This small text begins with the expression “the landscape of work”, which is intended to shed light on three matters that are brought up in the drawings made by Antonio Fabiano Jr. The first matter is the landscape of work as a design or representation of some real or imaginary space, a panorama or view that contains and experiences narratives and fictions. The second matter is the landscape of work as Antonio’s work field as a researcher and professor, which result from his political, technical, aesthetic action, a as well as his practice in architecture and urban planning. The third matter is the landscape of work as the spatial manifestation of the working class, their houses, equipment, services, infrastructure and, in summary, the territory of the “reproduction of the work force” and its several experiences and conceptions of life.

This dimension unfolds when it is exposed in this dual form of “landscape” and “work”. At first, it unfolds into the very expression of landscape, which - from the French language -, results from “paysage”, or “pays-agir”. The expression pays denotes the idea of nation, state, region, which is then found in the idea of agir, which gives the idea of action or act. Therefore, we can note that the spatial dimension of the landscape (region, village) is apprehended as a panorama, as a view or spectacle, as a result of the action over the space or territory: acting on the nation (pays agir). The landscape then derives to the notion that pays, ville, cité, as concepts perceived as spatial results of the action of work over nature, involving the terms landscape and work, previously presented in a dual form. In this action, the light sheds over the habit, the inhabitant, and dwelling as constituents of history.

Next, the “landscape of work” correlates history and nature. However, nature is also a term with double implications: exterior to the individual bodies and as the bodies themselves. Its transformation - as landscape -, is the moment of constitution of humanity (even as it faces several manifestations of inhumanization of nature, or environmental disasters). Therefore, it is and it is not nature; work and history are implied. The history of the subject. When we produce and experience production and products, we can interpret that experience and it can thus be narrated and reproduced: represented and presented. An experience that is constituted in the very individual and then unfolds an occasional experience to the “other”. The related “self” and “other” constitute the “social being”, which is recognized in this relation.

Hence, landscape is work in its essence. An undissociability. Means and process of existence, representation of the absent, and effective presence, real and imaginary, real and fictional. In this sense, the action over nation, constituent of a territory (socio-spatial unit that includes dispute and war), is not restricted to its unit as a result of public administration. But, as the territory that it somehow identifies based on a differentiated unit and on conflict, built with the work and recognition of the other.

The “landscape of work” discussed here is the peripheral region of São Paulo, particularly the neighbourhood of Vila Bela (Belle Ville?), located in the East Zone of the city. The drawings presented herein are part of the understanding of the unfinished aspect of that neighbourhood and the city itself, and such unfinished aspect appears as a condition that demands action. And there resides the beauty of the unfinished aspect of the city: the continuous possibility of production of humanity, through the work over nature, through the landscape of history. Through the overcoming of miseries and negligence. This neighbourhood, seen as a “distant landscape”, is similar to many other manifestations of this form of production of space. One could say that their images are almost always the same. An understanding that is at the same time particular and individualized, while also homogeneous and undifferentiated.

These drawings are depicted as fragments of an experienced that is lived, conceived, and perceived from those three levels of the “landscape of work”. The overlap different scales, streets, details, and urban issues that are analyzed and represented through drawings, as a plastic expression and critic reflection. They relate the colour mass of watercolour - homogeneous and undifferentiated -, to the accurate and individualized lines of China ink. The watercolour mass results from a drawing technique that promotes the controlled loss of control of its region, the expansion of its pigment. It mixes with itself as overlapped stains of watercolour and also mixes with the other, the China ink, defined and defining individualities and particularities created by the lines and sketching. The sketching is a bet in what is experimental, the movement that unfolds with no previous knowledge of its results. Loss of control based on control. The error and doubt as constituent moments, but also with possibility to reach the new, the other, the different based on the same and on what is known and mastered. The line represented by the sketching, the fight for recognition: being oneself in another.

Therefore, the mass and the individuality present themselves as a dialectic between the collective and the individual, in a reciprocal existence, one related to the other, experienced by the drawing as an aesthetic and political act (“aest-hetics, est-h-ét(h)ique”: aesthetics is ethics, is politics). This sheds a light on the meaning of the sensitive experience in contemporaneity, as the moment of constitution of individuality as related to the collective and social, and the constitution of the common in face of the fragmentation of individualism. Without the obliteration of one by other, as moments of extremist-extremities of individualism (neoliberal, post-modern, financial), and the abstract collectivism (statist, Fordist, industrial). This dialectics also explains the necessary condition of conflict, both in the concrete experience of these peripheral neighbourhoods, daily and urban, as in the formation of concepts, form and aesthetics, a reason that is permeated by the sensitive experience of the very subject that thinks and acts. “I think, I draw, therefore I exist”.

In these drawings, the watercolour and the China ink also refer to the presence-absence of water and pigments (earth). A possible analogy between the environmental condition of these areas of the city that are constituted by the absence or precariousness of infrastructure is the lack of sanitation and paving. The drawings affirm the representation of an absence, and the mere presence of these precarious urban conditions - non-urban, anti-urban -, reveal “in itself” the precariousness of the urbanity as a whole, in general, as a possible-impossible accomplishment of the whole society. In face of this action, the individual is fully dismantled. In view of this landslide, this submersion.

Therefore, the drawing materializes and becomes real as an exercise of reflection and a as a critical action that is not restricted to the mere condition of unreflected “representation” or “illustration”. It reflects and exposes what is absent by recognizing the history and nature as the landscape of work, the future, the project that is born from the experience. One might also say that it emerges from the figurative and the territorial concrete and advances toward the abstract, the concept, the aesthetic dimension of the form.

São Paulo, early Spring of 2018.