Shot mostly from the rooftop of the apartment building where I grew up, this is one of my first-ever films. It alternates between a read poem and an interview with my mom. In the poem, I imagine a doomsday scenario where all these buildings are destined to collapse one day. Meanwhile, my mother opens up about her frustrated dreams of living in a neighborhood closer to nature in São Paulo, which was eventually overtaken by concrete as the area kept growing and new, taller skyscrapers were built.
The themes of the failure of utopia, which have stayed with me more than a decade later, are clearly evident in this video/poem about a kind of deluded romanticism that’s been passed down through generations of my family, from my immigrant great-grandparents all the way to me.
The guitar was recorded by my old childhood friend Luis "Porcacultor" Misiara when I stayed for a week in his dorm room in a New York City in the freezing last days of 2013.
Poem:
We Live on Treetops
Since my nemesis, who lived
on the apartment overlooking mine,
committed suicide
by jumping off the balcony
one year ago,
I have lost the main reason I gave my mother
for abandoning her and moving in with my grandma:
namely, that he wanted me dead
because at night he liked to party hard, high on coke
and in the afternoon he slept,
and while he dreamt he was a soldier stepping on my skull in Ancient Rome,
I trained to become a singer
and my vocalizes woke him up.
Now it does not suffice.
to mention traffic and lack of nightlife.
So I tell mum
that the entire neighborhood’s destined to collapse,
that every single tower,
will submerge into the mucosae of the earth and
become its underworld negative,
shadow of its shadow,
for concrete has no root.
The neighborhood was built on
the river’s muddy shores,
I remember,
and on a sin bearing no originality:
foreign settlements, speculation
I remember
when I close my eyes and press
my eyelids against my eyeballs
to the point of hurting them
I remember
“What was so special about this neighborhood when you first moved in?”
“I found it really special that there were fireflights during the night,
there were crickets and cicadas.
It was like a village in the countryside.
There were still many plots of
land where nothing had been built.
So we felt as if
not in a big city.
There was little traffic and the friends
were like neighbors in the countryside,
we got along very well, there
was a feeling of community.
But after all these years,
everything has changed,
and the neighborhood’s
become really bad,
with a lot of traffic, many buildings.
It has lost all the charm it used to have.
And it’s also become very distant
from everything because of the traffic.”
Romantics revel in disenchantment
The curse has been in the family for several generations now
I can trace it back to my greatgrandparents
who sailed across the atlantic
leaving behind them a barren land,
or in my mother's fantasizing a bucolic life,
luring birds into the balcony with artificial nectar,
and growing sugarbeet on the window ledge.
The naive beauty of these dreams
and the architecture they engender
seduces me to the point that
from now on
I’ll admit to finding and cherishing in my heritage
in its shipwrecks and navigations
its highrises and debris
the petrol for gigantic projects of my own
standing firmly on islands
off any given shore.
