Diamond Carnival, Thu, 08 Feb 2018 | written by Simon
Simon at a City, Museum in Brazil, South America

Still can’t sleep. Today I woke up at 4:30 and was pretty much awake until I got up at 9. Many thoughts, but can has sleep pls? At least it’s getting properly warm now, 30°C is neat!
Today I’m going to Embu dos Artes, the city of artists. It’s a smallish city near Sao Paulo, where historically a lot of artists moved (incidentally, also a lot of German war criminals including Mengele himself).
After some bus troubles (Google’s recommendation was the worst) I got there before midday. What a change! What joy ll! Embu couldn’t be more different from the huge, overwhelming Sao Paulo. A bohemian town of 200k people, low and tightly built architecture, lots of art studios, tat stores, and some amazing furniture stores – that’s just what I needed! I quickly put together a short list of places to visit and decided to go to the Sakai Memorial first.
Tadakiyo Sakai was a Japanese born artist who moved to Brazil as a teenager in 1928, to become a famous terracotta sculptor exploring the local folklore. The memorial couldn’t be better – a small gallery of his works with a free terracotta sculpting school attached. Some language acrobatics was needed to talk with the gallery minder, but he was really enthusiastic and forthcoming in offering explanations. As the place was in a hill, I caught some nice views on the way.

Instead of walking straight back down, I decided to walk around the area a bit. I soon found a curious place, a gate like in a castle, a couple sculptures in front… It was open, so without thinking much I walked in to find a cute verandah and a whole sculpture studio. I walked around, took some pictures, and was soon intercepted by a lovely lady who asked if I’d like to see more. Her name is Yva, this is her home and her father and brother are the sculptors. What an amazing opportunity to see their works still unfinished, mid-creation!

I told Yva that I’m a musician, and that was it. I got invited to the verandah, she brought out not one, nor two, but three guitars, and on we went. Yva sings gospel, you see. And how! Soon her sister joined us – the beautiful voice runs in the family. Three guys soon appeared, two women visiting from Chile came down from the house, even Yva’s husband showed up. We played a few tunes, chatted in an interesting mix of languages (Google translate can be pretty helpful in live conversation, turns out), showed each other photos, they gave me advice on where else to go… And then Yva’s husband offered to drop me off to town! What wonderful people, this totally made my day and was the nicest thing about this trip so far.
The museum of sacred art turned out quite nice – they’ve had a lot of Jesuits here and they left a lot of stuff. It’s really interesting, because although much of the local 18-19th century art doesn’t show the same level of skill as that of the Old World, it has a great deal more sincerity, expression, and probably actual faith to it. It just feels really honest and authentic. Plus there are some fantastic local features that I haven’t seen much elsewhere: for example, sculptures have hair. Human hair. But perhaps my favourite was a life size Jesus with joints in his hands, like a marionette.
I then walked around town a bit, checking out some shops. Not much great art, and tat is tat, but they have some really nice furniture here. I had a massive lunch, visited a couple churches, and headed towards Parque Francisco Rizzo. Pretty nice place to sit and read, if not for the flies – but I persevered for a chapter to finish A Wizard of Earthsea – for Ursula. It was slowly getting late, so I climbed a hill and caught a bus back home. It’s time to start packing – tomorrow ends my time in Sao Paulo and begins: Rio!