Uma Pausa de Mil Compassos

by Alexandre Sá, 2021

Samba Exaltação Project
Mirante do Vale Building

“To live this long avenue of neon gas
Doors of gold and silver
False dreams beneath these summer nights
Colorful faces, façades of joy
A tasteless kiss
Clandestine gestures, dizzy and thirsting for love

Thorns, roses, laughter, tears, and so much lovelessness
Cuts, scars, choked-back screams
Tears of pain
A mask upon the face, the party carries on
Salt upon the smile
The orchestra groans with the clown’s sorrows
A sorrowful outcast

Woe to those who dive into this sea of poison
This adorned mud, this blood in the glasses
Fearing to suffer
Woe to those who seek to deny this sea of poison
A thousand times cursed in unconsciousness
Those lives at the margins shall remain”

(Free Translation)

Gonzaguinha

Neon was invented at the end of the nineteenth century and quickly became an emblem of modernity, of progress, and of the social and urban transformations that lay ahead in the decades to come. If its emergence and use are structural to the way we think of the city as an imaginary in transit, it is not uncommon to encounter another, no less imaginary, image of its presence: the loneliness of its flickering, failing light in an empty shop window on a fast-moving night.

Uma pausa de mil compassos is the second movement in a series of works in which Felippe Moraes singles out affective fragments of songs and suspends them in the window of his apartment near the Santa Efigênia viaduct in downtown São Paulo. Here, the verse by Paulinho da Viola takes on new, perhaps spectral, tones in the face of an inevitable, oppressive pause brought on by a public health crisis, compounded by a lack of collective responsibility and permeated by a necrophilic undertone.

Solitude resurfaces here, intensified by the entangled relationship between public and private. If, on one hand, stepping out and existing in the space of the world is a risk of death, on the other, remaining in the world means sustaining one’s sense of self while confronting the insurmountable risk of intimacy exposed through screens. The bond between self and other — perhaps the result of a clumsy process of construction that insists on disregarding its own past — is shattered. What remains is a nostalgic longing for a future time. In eternal becoming. To be lit and extinguished. As if on the invisible wall of an intimate cave where the pure expression of living still urges to be.

Alexandre Sá
2021