The Latest at Goethe

Luxury in a former brothel, police in a squatters’ high-rise, a footbath in the lift: Visitors to X Homes encounter imaginative stagings in real living environments. Now, the Brazilian metropolis of São Paulo was the setting for the happening that originated in Berlin. By Renate Klett

Day one: Eight years away and the city is unrecognizable; all of the little, personal bearing points have disappeared. Like all megacities, São Paulo is constantly changing; the only absolute is checkless growth. It is estimated that 20 million people now inhabit the metropolitan area of the economic centre.

The X Homes (X Moradias) tours begin at the major cultural organization SESC. You are registered, are given an ID and route description and have to sign a declaration that you are walking through the city centre on your own responsibility – for although everyone says it has improved, it still has a reputation of being dangerous. The mere fact that the owners have opened their doubly and triply-secured homes to perfect strangers for the Goethe project, every ten minutes at that, is a huge success. One can imagine the amounts of work, persuasion and planning behind it all.

X Homes is the name of the project that has come to São Paulo after Caracas, Istanbul and Berlin. The idea behind the theatrical concept initiated in 2002 by Berlin theatrical director Matthias Lilienthal is to play with the privacy of homes. Known masters of their arts show their mini-dramas, performances and installations in the residential quarters of the upper class, in places that mere mortals otherwise never see.

Tour number one leads through the districts of Higienopolis and Santa Cecilia. It begins in prosperous, elegant homes in fortressed high-rises and ends in middle class and modest residences. For four days, an art happening waits behind every door, each is different, each plays at blurring the lines between reality and fiction and is shown to two visitors each in an “endless loop” between two and nine p.m. It’s best when coincidence also plays along and terrifically muddles the categories.

A temporary dream

For instance: While we are searching in the kitchen for traces of a ghost once seen here, there is a rumbling in the servants’ stairwell that sounds as if the ghost were about to enter the back door. It’s not part of Torsten Michaelsen’s project; it’s merely the rubbish collectors rearranging the bins, but it fits in spine-chillingly well. Yet, the maid that opens the door to another flat is real and so are her employers who are waiting for us to share their meal. Unfortunately we arrive too late and get nothing.

X Homes: House Beautiful in Sao Paulo

In many cases we visit the homes of the artists themselves; they play themselves in their authentic surroundings or they invite actors to play. Directors, installation and video artists invent stories, situations and conflicts, undermine reality or duplicate it. Leticia Sekito sits in a caravan on a barricaded car park offering tea and a Zen tarot deck.

Her explanations of the card drawn contain the lovely sentence “Life is not a business that has to be managed, but a mystery that has to be lived.” She then dances for us in the cramped space. Simone Mina has created a temporary dream world: a white room with a white couch, white birds, white air – served along with Derrida quotes about hospitality.

The failed housemaid

Day two, second tour: Republica – Vila Buarque. Today we are underway in the centre of the centre. When we wish to take a shortcut through a little park, we are warned: perigoso! In broad daylight, in the middle of the city? We take it anyway, but with some trepidation. The entire day is full of uncertainties. Lucas Bambozzi sends us into a pitch-black room, from which we have to use a night shot camera to cut out a tiny particle of life. On the display we see cats and hens, we hear them too, yet cannot locate them.

It’s eerie. You lose your bearings; can hardly find the way out – an intense, very irritating impression of claustrophobia and helplessness. In Niemeyer’s famous Copan high-rise, too, where 5,000 people live, our eyes are bound in the lift, but here getting lost is rather pleasant: we are pampered with a fragrant footbath and gently led back out. On the roof of the Copan we are then permitted to enjoy the fantastic view before moving on to the caretakers’ flat in which there is a philosophizing on the sense and nonsense of communication (Dellbrügge & de Moll).

Nurkan Erpulat shows us the shabby flat of the famous and aged transvestite Phedre de Cordoba, where we become applicants for the job of housemaid. We do everything wrong, however, and aren’t accepted. Gesine Danckwart’s home is, in turn, very elegant: a former brothel, it is now a luxury apartment, which leads, of course, to speculations about the owner. It is rather less speculative with Richard Maxwell who has produced a veritable monologue with an astonishing amount of lines for ten minutes: a lonely man whose sexual obsessions drive him from room to room. When you consider that the actor plays the role every day 25 times in a row!

Police operation: reality overruns fiction

Every stop, every experience is different and by evening, you are filled to the brim with impressions and thoughts – not to mention the intensity of urban life. X Homes is exhausting, but incomparable. Then, at Ariel Davila’s production, reality overruns any fiction. He wanted to work with the homeless who are squatters in a vacant high-rise. On the second day of rehearsals, the house was cleared by the police and over one hundred families camped out on a bridge stairwell, and then were sent to an old warehouse, which they furbished in a makeshift way.

Now, they receive their visitors there. Davila, transformed from director to documentary-maker, has hung his photographs on clotheslines and shows a film about the events. The homeless people, many of them employed but so underpaid that they cannot afford a place to live, are pugnacious and well organized. They will probably occupy yet another high-rise – enough of them stand empty.

Day three, the fourth and final tour: Consolacao – Bela Vista. Today’s route is particularly long and rich in contrasts. A completely derelict Wilhelminian style villa in a garden run to seed speaks for itself (Enrique Diaz). An occupant guides us about. The banisters wobble; the floors are full of holes. We find it wretched, but she is full of praise: it doesn’t rain in, they have electricity and they get water from the filling station for free. We feel ashamed.

At the end of the line: home

The Academia de Boxe is also such a place: wild, fenced-in grounds underneath a motorway bridge where children and adults can learn to box or use discarded exercise machines, all free of charge. What to us seems noisy and makeshift is part of their home. Near the end of the course it gets friendlier again: a few surprisingly lovely old streets, a district that is even a discovery for Paulistanos. A woman with a microphone urges us to her computer: each of us must tell a story and she plays the stories of the other participants (Cassio Santiago / Elisa Band).

In the next home, a woman has just left her husband. We help her sort out his things and share her liberating joy in throwing them out the window onto the street below. This is the most laconic, most smart performance of them all (Estela Lapponi). A few houses down, Simon Will of the Gob Squad turns us into residents. We are handed a mobile phone silently at the door, we follow the instructions, compliment music we don’t like, treat the partner in ways we never would. It is the final stop of the three-day journey and its logical conclusion: after 23 visits, we have arrived home.

X Homes is a huge success in São Paulo. Everything is sold out and still people are queuing. Anyone can become a part of these tours; take them in as a daring adventure, sociological study or philosophical excursion about reality and fiction, authenticity and plagiarism. Each edition is different – as they must be. After Berlin, Istanbul, Caracas and São Paulo, the next experiments will take place in Vienna, Warsaw and Johannesburg.