A spiral in the heart of the metropolis: artistic occupation, rebel bodies and urban re-existence in São Paulo

Source abstract

This article examines Ouvidor 63, a self-managed artistic occupation in downtown São Paulo, as a form of insurgent artistic commoning. Located in a former public building first occupied by housing movements in 1997 and reoccupied by artists in 2014, Ouvidor brings together dwelling, cultural labour, migrant circulation, collective care and political self-government in a city centre shaped by vacancy, policing and real-estate redevelopment. Drawing on four years of collaborative research between the Federal University of São Paulo and resident artists—including workshops, collective writing, public actions, legal and heritage strategies, and the collectively authored Projeto Ocupações—the article asks what such occupations contribute to debates on urban commons, squatting, cultural labour and post-capitalist imaginaries. Organised around three axes—space–time, body-word and border-culture—it approaches Ouvidor as a spiralling infrastructure of use, memory and conflict, continually assembled under conditions of legal uncertainty, institutional negotiation and real-estate pressure. Its rebel bodies, migrant networks and Afro-Indo-Latin American imaginaries do not escape capitalist relations, but partially interrupt what Mark Fisher calls ‘capitalist realism’ by making other forms of dwelling, labour, care and cultural production materially perceptible and collectively practicable.