3Nós3
Ensacamento, 1979 | X-Galeria, 1979 | Interdição, 1979
AS I WAS MOVING AHEAD OCCASIONALLY I SAW BRIEF GLIMPSES OF BEAUTY is a very simple newsletter where I share a collection of creative expressions I enjoyed coming across.
Comprising Hudinilson Jr. (1957–2013), Mario Ramiro (b. 1957), and Rafael França (1957–1991), the group 3Nós3 emerged as part of a new generation of 1970s artists and collectives who proposed the occupation and appropriation of urban space. Founded in 1979, 3Nós3 viewed the city as an active surface for intervention and carried out a series of actions throughout São Paulo.
Martins&Montero
The intervention projects effectuated by 3Nós3 were conceived as ‘drawings on the city's blueprint’—a visual mark imposed on and in dialogue with the architecture, even if it only lasted a short while. […] Due to the brief stay of our installations, we discovered that the best way to make them known to the public at large was through the printed and televised media. […] Although the physical existence of our works in the urban space was extremely fleeting, their permanence as ‘journalistic material’ in the mass media was much longer.
Mario Ramiro
Ensacamento, 1979
Between midnight and 4am on 27 April 1979, three Brazilian artists […] ran through the streets of São Paulo placing plastic bags over the heads of the city’s public statues, fixing them in place with a cord. They orchestrated their intervention with meticulous attention to detail, documenting their actions, tipping off the press, and recording the ensuing public response. […]
Ensacamento [Bagging], 1979 was the group’s first and most widely known work, realised at the peak of Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship that began in 1964 and continued until 1985. It was only a matter of hours before the authorities removed the traces of this act of ‘vandalism’, but by then the provocative aims of 3Nós3 had been realised: the statues were rendered eternally vulnerable – the memory of suffocation and the mass execution of revered leaders was forever fixed in the public imaginary.
Archive of Destruction
[Ensacamento, 1979] evoked the deliberate practice of suffocation, used to obtain statements from men and women imprisoned — often without formal charges — by police or military authorities in Brazil.
Moacir dos Anjos
X-Galeria, 1979
On 2 July 1979, the three members of 3Nós3 travelled the streets of São Paulo in a red Volkswagen Beetle, having laid out a plan for targeting art galleries throughout the city. Using masking tape, they marked huge letter Xs across the entrances of the galleries they had selected, as well as affixing a sign that read ‘What is inside stays, what is outside expands’. The artists had contacted journalists from various newspapers who followed them and reported on the event the following day.
Erin Aldana
Interdição, 1979
Another example was Interdição [Interdiction], in which diverse bands of colored plastic material obstructed the intersections near the São Paulo Museum of Art. The intersections remained closed off until a motorist had the initiative to drive through the plastic, freeing up the flow of traffic.
Mario Ramiro
