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This text was originally published in the catalogue of the 2010 edition of performance showcase Verbo, which took place in the end of July, in São Paulo. It was written after a seminar conducted by the author in the showcase’s 2009 edition. The complete publication with this and other texts is available here, in pdf format.

An unexpected invitation

The right word is surprised: I was caught by surprise by the invitation made by VERBO 09 [Verb 09], opening the opportunity for my participation in the VERBO Conjugado [Conjugated Verb] seminar, dedicated to debates concerning performance in the context of the visual arts. After all, throughout my professional career, I had never considered myself qualified to deal with this theme, not belonging, from any point of view, to any field of the arts or art criticism. My training as an architect and urbanist has led me along other paths, involving the investigation of the city and its territories, the social actors that constitute them in permanent articulations and tensions, as well as the political and symbolic tools they construct to defend their positions in the city. Certainly, all these elements are possible sources for the practice of performance, but evidently VERBO 09 did not need me to become aware of this, since there are many artists who have been using references to the urban space, the history of the city and urban politics for the construction of their performances. Neither did it seem to me that the participants of the seminar needed a theoretical basis derived from urban studies for the realization of their work. We all know that too much theory gets in the way and, moreover, the artists who work with performance in the urban space know very well how to search for their theoretical references, when this is the case. In short, justifying my presence at the seminar presented a big challenge for me.

After some time of reflection, I opted for a participation with a less analytic and more autobiographical character: to bring to VERBO Conjugado an aspect of my experience in the comprehension and register of the urban territory, which has been guiding part of my research and intervention in the debate on the city. For more than 15 years I have been researching, along various paths, the relations between the living and the dead in the urban space. With this research, I have been showing that – even though in the 19th century the living expelled the dead from their day-to-day life – our everyday life continues to be permeated by relations with the dead: bodies and relics of saints operating miracles, places where deaths considered sacred or particularly eerie or sinister occurred, places for communication with the world of the dead… Wherever we look, the dead are there. With this work, I seek to combat the idea that our society is totally secularized: the relations of religion and spirituality continue to be very present in the space of the cities.

For me, the recovery of aspects of my own trajectory as a researcher of the urban territory, and putting my reflections into discussion in this seminar, can function in two ways: on the one hand, it offers raw material for those who work with performance, who are perhaps interested in developing or unfolding some reference that I inject into the debate. On the other, it reflects on the instruments for research in the urban space: registering, associating, presenting aspects of urban life which, without our work, would remain hidden. These instruments are not so strange to the world of performance. There are various artists who operate with these procedures.

Beginning a voyage toward the territories of the dead

I began my researches into the territories of the dead with a very simple subject: the colored tombs in the cemeteries in the smaller towns and cities of São Paulo state, which intrigued me precisely for not fitting into any of the forms in terms of which I had learned to analyze architecture. While they clearly bore no connection to erudite forms and institutions, they were also unconnected with the traditional or vernacular modalities, since they presented an intense elaboration of information from a wide range of sources, were made using more or less industrialized materials, and also evinced multiple styles and languages. On the other hand, I noticed an undeniable capacity for synthesis of the available elements, resulting in the production of creative forms. I also perceived the conversations that the languages of the tombs established among themselves, revealing modalities proper to the circulation of architectural and decorative knowledge that took place in a specific way in each cemetery. This research and these considerations constituted the subject of my master’s thesis.

I soon discovered that the authors of these tombs were bricklayers and construction contractors who resorted to their overall repertoires in constructing them, often using the same materials they used to build houses for the living. I felt that I had discovered a gold mine: “architects” trained outside institutions, who elaborated their own syntheses in each tomb, producing something akin to personal styles, removed from both the erudite styles and the vernacular traditions. By investigating more deeply the way in which these professionals – the authors of a truly Brazilian synthesis, distant from imported and colonized models – created their languages and buildings, I would be able to further my knowledge of the real and mainstream architecture used in the construction of our cities. Shedding light on these procedures meant helping to elucidate aspects of a national architecture that owed nothing to the so-called “erudite” schools.

Today, the foregoing hypothesis is clearly seen to be ingenuous. It did not take me long to discover that my initial hypotheses were wrong. As I progressed in my field work, visiting more and more cemeteries, interviewing the participants and photographing their works, I perceived that those popular builders did not work autonomously in relation to the representations of the elite. On the contrary, the tombs of the richest people served as the most frequent models for the popular reinterpretations.

Another upset was that with all my interviews, I never managed to find a bricklayer or construction contractor who recognized in his own work a personal style or language, a specific authorial synthesis based on which he positioned himself in the community. Actually, they all, without exception, said that the people responsible for the final form of the tombs were always the families of the deceased. “But don’t you give any suggestions?” Nothing. At most, a family without any prior ideas would take a walk around the cemetery and choose a model close to what they wanted. What was worse, the bricklayer’s work in the cemetery brought him no prestige. He was seen by the community in a shadowy light, confused with the image of the gravedigger.

But the major upset was still another. I perceived that the tombs that had initially caught my attention as being the most creative were the older ones: from the 1920s, 1940s, up to the 1970s. With some exceptions, the more contemporary the tomb, the more it tended toward simplicity, horizontality, and nondifferentiation.

My national and popular architect was lost, substituted by someone who delegated all the aesthetic decisions (and seemed not to suffer because of this), who did not obtain any prestige from his professional activity, and furthermore was tending to no longer create what I considered to be the most interesting architecture. In other words: as my field work progressed, my initial hypothesis took a beating from the object of my research itself.

I was not aware at that time that my difficulties in recognizing my original hypothesis in the findings of my field work would start me down a new course, this time oriented by what my research was actually revealing. I gradually found elements and relations that led me away from the initial route and showed me new paths, which the first approach would never have allowed me to follow.

First of all, the paths of time, of History. The discovery that the architecture that had initially charmed me was gradually disappearing awakened me to the fact that it was a historically constituted object. I therefore initiated a historic research, seeking to identify the temporal context that had given rise to the architectural production that interested me. I wound up studying the historical beginnings of the cemeteries in the state of São Paulo.

During the first three centuries of Portuguese colonization in Brazil, the living and the dead lived in close proximity in the cities, the dead being entombed at churches in the center of the urban space and everyday life. This situation prevailed until the early 19th century. During the 19^th century, various sectors of the elites began setting forth a number of considerations, ranging from health to decency, all converging on the idea of condemning the traditional customs of death and burial. The social construction, which in the name of “civilization” segregated the dead from the living, established a single place for them in the city: the public cemetery at the city’s periphery. But once the tension from an urbanistic point of view was resolved, new tensions and contradictions emerged. The interface between the living and the dead of people of all colors and social classes in a single territory gave rise to new manners of differentiation between the various groups in society. Architecture entered the scene, mobilized in all its potential to attribute to the tombs a specific position in society.

But my efforts at perceiving and systematizing the hybrid architectural form of the tombs in the cemeteries of small cities and towns of São Paulo State as creations, rather than deviations, did not bring me to the encounter of “legitimate,” “genuine,” languages “of resistance.” On the contrary: generally, I identified a persistent sense in the creations and formal appropriations. The capacity for proposing new forms – and, therefore, a certain control on the obsolescence of the old ones – begins almost always from the richest people, moving toward the poorer ones, and the cemetery is the privileged field for identifying this movement. This inequality was truly disquieting, because I found it hard to accept that the poorer people had such a peripheral role in the territory of the cemeteries.

I was able to obtain a response to this uneasiness, thanks to the insistence of some of the deceased, who followed me ever since the outset of the survey, who appeared recurrently without being called, and wound up deserving an entire chapter, the third and last chapter, in my master’s dissertation. These were a set of tombs of “popular saints,” present in practically all of the cemeteries, places the population resorted to in order to ask favors or to express their thanks for miracles received. Tombs that constitute spaces of devotion and, in some cases, are nearly the destination of pilgrimages, establishing windows of interface and communication between the world of the living and the dead. These relations and territories impugn the radical separation between the world of the living and the dead, brought about by the strenuous efforts of the 19th-century “civilizing” elites. The popular matrix, which at the outset I had sought among the bricklayers and artisans, appeared in its greatest force in a place which initially had not even been part of the field of research: the persistence of age-old interfaces, exchanges and communication between the world of the living and the dead which, I perceived, are far from extinct.

The foregoing trajectory is explained in more detail in my book Cidades dos vivos: arquitetura e atitudes perante a morte nos cemitérios do Estado de São Paulo [Cities of the Dead: Architecture and Attitudes in Regard to Death in the Cemeteries of the State of São Paulo] (Ed. Anna Blume/FAPESP, 2002), which, rather than merely satisfying my curiosity concerning the territories of the dead, raised new questions, which I developed in later works.

The relations between the living and the dead: a historic object

One of the main outcomes from the research on cemeteries in smaller cities and towns in the state of São Paulo was a great uneasiness in regard to the documentation that I had found throughout the course of my research. Sources that I hardly understood, but which revealed their potential concerning the production of knowledge about the territory in the cities. These consisted of five or six passages of documentation from the 16th to 18th centuries, all previously published, which revealed that, in some cases, the dead had arrived before the living at the outset of the organization of cities in the state of São Paulo. It seems that sometimes a cemetery or the tomb of a special person would not only precede, but even guide and condition, later permanent settlements, some of which became large cities. 1

Could this be possible? Had the dead participated, so to say, actively in the urbanization of Brazil? Had the people and the cities behaved in this manner, so radically different from the way we relate with the territory nowadays? Answering these questions presupposes a more intense delving into the instrumentation of History, and this was the challenge that I faced in the process of earning my doctorate.

The paths I had tread had brought me far from what I had at first suspected, both geographically (including a fundamental visit to some Portuguese and Spanish archives) and academically, demanding a radical foray into areas outside my training and discipline. The documents that so much fascinated me were, actually, reports from a world that has long since ceased to exist, and which reached its peak at the beginning of the Modern Age. Although it had not been in my plans, I began studying the territory of the 16th and 17th centuries, and became something of a specialist in the territorial aspects of Portuguese America, an identity somewhat uncomfortable for a researcher so close to the debates concerning contemporaneity. Even so, I took up this intellectual challenge with the utmost intensity.

To satisfy my uneasinesses, I had to learn to get on closer terms with a world that was immensely different from ours. A world our truths help little to reveal, if the idea were to understand it on one’s own terms. The main parameters that guided the work were given by religiosity. At the beginning of the Modern Age it was unthinkable for a Christian man to think, move through or produce the territory in a secular way. It was a world whose entrance portal was the total integration between the religious and the social, where there was no doubt that the greatest force for constructing the world was divine providence. God commanded and controlled everything. Everything was in His hands. Material life was the revelation of a spiritual and divine dimension, without any questioning. The aim here is not to deny that the actors of that time had economic or pragmatic reasons for their acts, but rather to identify another rationality, with a spiritual and religious basis, which also guided the production of the territory. Moreover, it involves the undoing of an association, which for us is automatic, that defines the sphere of spirituality as a “symbolic” realm, a poor cousin of the realm of the “real” or the “material,” when we analyze the territorial development in any period. The situation was very different at the beginning of the Modern Age, when for the Christian, concepts such as God, the devil, sin, heaven, hell, purgatory and others were “realities revealed by the divine realm and, therefore more real than the fleeting temporal aspects of our lives.”2 The result of this work was consolidated in the book Sangue, Ossos e Terras: os mortos e a ocupação do território luso-brasileiro [Blood, Bones and Lands: The Dead and the Occupation of the Luso-Brazilian Territory] (Ed. Alameda/FAPESP, 2009).

The first two chapters of that book seek to show that in the 16th and 17th centuries the conformation of territory, both in Catholic Europe as well as Portuguese America, was highly mediated by the sacred bodies of the saints and by the places and reports of the martyrs. Here, I do not refer to the more recent and ethereal representation of the saints and glorious images, but to the physical presence of their bodies on the Earth, of the material signs of their passage through this world before they departed from here to be with God. This investigation took on more and more space as the work progressed, as I allowed myself to be seduced by the unending documentation of what I discovered, whose problematics opened up like a fan. This has turned out to be a nearly inexhaustible field of study, yet it has allowed me to affirm some things about the presence of the bodies of saints in the territory.

The first chapter concerns some very special dead people: the Christian martyrs, whose paths of suffering transformed the places of their death and burial into places invested with exceptional meanings. In this chapter, I reconstruct the relations of identity between the worship of the martyrs and the Christian territorial order, to show that at the beginning of the Modern Age the narrative of martyrdom was endowed with great meaning, leveraged by the pedagogical power of countless deaths in the context of religious strife in Europe during the Reformation, coupled with the circulation of information in regard to the martyrdom of missionaries in the new regions. The martyrdoms were also events full of meanings for the Indians that the Portuguese found in America. This chapter also shows the willingness of the missionaries – Jesuits and Franciscans – to die for the sake of the expansion of the Christian faith.

The second chapter concerns the sacred relics, the material remains of the bodies of the saints, especially their bones. Unlike the places of martyrdom, which were fixed and permanent, the relics were mobile objects that could be treated in a very diverse way. They could sleep hidden for centuries until being rediscovered, as occurred extensively on the Iberian Peninsula in the 16th and 17th centuries, after the reconquest of the territory by the Christians. This movement also took place in Americaand in Asia, mainly involving the relics of Saint Thomas, an apostle who had preached in those lands. The beginning of the Modern Age was probably the period of greatest mobility for the relics, due to various processes that occurred simultaneously: in Northern and Central Europe, the Protestant reforms denied their power of intermediation between the divine and earthly realms, depriving the churches of their relics and not rarely destroying them. Conversely, in Catholic Europe their worship was exalted. Countless relics exchanged hands and moved from city to city at that time, and the ceremonies for the movement and reception of the relics took on grandiose importance. The movement of the relics became worldwide in scope, since it was fundamental to integrate the vast new lands within the symbolic Christian narrative, and the arrival of the relics in the colonies were momentous, ennobling events that could even influence the settlement of cities in Portuguese America.

While the first two chapters give priority to the ways that the clergy was related with the territory, the basic question of the third chapter is: what relations were promoted by the Crown in regard to the territoriality of death? Focused on the kings to which Portuguese America was subject in the 16th century, the chapter entitled O corpo do Reino [The Body of the Kingdom] shows that while on the one hand the procedures related to the martyrdoms and to the transport and collection of relics were entirely legitimated by the kings, on the other, there was an important process of territorial isolation and monumental isolation of the place where the kings were buried, showing the progressive affirmation of the royal figure by way of these tombs, an integral part of the process of the State’s centralization. The royal tombs were also fundamental for the legitimization of the capital cities – which in this case were two: Lisbon and Madrid – which ended up producing a new territorial hierarchy for the empires.

The fourth chapter, A comunidade dos vivos e dos mortos [The Community of the Living and the Dead], shows that the dead who were able to influence the sociability and organization of the territory included more than only saints and martyrs. The common dead also had their powers. In this chapter, I seek to investigate the bonds of dependencies and reciprocities that linked the living and the dead, showing the powerful capacity for aggregation on the territory that the dead possessed at the beginning of the Modern Age, constituting nearly a social group, an “age bracket” of citizens.

The geography of “the beyond” was part of the life of the people, as were the streets, houses and churches in the city, and there were clear and widely accepted paths of access between these two worlds. Special importance was given to purgatory, which among the territories of the beyond was certainly the one with the most interfaces with the world of the living.

The Catholic occupation of Brazil also signified a massive clashing of funeral territorialties, perhaps the most profound that humanity has ever witnessed. The meanings attributed to death and to territory by the native inhabitants of Brazil could not have been more different from those of the Portuguese.

The fifth and final chapter of the book, Os índios, sua terra e seus mortos [The Indians, Their Land and Their Dead] is wholly dedicated to the indigenous peoples, seeking to understand how the Indians, specifically the Tupi, articulated the relations between death and territory in their own terms. In this sense, it relates apparently disparate aspects, such as the little importance given to the places of burial, nomadism, anthropophagy and attitudes toward the body.

The city, the dead, and the history of VERBO 09

My path through the territories of the dead is far from over. Currently, I am conducting research at the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences at Universidade Estadual de Campinas (IFCH-UNICAMP), with a research grant from FAPESP, about the role of the martyrdoms as an element for the sacralization of territory, which was fundamental for the conversion of the sertão [backlands], inhabited by Indians and demons, to Catholicism, in the 16th and 17th centuries.

I do not consider myself a specialist in the past. On the contrary, all of this research is aimed at legitimizing forms of construction and occupation of territory based on religiosity and spirituality, which are far from being extinct – perhaps even on the rise. Contemporary events such as globalization, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the growth of the socalledfundamentalisms of the Middle East and around the world, make it urgent that we reflect on the filters that were successively imposed on our society, such as, for example, the National State, technicist society, and the separation between science, politics and religion. Recognizing the power of the religious logics in the dispute and occupation of the territory bears a meaning that extends into other fields. At the beginning of the 21st century, achieving a knowledge and recognition of a world and a humanity whose actions are driven by religiosity and spirituality is not a whim, but an urgency.

Returning to the considerations that I made at the beginning of this text, it seems to me that the paths I have taken present some similarities with the way that some artists construct performance works, principally those who take the urban space and its agents as their subject. All these things – an uneasiness with a problem that initially appeared to be little more than an intuition, an effort of documentation and systematizing, a perspective of intervention in a debate of a more public character, the concern for restoring dignity to countless people whose lives were (and still are) structured by values that to our technical and contemporary eyes might appear outdated, folkloric or obscurantist – are all concerns that also circulate in the context of performance.

The format that I have been finding to give vent to these concerns has been eminently academic, but perhaps this is owing more to my own concerns, insecurities, opportunities and talents than to a greater effectiveness of the method of research in providing answers to the challenges that I have sought to face. Certainly, an investigation of a more artistic and freer character, concerning the same objects, subjects and documents, would offer new possibilities for problematizing and disseminating the questions that concern me.

Renato Cymbalista is an artist and urbanist, with a master’s and PhD from FAU-USP. A postdoctoral researcher with IFCH – UNICAMP in the project “Dimensões do Império português” [Dimensions of the Portuguese Empire]. A fully instated researcher with the Instituto Polis. Author of books and articles about urban history and urban politics, including Cidade dos vivos: arquitetura e atitudes perante a morte nos cemitérios no estado de São Paulo [City of the Dead: Architecture and Attitudes in Regard to Death in the Cemeteries of the State of São Paulo] (Anna Blume/FAPESP, 2002); São Paulo, Panorâmica em 360° [São Paulo, a 360° Panorama], (with Helmut Batista – Panaview, 2006); and Sangue, ossos e terras: os mortos e a ocupação do território lusobrasileiro [Blood, Bones and Lands: The Dead and the Occupation of the Luso-Brazilian Territory] (Alameda Editorial/FAPESP, 2009).