The project Arte/Cidade (Art/City) takes place in São Paulo since 1994. Its point of departure is the understanding that contemporary culture results from an expanding interaction, generated by the large city, among the various artistic languages. The project is framed in a new vision of culture, devoted to the enhancement of diffusion and exchange circuits that may invigorate different artistic areas and cultural spaces.

The object of Art/City is to promote the meeting of artists from different backgrounds and languages -- fine arts, theater, photography, cinema, music, dance, architecture, and video --, according to the contemporary trend of integrating artistic activities. On the other hand, it also wishes to enlighten city spots of meaningful historical and symbolic value, which are never used for artistic activities; to make the population contemplate with different eyes these significant spaces, designing a new map of São Paulo.

The project is divided in three segments. Two of them were concluded. In the last segment, "The City and its Stories", that will now be accomplished, we have a railroad station, and a railroad section that crosses significant places of the city's manufactural period: the abandoned barns and structures of an old mill, a railroad yard, the sheds and chimneys remaining from a large industrial complex in the city's western zone. Here it is evident, more than in other segments, the particular meaning of these sites. Now, approximately 30 artists, in addition to a group of architects, are devising interventions in these spots.

The public will move by train through these different places. A train specially reserved for the event will stop at the various exhibition sites. The route works as the conductive thread of the city's organization and history. Time is taken as an element of artistic production, history as an aesthetic reference.

An evolution may be perceived between the segments of the series. The works of art conceived for the event become less and less related to their own regular production (conceived and completed in the studio), to increasingly reflect the relationship with the circumstances and places. In this, it took place an apprenticeship, a procedure was configured. The works of art tend more and more to appraise the places, the architectural insertion, the urban scale, the complexity of circumstances (information resources, coexistence with other interventions and activities).

Brasmitte, a new project in preparation, retrieves the principle of intervention that is at the origin of these events, seeking to explore the relationships among art, architecture and urbanism, potentiated by the circumstances. Bras and Mitte are places that generate oppositions and conflicts that are at the basis of artistic creation. They are able to accept an intervention project as an environment for dialogue, where differences become apparent and are expressed.