Public Living Room

Formed in 1996 by architects and artists, BijaRi is a collective focused on visual arts and multimedia creation. Through the use of different resources and technologies, and both analog and digital media, they propose artistic experimentations that attempt to challenge the way we think about our surroundings and the relation between humans and the urban environment in which we live in. Urban interventions, video art, performances, design and web design are the mediums used to provoke such reflections.

Their latest intervention took place on Paulista Avenue, one of the city´s busiest streets, which is often compared to New York’s 5th Avenue due to its many financial institutions and skyscrapers. The intervention consisted of a living room set up on the middle of the sidewalk. The purpose? To provoke some of the city’s 19 million inhabitants to think about the public space, how they relate to it and how they feel about the city itself. 1.2 million people walk along the avenue each day, almost none of whom actually take time to look at their surroundings. BijaRi’s “Sala Paulista” (Paulista Living Room) is meant to lift people out of that frenzy and provoke them to think of São Paulo in a more humane manner.

The intervention was made for Continuum online magazine, a project developed by Itaú Cultural, an institute devoted to promoting and disseminating Brazilian artistic production.

[via Itau Cultural]