He speaks in gunfire English and has an accent from Utah. Professor Reynaldo is head of Literature and Linguistics at the Roman Catholic University in Sao Paulo. His teaching staff are committed and loyal. They beam with a missionary zeal to teach.
“We have no money” he says. “There’s pressure on us to have as many students as possible to get money for our university. But we have managed to keep the numbers of students in our language classes down. You can’t teach a language with 100 pupils which we have in our other classes.”
They love the message of Arvon: that by freeing the imagination you can find your way in words and new literature and voices will grow. They want to jump on the first plane and visit our houses, but they can’t afford to visit us as a group. But Brazil has a culture where everything is paid for in instalments – including air travel. The national airlines allow you to pay off their airfares monthly spread over a year. There might be individuals who can afford to come because of this, Reynaldo explains, so we will spread the word, but why doesn’t Arvon come here?’
It is a question which comes up time and time again here in Brazil over my 8 days. Arvon is going to open a franchise here in Brazil says Malu firmly. She’s swiftly become the business brains, and Liliane the saleswoman. Liliane is starting to know my descriptions of Arvon so well, that she can recite it without me ever opening my mouth. We are a team with a mission: we want to make literature happen even more here and find a way of crossing the gulf of money, geography and tradition. We know we can do it. We see everyone ablaze with the idea.
The car spins us into the courtyard of one of the hundreds of buildings which belong to a private university founded by an American donor. It has 30,000 students and a campus which is like a town in itself. It also has 6 other branches throughout Brazil.
“We have a house in the mountains. That could be a place to work with you.” Arvon in Brazil suddenly becomes an unexpected possibility. They love the idea of cooking and eating together too, which is also a surprise I hadn’t reckoned with. In Brazil, even the very poorest household will have a maid who prepares the food. At Munira’s maids had flitted like shadows in the house bearing steaming dishes of chicken curry and pasta. The past is very much present.
A girl with great sweeps of black hair floats on the ceiling. Arms spread wide, she is a suspended angel, her white gown spread around her like clouds. Look closely and you realise that what seems above is below you, what seems to be visible is invisible. You are looking in a mirror.
Patricia Osses is one of Brazil’s leading young artists. She works mostly with photography but trained as an architect. Not surprisingly, her obsession is space – the way we occupy it and our relationship to it, even when we have left a particular place.
The work I am looking at was made in her grandmother’s house in Santiago in Chile, where she comes from.
I wanted to make the house where I would live for the rest of my life,’ she explains. Then my cousins said – here is your grandmother’s house. Do what you want with it.’ It’s been untouched for 15 years since she died – waiting for this moment for her grandchild to set foot in it again.
The photographs are a collision between past and present. One shows a curtained room, with azure wallpaper and a mound of belongings: a television set, numerous unrelated chairs, books all piled high – the debris of a life abandoned by the frailty of the flesh. Peer closely into this dark room, and in the curtains by the window you may glimpse a form. It is Patricia – a ghost in her own presence.
Patricia turns over her portfolio and shows another photograph.
‘This is the last supper’ she explains. It’s the last supper my grandmother ever had.’ Patricia’s family sit, with her father at the head of the table. But what makes this so extraordinary is that it is in the middle of a shop – a general store with wire mesh shelves which reach to the ceilings – replete with cleaning products and cans of beans and tomatoes – everything a household could need.
The last supper is an intervention in this space – it used to be the dining room in her grandmother’s house but since she died, it was bought and turned into a shop. Patricia is reclaiming the space for this one last supper. Like everything she does, it is touching and extraordinary – emotionally thought through. No wonder I am so keen to welcome her to an Arvon house next year as part of Artists Links – an innovative ongoing project in which Brazillian and British artists travel to each others countries and engage in each other’s work. Imagination is moving.
The project Patricia wants to do in Britain is wonderful too: she thinks every house is like a book: It tells many stories and has many pages which you must turn. She became aware of Britain through reading books, like Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. She has mapped in her imagination a country she has never seen, thanks to the pages of the books she has turned. Now she wants to encounter it for real. She wants to stay in writers’ houses and make work based on these encounters. She shows me a photograph which started this whole idea. It is of the side of a building torn away,. I can see the traces of where the staircase was, the delineation of walls like tears on the building, the ghosts of where pictures hung and a doorway once was. This is the map of this buildings’ past : its walls are worn inside out.
Patricia has stencilled huge words onto its walls in Portuguese. This is a house which is a book with many thick pages. Turning, turning, turning…I hope she comes to the Hurst and turn the pages of one angry young man into a house of artful destinies. A Brazillian in John Osborne’s house for whom the ceiling knows no bounds.
The underground station disgorges the cities travellers into an open space, which resembles an aircraft hanger. The noise is deafening here. The clatter of activity is intense. People are dancing, rehearsing, writing, clapping, reading, shouting, workshopping and running here. But what makes it so different from anywhere I have ever been, is that you not only hear it all happening, you can see it all too. Every space – whether it is the theatre, the library, the centre’s administration, the garden, the rehearsal spaces – is open for everyone to see. The walls are made of glass. Even a whisper is amplified. It feels astonishing that you can’t also hear people think. This is the Cultural Centre of Sao Paulo. A glass heart which beats with imagination in the depths of the city.
Last month, they held a partnership with the city’s planetarium. Audiences came and were handed telescopes to gaze at the night sky, whilst poetry was read and music played. This is a place from whom many could learn. It shows how public space can engage and stimulate cultural activity, and be alive with it. With a new visionary as its director, Martin Grossman, it embraces the urban chaos with an imaginative zeal. It has been called a city in itself – travelling like a ship on a journey.
Have you read Roland Barthe’s ‘How to Live Together’ asks Gui, a visual artist who only started work in the education programme here three weeks ago. ‘It reminds me of the Arvon Foundation. How you have to live together in a retreat like a monk to be truly individual and listen to your soul.’
Everyone here is struck by the Arvon message of imagination freeing you. But how will it translate into this intensely noiseful space? We start a conversation which is still just beginning – and somehow I know it will lead somewhere unexpected, unusual and special.
‘Then on to give another lecture. This time it is a double act about New Writing in the UK, with Julie Ellen at SESI which is running the Nucleo project. Julie is awe inspiring, the work she has done for the Playwrighting Studio of Scotland in just 3 years is astoundingly impressive.
The questions we field are from committed and engaged young drama students . They ask intensely about how theatre can engage with politics and perhaps even replace journalism.
Students come up afterwards, asking more questions. And then an injection of reality. All the time during this 7 day visit, I am intensely aware that I am seeing a slice of Brazillian life which is so privileged it bears little resemblance at all to what the majority of people in this country experience. A young student comes up to me. ‘I don’t have a question for you. I just have this.’ He thrusts a sheaf of papers in my hand. ‘This is what life is really like in Brazil. This is how my son really lives. It’s written in Portuguese which is our language. Read it and see.’
There is one other moment in my 7 day trip when the same reality cuts through the verneer. In the converging lanes of traffic at the entrance to Sao Paulo airport, a young girl stands, hand on hip. She has long black hair lank with neglect, a lost face, and is dressed like a school girl in a black skirt and top, with shoes. There is no light in her eyes: they are deep black caves. All that is left of this 16 year old girl is a body stranded yet still standing in the tides of traffic - a girl who has nothing to live for, except for the car door which will be opened to let her in.
Geoff Manaugh is the blog and book writer for 
by Sally Crawford
Top tip 1: set up your own parameters.
Ever wished you could have an 
