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31ª Mostra > 08/04/2008
Text: Leon Cakoff, for ‘Jornal da Mostra’
SÃO PAULO’S LAW IS STILL ECHOING IN GERMANY
A Brazilian popular saying states that what comes from below doesn’t reach one. But when a good example comes from below, in this case, from the south of the planet, the north is shaken. One year after the Clean City Law in São Paulo, which wiped the city out of the propaganda chaos and revealed its real façades, the city hall initiative is still echoing in Europe. Especially in Germany, which, after being reunited, is still living the shopping euphoria. With billboards growing bigger and bigger, more extravagant and all over the place. Especially in Berlin, which is still recuperating from of the traumas of being torn between two Germanys.
Filmmaker Wolfgang Becker was widely required by the German media due to the big success of his film GOODBYE LENIN . In it, Becker rebuilt the desolated landscapes of a communist East Berlin, grey and closed to the West’s appeals to shopping. A boy tries to save the mother, militant and with a heart condition, from the news of the communism collapse. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he pretends to his mother that East Berlin is still isolated and safe from the capitalist temptations. Until one big Coca-Cola billboard can be seen from her apartment window, as a sign of opening and freedom of purchase.
According to Becker, in the interviews he gave to newspapers, magazines and television, the articles compared the naked Berlin to São Paulo in the process of publicity clean up, with the skeletons of empty billboards. As the media obviously defend the publicity market, some articles were alarming in suggesting how the city would be sadder without the happy colors of the invitations to shopping… as in the times of the communist cover.
In fact, Berlin is living an unlimited publicity boom, much more aggressive than it was in São Paulo a year ago, when the city hall Law started to work. The picture illustrating this article already announced, in February, on the façade of the modern Sony Center building, the next film produced by Sony Pictures with the new 007 adventures – QUANTUM OF SOLACE, being produced and with world premiere set for November 7, 2008.
But the comparison between Berlin and São Paulo ends with the permission or not to expose publicity on the streets and on the façades of the buildings. Berlin is a city with good examples “from above”. It is a humanized city, with the whole infrastructure of public transportation, cycle ways, social service, education and health. And it is a city that dedicates a good part of its wealth to the beauty of its historical buildings and to the construction of new meeting points, such as Sony Center itself, designed by architect Helmut Jahn. Opened in 2000, having cost 800 million dollars, it soon became a tourist attraction in the new unified Berlin.
As said by the famous Brazilian architect Isay Weinfeld, São Paulo before the Clean City law was chaotic and ugly. Now it is only ugly.
English version: Laura Rebessi