draw a chair for three, as this is the number of members in that family. He uses foreign languages—French, English—the official languages of commands, of exploiters. Languages that, according to the artist, are used out of a complete incompetence in understanding them. And yet, there he goes, forming crude, erratic phrases. All the drawings are activated by memories and lies about the things from the Sapucaia de Dentro shack.

After all the negotiation and the family's agreement to switch shacks, they asked the artist: "And the cavity?" (E a cárie?). From this, Márcio understood that the hole left by the squatter house opened up a cavity—not an official space, but a rotted vacuum, a cavity in the toothless mouth that Lévi-Strauss had envisioned upon first arriving in Brazil and sighting Guanabara Bay. Márcio then creates a series of drawings, "It cuts (Isso corta / It cut)," in which he mimics missing teeth in an arch that also resembles a set of bricks, in a blend of construction and ruins.

As a subversive proposal for the continuity of his research into squatted lands, Márcio Almeida proposes a kind of kit—methods and materials that would serve those interested in occupying vacant lots. In a "do-it-yourself" fashion, the artist lists the components of the project and shows how to assemble the squatter house. At the same time, Certeau's aforementioned concept becomes evident, where the subject never reached the type-category. Not even the utopian modernist projects of public housing managed to normalize the act of dwelling. The state bypasses the official nature of electricity, gas, and water supplies. Meanwhile, people invent. They invent the "macaco" (monkey)—a term used for clandestine electrical connections—and moves are carried out using street market carts. Márcio Almeida stimulates this while transfiguring pieces between art and an almost ethnographic observation. And so we come to understand that "space is a practiced place," supplanting any geometries and rules. Meanwhile, the subject—universal and anonymous—can only be called the city. The city itself, which, to be lived, will be full of counter-uses.