In São Paulo, at the end of 2005, something that may have sounded like a detail amid the flurry of year-end and to the actual accelerated pace of the city, would call my attention some years later. Because at that moment of my graduation in Social Sciences I was focused to think about the issues about art, it happened to me to see the acting of a faceless group, preserved by their integrants’ anonymity, which was self-entitled: Don Quijote. I started a search to understand what was the performance of this group of such an evocative name and, in short, I realized that they have practiced for a few months a series of misrepresentations in traffic signals in specific parts of São Paulo, spreading along the streets and avenues, with various pasted stickers figures on the signs. But in what did that interest me?

“The sameness of standardization leads to a saturated look of acceptances. We are obliged to be guided by arrows and directions of others. All very clear, all very straight, all well and good. Sure as a sign prohibiting parking hidden behind a tree and you get a fine for this (…). The automation of standardized citizens imputes a trained eye and amputates the subjectivity and surreality inherent in our complexity.”¹ The change in the traffic signals made that Don Quijote group built a way to dialog with the urban space: “The choice of signals wasn’t for anarchical reasons, and to increase the chaos of the traffic. The choice was born when we started to see the signs as a direct range media to the citizen, highly available and without commercial breaks”.² Through this language, their activities showed me the need for discussion about the recreation of a contemporary symbolic imaginary.  This urban intervention, unfolding as artistic experience, generated an avalanche of questions of individuals’ interaction with the environment around them, as well as the participation of society in the process of rebuilding the public space.

The symbol here is an important element in trying to think about such issues, it will be employed from the idea of using it as a code that translates and unifies, by convention, perceptions of reality. A sort of generalization that conceptualizes various elements into a single class, whose function is to mediate our relations with others and with the environment, giving meaning to the way of perceiving the world and act on it. Having, in the specific case of traffic signs, a reduction of the polysemy from state conventions and the systematization of symbolic information. Thus, the traffic signs are considered by the group information that make up a way of “thought control” and the actions of individuals. Such interventions arouse questions about “the automation of citizens and the endless prohibitions imposed without any discussion of public space”¹.  

Observing the signs alteration one sees a good-humored satire of institutions and establishments located, in general, in the vicinity of the signals. .The figures are made by the group in black and white, and their design are similar to the signs seem in traffic; however what arouses attention is the multiplicity of unexpected images. After nights of action of the interveners, streets and avenues of the Capital City dawn with several figures covering mainly the round signs: “It is a similar interference to the graffiti, but it has another kind of language. Rather than depredation, it is a revival of public space. Apparently it is predatory, but it is not. These images stuck together are used to discuss the public space.”² It drives the need for participation of the individuals in the creation and organization of that space. Otherwise, it tends to undergo a process of total regulation either state or private, which blocks the recognition of public space as a place of experience and collective creation. The intervention of Don Quijote’ group is an attempt of action that configures the resumption of these spaces by individuals. The group itself states: “The city is the space for our ideas and ideals, and its porosity is legally protected to be raped to get new insights. Admittedly, these were questions and insights that led Mister ‘Don Quijote’ to intervene in boards that have arrows pointing, prohibiting and allowing somewhat uncertain paths”.³ That is, the creation of new symbols and meanings which will argue the former and, more generally, the imprisonment of looking at the conditioning routine.  

The problem of individuals’ automation is directly linked to the internalization of symbolic systems, without questioning the legitimacy of these. Therefore, the action of pasting the new images resignifies the traffic signs, because it is a way of letting people perplexed by the finding of a symbol they are not used, causing not only an estrangement, and indirectly causing the reflection on the validity or legitimacy of internalized signs for ’social imposition’.

Only three examples will be satisfactory to the illustration of the interventionist character of the works. The first one is a sticker titled A Black Buddha on the Cross of Exu at signals positioned in front of the evangelical and Catholic churches. With a great and clear visual work on the sticker chart we could see a fusion of religious doctrines, opening a fruitful discussion on syncretism. The theme returns in the board headed by the group: Jesus also meditated friend. In front of the renowned cultural institutions of the city the reference is the alteration called by the interveners: Duchamp: from the Museum to the Streetss. The patch created refers to one of the most famous and controversial works of the always cited Marcel Duchamp. 

Revered not for nothing. The influence of the Dadaist can be seen in the philosophy of Don Quijote, because in addition to the board cited the group has an Duchampian inspiration that converges on the creation of alternatives of expression fleeing the traditional categories and the ingrained habits of consuming art and culture. Inventing new forms of artistic expression, which awaken the eyes of other spectators inside the old ones.

That is why I understand the movement of which deals the philosopher Espinoza facing the power of a body to affect and be affected by other bodies, this being defined by the affections of which is capable. In the case of the group, we can say that this will be reflected in the lyrical impulse that adhesive works will transmit to the affected bodies. Through the creative power, the power of affectation becomes constant, causing disruptions in individual pre-established code system, which could perhaps be translated by the Deleuzian concept of “deterritorialization”. At the reception of unscheduled information, occurs the reorganization of the individual’s thought, which will have as a reference the breakdown of trained thought causing, sometimes the organization of the new one. The redefinition of public space recreates symbolic systems internalized by each of us, as a quotation of the filosofer Gilles Deleuze: “the interior is only a selected exterior; the exterior, an interior designed“. From this perspective, space is nothing but a projection of our internalized symbolic systems. From the moment that the individual acts in order to transform the external, redefining it, also transforms and recreates itself: public space needs to be problematized and used as a place of emancipation and diversity.

Chosen by clear reasons, the group name is interwoven into their practices uniting the idea of creative power as a source of affectation of bodies. According to the group: “He (Dom Quixote) is a fighter of the metaphor, a fighter of the imaginary, he is a visual poet. His words are pure image, he is a lyrical militant” The art thus opens a gap for thinking about these issues, as Deleuze describes: “The act of resistance has two faces. It is human and it is also an artistic act. Only the resistance act resists to death, whether in the form of artwork, or in the form of a struggle of men“. Thus, far from being exhausted in these lines, such questions are reflected here in an effort to interact with the ramifications of the actions of the group Don Quijote. Not like the arrival port of ideas, but rather a starting point, an imaginary trampoline, which will support the attempt to think through art, contemporary issues such as rebuilding and construction of the public space and the symbolic systems, and conditioning the socio-cultural content of the individuals in the mediation of our relationship with the environment.

¹Testimony taken from the blog of “Don Quijote” group: http://permitidopermitir.blogspot.com

²Idem

¹Idem

²Testemony of the Professor of Communication of PUC-SP, Sílvio Miele, in an interview to the Diário de São Paulo in December, 2005 in the matter entitled “New Vandalism?”

³ http://permitidopermitir.blogspot.com 

DELEUZE, Gilles. Espinosa: filosofia da prática. São Paulo: Editora Escuta, 2002. 

GUATARRI, Félix (1992). Caosmose: um novo paradigma estético. São Paulo: Editora 34, 1992. 

http://www.permitidopermitir.blogspot.com/