Street Magic.

The first time I saw an animal sacrifice was outside the cemetery by our old apartment. I used to go and walk there a lot, ostensibly to check out the crazy funeral art, but mostly, I think, to fool myself into thinking I was in the countryside.

It was just by the gates: a dead black chicken in a flowerpot with a cigar in its mouth. At first I thought the chicken had died there by accident and some joker had decided to make it look like Groucho Marx. But then I decided to check on the internet and see if there was anything more to it.

Sure enough, a quick trawl of Wikipedia introduced me to the existence of a whole range of Afro-Brazilian religions with wonderful names like Candomblé, Batuque, Umbanda and Quimbanda, some of which prescribe animal sacrifice as part of their rituals along with other offerings including rum, tobacco, flowers, salt and fire. Indeed, animal sacrifice is essential to the workings of Quimbanda, the darker offshoot of the practices previously, and polemically, labelled Macumba by most Brazilians.

It is common for these offerings to be made at marginal locations. Hence the cemetery is favoured as a marginal location between life and death, the beach is the margin between land and sea and the crossroads represents the intersection of pathways (the forest is also important, though I’m not sure why – maybe the meeting of shadow and light or wild and tame, or simply the negative space where dark business of all kinds can be conducted). Anyway, the fixation with the crossroad as a locus of transformative power also signals the common ancestry these Afro-Brazilian religions share with the traditions of the African diaspora that settled in the Mississipi Delta, where the cross-pollination of Christianity and African folklore spawned the idea of the devil at the crossroads, waiting with his Faustian pact.

So far, so interesting.

Now I have to jump tracks and talk about something entirely different for a while. Don’t worry, I’ll come back round.

Over the past couple of years, there have been several little bourgeois street art trends around the neighbourhood where I live. Now, when I say bourgeois street art, what I mean is that they’ve all been self-consciously cultured in some way, usually by importing techniques from fine art or situationism or poetry into the street artist’s palette.

The first one I remember was the 'ISSO NÃO É POESIA' movement, which seemed nice and slogan-friendly in a Paris '68 way.

Another good line these guys came up with was TENHA UM BOM DIA OU FODA-SE ('have a nice day or fuck yourself'), which you can see below the window on the above image. I don't know whether this group knew about the next guys, but their lines had a nice symmetry, as the latter lot were going round painting nudes on the sides of junction boxes and adorning them with the charming line FODA-ME COM AMOR ('fuck me with love').

Then there were the 'MAIS AMOR, POR FAVOR' trend, which created a carnivalesque inversion of political fly-posters as a means of appealing for more tolerance and love on the street.

There was even a funny seasonal variation on this idea during Halloween last year, with the line MENOS TERROR POR FAVOR ('less fear, please'). It sounds throw-away and obviously it was meant to be fun, but at the same time it also reflected people's unease about the protests that were still pretty dramatic around then.

Indeed, this style (pastiche of a political fly-poster + rhyming couplet) has now entered the vernacular to such an extent that local companies now rip it off for advertising; you know you’ve made it when the man tries to nick your work.

There was also the scary mutilated women trope (see first image below; this was quite prevalent last year, but I didn't like it much so I only photographed it a bit) and the solo efforts such as the bloke who spends his Sunday afternoons painting elegant little symbolist pictures on junction boxes or the old dude who likes adding grey triangles to road markings and signage.

Hard to tell this one's a girl because of that super-sweet awning. But trust me, they always are...

He later added some Cyrillic to the banner; I have no idea what it means.All these are done on a very small-scale and they seem to come and go with little to no thought of profit or recognition. That's one of the reasons I like them: the generosity of the act is a kind of poetry, shifting the flow of consciousness in the street. The other reason I like them is they enact a dialogue with the other, very vibrant street-art scene you find here. It's not that the grafiteiros need intellectualising, incidentally. They’re already sharp as tacks because they work in an environment of censorship and ostracism in which the authorities and entitled classes dismiss them, and anyone else in the street, as inherently suspicious.  

No, what I like about these movements is not their ability to interpret the other graffiti artists’ work for us with the aid of their Marxist readers and libraries of obscure fonts. Rather, it’s the way their involvement proves that the middle-classes are contributing to and evidently care about the ongoing debate over who owns the streets and to what end. I appreciate this not just because they’re my brothers from another mother (which is to say that I'm hopelessly middle-class myself), but because a revolution that doesn’t embrace people who want to change the status quo irrespective of their place within the class system is going to be a thoroughly miserable affair. Indeed, the lesson of history would suggest that a revolution which excludes certain classes or professions is pretty quickly going to turn out totalitarian, and it won’t be long before people with glasses and asymmetrical haircuts are labelled as subversive and shipped off to the salt mines. 

So, so, so – where was I?

Yes – I like these movements. I think they’re a cool element of the street art scene here in SP and, who knows, perhaps around the world (global class consciousness, man!).

And then there I was last week, walking my daughter to school, when I saw these: the latest and perhaps coolest, most distinctively paulistano bit of eccentric street art I’ve seen.

That’s right, those are Candomblé offerings. There are the dead chickens, just like the one I saw outside the cemetery. There, too, are the cigars, the rum, the fire and the salt that I read about. And they’re all of them clustered around two sets of crossroads on the way to my daughter’s school.

The woman on the box is a pomba-gira, a feminine entity who helps women or effeminate men.

But you’ll have noticed something else, too. Those aren’t real, tangible offerings. They’re pictures of the real thing, simulacra produced in a hot rush of ink and toner then pasted onto telegraph poles, the digital metaphor for an analogue mystery.

What does it all mean? Is it just bourgeois fun, the perfect post-modern play on form? Or is something else going on? A tree falls in the wood, and we don’t know if it made a sound. A spell’s left by the side of the road, and we don’t know if it has any power.

It’s telling that the images are not at eye level, where the flyers for dodgy health plans or psychics go, but right down low, by the ground, where people won’t necessarily notice them. I said before that street art is like a gift, a disinterested commitment to shifting the play of consciousness in the street. These are the same. Some people will notice them, but others will just hurry by, too caught up in the anticipation of their various ends to notice the strange resonance of the crossroads.  

Perhaps that’s what makes the magic. The thought that, even when they go unnoticed they’re still there, subtly altering the narrative of the street, claiming it for different purposes than the mercenary dictates of commerce and superimposing upon the grimy urban environment the ethereal architecture of a much older tradition. It is this which suggests that here, even for the people who drive straight past, you are in São Paulo, a place where different worlds coalesce and accumulate, one upon the other, all the time.