In spite of some announced deaths of which no-one has ever seen a body (as in painting), and of practices (or experimental actions) that are being compromised with worthlessness (urban interventions), I have never been a pessimist. Every once in a while, my students ask me what do I consider a good work of art. Escaping this part as a judge – despite knowing as Paulo Sergio Duarte would say that it is a judge of worth who puts the bread on my table -, I can enumerate a small corps of qualities for this work of art to be considered good. One of them is the risk. I am not exactly speaking of the risk of death, but of limit-situations which are elaborated, challenged and proportioned by the artist to the artistic circuit of art. Works of art that operate on a frontier where the strange, the unpredictable and chance can configure in a power which is impossible to measure. These works of art commented on in this essay transmit to art itself a power capable of influencing behavior and challenge, by means of devices that dialogue with irony and risk in its diverse circumstances, a way of life, giving doses of speculation, delicateness and strangeness.

A very busy crossing in the center of the city of Fortaleza, in the short interval between one set of traffic lights closing and the other opening, artists dispute a game which gives name to the work of art. Making use of the very math’s diagram that the city offers to its citizens, the pair Barbosa and Ricalde construct an organization chart which is maintained freshly up-dated each time the game is played: it is a “interim” work. Everything happens around time, the moment when the traffic stops. They work, therefore, on the red, in debt, in lack … of time. Risking their lives and those of the drivers, this ironic tactic does not signify fun, but refuses enjoyment to daily routine and justifies the space, recognizing it as a field of fickle, moveable experience in the city. The crosses and circles marked on the asphalt in paint by the pair make a negative map of the space, and indicate everything that they are not and that cannot be seen. The situation here is not interesting as a simple demarcation, but as a journey, a passing through, in the sense that Guimarães Rosa affirmed: “Places do not disappear, they become enchanted.” All that we have is a zone without traces or frontiers. We are not dealing with simply playing a game (or creating a path from one place to another), but in producing movement that affects, at the same time, all of space.

The strangeness can be confused with contradictions as in Des-limite (2006) by Waléria Américo. Moving between floors of a tower by using the stairs, and having windows as a means of circulation between the outside and inside, we observe his proceedings well marked out but they do not reach an end or purpose. Risk and security are now very near, in spite of the first signifying a path to somewhere which is not yet known. In another work of 2005 – Para ver o céu mudar de cor – a series of five photographs are presented, which exhibit the image of an artist walking along a parapet on top of a building, neighbor to other sky-scrapers whose network of concrete nearly blackens out the horizon. As Moacir do Anjos confirms, “The danger of a fall implicit in the walk seems to be justified in the last of the photographs shown, in which the artist reaches a position that permits him to see the twilight beyond the barrier created by the buildings, as well as the title reason given to the work.”¹ The risk that is confirmed in the apprehensiveness of a city that is unfulfilled: it is a horizon; it does not belong anymore to its citizens and neither them to it. Excessively extensive and complex, it escaped from human touch and became a patchwork, in the expression of Felix Guattari, in which foolish fragments are changing places in a disorderly way. Off-centered and excessive, it does not behave in an integrated planned way. The habitant becomes the spectator-consumer who succumbs to the images of general esthetics and lives in the anxiety of an insatiable demand.

In this contemporized risk of seeing an even greater nearness between art and life (as if this dialogue were not a live contact established since someone named such experience as a work of art). Ronald Duarte executed in 2002 in the Santa Teresa district of Rio de Janeiro the intervention Fogo Cruzado. At the crossing of three tram rails, a trident is formed. The city is divided. An artist spreads rags and throws kerosene on it. Duarte uses approximately 500 meters of each rail. He organizes 13 pairs of friends who have the job of spreading the rags and then throwing the kerosene on the rails. Maybe the risk is not fire – seeing that it does not reach a height that could provoke great danger – but in the possibility of being arrested. ².

If we move on to a dialogue between discourse (politics) and an intervention allied to this process of risk, we arrive at Shibboleth, an intervention presented by Doris Salcedo in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern 2007. The work of this artist, nearly always accompanied by her own, and political, discourse, tends to run less risks when this association is produced. It is the moment when intention and discourse of the artist mix in the building up of a possible understanding or history of this work. According to Salcedo, the work was addressed to a long legacy of racism and colonialism which devastates the whole world. The term that gives a title to the work is a phrase or use of language which functions as a key of belonging to a particular social group. It is used to exclude those undesired to this group. Salcedo’s discourse continues to reveal that he has the intention of exposing a shattering that modernity itself is going through. However, we are not speaking any more of the risk that outlines, crosses and tears apart the physical space of the Tate and neither of the real risk of a person falling into the hole, but of the risk of the discourse of the artist corrupting the possibility of the work becoming more powerful that what she imagined it to be.

Cities are also the investigation of spaces in Falante (2007), a performance carried out by Romano. Carrying a backpack that emits sounds and a video camera, the artist wanders along the sidewalks of the cities, spreading (dis)information, requesting communication and very often “listening to the emptiness” as a comeback. Romano does not wait for anything: in reality he does not effectively want to talk. He is not a contemporary John Rio. He is not interested in researching the sounds, smells, views and space or in mapping the marvels of the city. With antecedents in 4 Dias e 4 Noites (1970) by Barrio, Romano evaluates, questions and exposes the more degrading and individualistic side of the city. During his performance, the artist is not often questioned or bothered by the public. His walkabout, with a heavy backpack/sound system stuck to his body, very loudly emitting the phrase “Do not pay attention,” does not awaken attention as such and is seen as being normal. The risk is in the emptiness. The non-communication and the strangeness become frequent and acceptable in the city. Nothing destabilizes, they are normal situations when the people do not let themselves be affected by each other.

It is affirmed that urban interference (or intervention) is a work that dialogues with subversion. This is a false analogy. All works of art are subversive to major or minor degrees. And the supposed subversion that urban interference carries is nearly always accompanied by a competent Government organ (as was the case described in this essay). We should be careful in analyzing a supposed loophole by the artist to the State in the production of this “interference.” We cannot confuse artistic practice highly emanated with power with a discourse intentionally simple to the act of “committing a crime” in the name of art. In the works commented on here there is no Europhobic discourse as a loophole but a dialogue conceived among space, architecture and experience.

1 DOS ANJOS, Moacir. Rumo a um lugar que não se conhece ainda. In: AMÉRICO, Waléria. Contínuo transitório. Fortaleza: Centro Cultural Banco do Nordeste, 2008. (catálogo de exposição).

2 “At that moment when they put fire, the police looks for the “guilty one” and starts asking the audience: ‘Who is Ronald Duarte?’. I had said to the audience that if somebody asked them who was Ronald Duarte, to tell them that he was a person wearing a T-Shirt where it was written ‘Fogo Cruzado’. There were 26 people dressed like that. So, Ronald Duarte could be any of them” (In: Briefing to the author. Rio de Janeiro, 03 de maio de 2006).