Public Digital Art on FIESP`S Building Wrap Screen in São Paulo by Said Dokins & Roberto Palma

Interferences is a collaboration between Mexican artists Said Dokins and Roberto Palma that was screened at the building of the Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo, FIESP, to represent Mexico in Brazil during the Mexican Independence commemorations in 2022.
The work aims to create a dialogue between the various aesthetic discourses of the street of these large cities: Mexico City and São Paulo, while reflecting on the social and political condition of both countries, two years after the arrival of COVID-19 and the radical acceleration of digital transformation.
The work, composed by words, letters and phrases, makes a direct reference to the Brazilian pichação, one of the most risky illegal urban painting practices punishable by law in São Paulo (considered vandalism under the terms of article 65 – 9.605/98 of the Environmental Crimes Law that punishes up to one year in prison and high fines for pixadores).

Necropolitic Interferences

At the beginning of the monumentally projected video, an iridescent and sectioned face is shown from which the word NECROPOLÍTICA (Necropolitics), written in a pichação inspired style, overflows. For the artist Said Dokins ‘this piece seeks to reflect on our human condition and its relation with history, language and memory, at a time when the immateriality of our relationships sharpens the exercise of power and inequality in our cities.’

‘Something that we share in both Mexico and Brazil are the rates of violence, reflected in the use of police and military violence, the increase in disappearances, as well as gender violence and sexual abuse. In Mexico, militarization is becoming more and more reliable with the approval of the legislative reform to transfer the National Guard (a force created under civilian command) to the Secretary of National Defense (Sedena). The word Necropolitics resonates every time we think about the ways in which I manage politically our countries.’ Said Dokins

Historical interferences

In addition to the reference to the necropolitics that are lived in both countries, Interferences creates post-apocalyptic universes through a rich visual language that goes from the figurative, the written word and the calligraphic abstraction, vibrant spectrums that remind cyberpunk narratives, but also to ancient traditions through pre-Hispanic references illuminated in neon colors and extruded calligraphic textures.
For Dokins and Palma, it is important to refer to these elements of the past that have remained as remnants of history and that reappear in the popular narrative of cyberspace to be integrated as avatars of the metaverse.
In the elaboration of the piece, Roberto Palma comments that ‘the graffiti, calligraphy and pichação strokes were digitized, as well as the pre-Hispanic elements in a 3D model, creating the volumes in a three-dimensional space, with a 3 cameras set, allowing an anamorphic effect to be achieved, as well as an orthogonal version to correspond to physical space. By means of lighting based on ray-tracing and digital composition, the 3 faces of the FIESP were synchronized simultaneously.’

Poetic Interferences

Some other phrases that appear in the piece are: Aprender é morrer a cada dia (Learning is dying every day) and Netzahualcoyotl’s poem:

With what should I leave?
Will I leave nothing behind me on earth?
How should my heart act?
Do we come to live in vain,
to spring up on the ground?
Let’s at least leave flowers
Let’s at least leave songs
Netzahualcoyotl

Dokins comments on Netzahualcoyotl’s poem: ‘Being aware of our finite condition and of the several catastrophes that have arisen on our passage through the planet, one of the most recurrent questions is if we really have the necessary resilience capacity to overcome the catastrophes that we ourselves have created and if in that quest the currency of exchange is our own planet’.

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