In October 2013, I made a luminous intervention at Beco do Batman, in Vila Madalena, where the channeled Córrego Rio Verde runs beneath. This alley illustrates the kind of relationship that São Paulo residents maintained with their rivers in the last century: all the houses face away from the stream, seen as a place for dumping garbage and sewage. It was the same gesture as Cachoeira, a year and a half earlier — revealing through light an invisible river, buried beneath the city. But this time without the backing of any institution, without a production team, without budget. It was me, the project, and public space in its rawest form.

I built a 3D model of the alley inside Rhinoceros from satellite photos and on-site measurements. With Grasshopper, I simulated different compositions with the individual length of each electroluminescent cable as output — they came in 40-meter segments, so the parametric design needed to resolve not just the form, but the actual material logistics. I arrived at 240 meters of light, suspended in the center of the street and structured by six bicycle rims and steel cables. Billy Castilho and Pablo Gallardo, from Tag & Juice, offered support: shop open until 10pm on installation day, electricity, ladders, and the bicycle rims. Jan Nehring and Wesley Lee Yang, FAU colleagues who had participated in other installations with me, agreed to mount the work. Boleta, the graffiti artist who was painting a wall in the alley that day, gave informal approval to intervene in the place — without that, it wouldn’t have been possible.

At nightfall on October 5th, the work was installed. This space that during the day is very busy tends to be almost uninhabited at night — not that day. Many graffiti artists were with us during the installation, and they, more than anyone, felt the physical interference of light in space and could experience this ephemeral and “new” place, that situation. The installation remained mounted for a short period — I couldn’t count on security guards or controlled access. It was light in real public space, with all its own rules, its informal owners, its car flow, its unpredictabilities. Part of the LUZCIDADE series, which I completed a month later in Serra da Mantiqueira.