Sign of the Cross is the act of visiting the four geographic extremes of the city of Curitiba, to the north, south, west and east, starting from its foundation site, in the center of the city – a symbolic, but not geographic, center. The route of more or less 100 km, was ridden by bicycle along a single ride.
From left to right: the original intended route, the route actually ridden, the occurrences sites and the resulting drawing, already converted to vector image format.
Da esquerda para a direita: a rota originalmente planejada, a rota efetivamente percorrida, os locais das ocorrências e o desenho resultante, já convertido para o formato de imagem vetorial.
The cross
One of the most horrific forms of torture and execution, the cross has also an esoteric meaning. By representing the death of Jesus who, with his suffering and pain, have washed away the sins of humanity, it became one of the main symbols of the more spreaded religious trend in the world. Also, follow a path shaped like this through the city map was a way to explore the multiplicity of its landscapes, going beyond postcards and pasteurized concepts such as “European city”, “ecological capital” or “smile city”, among other politically biased clichés. Carrying out this drawing on a bicycle is also a way of comment about the city.
One of the most horrific forms of torture and execution, the cross has also an esoteric meaning. By representing the death of Jesus who, with his suffering and pain, have washed away the sins of humanity, it became one of the main symbols of the more spreaded religious trend in the world. Also, follow a path shaped like this through the city map was a way to explore the multiplicity of its landscapes, going beyond postcards and pasteurized concepts such as “European city”, “ecological capital” or “smile city”, among other politically biased clichés. Carrying out this drawing on a bicycle is also a way of comment about the city.
Editing the map in Illustrator
Editando o mapa no Illustrator
Stalkers
In the 1979 film Stalker, director Andrei Tarkovski tells the story of paranormal beings, who are the only ones able to walk the paths through the so-called Zone - an exclusion perimeter created after an alien invasion. Contrary to the commonly held idea of an invasion of this type, the mysterious extra-terrestrial beings do not seek domination of our planet, remaining within its confined zone. On the other hand, that becomes an inaccessible perimeter for humans. Several attempts to retake it by force fail and, upon realizing that that area remained stable, the government decides not to carry out new operations in this area.
At the same time, the Zone is closed to civilians, making further incursion attempts illegal. Still, people continue to ignore this prohibition, since, it is said, there is a room at the center of the Zone and whoever enters it will have fulfilled his deepest and truest wish. Hence the importance of the Stalkers, the only people capable of knowing the intricate and unseen paths of that forbidden area.
At one point, a non-Stalker explorer sees the room – a small insignificant building in the middle of the woods – and heads straight for it. He is stopped by a voice coming from nowhere in sight that warns him that if he takes a single step further, he will be struck down. There is no option but to follow the directions indicated by one of the last Stalkers still in activity, in the Zone there are no obvious or logical paths.
In the 1979 film Stalker, director Andrei Tarkovski tells the story of paranormal beings, who are the only ones able to walk the paths through the so-called Zone - an exclusion perimeter created after an alien invasion. Contrary to the commonly held idea of an invasion of this type, the mysterious extra-terrestrial beings do not seek domination of our planet, remaining within its confined zone. On the other hand, that becomes an inaccessible perimeter for humans. Several attempts to retake it by force fail and, upon realizing that that area remained stable, the government decides not to carry out new operations in this area.
At the same time, the Zone is closed to civilians, making further incursion attempts illegal. Still, people continue to ignore this prohibition, since, it is said, there is a room at the center of the Zone and whoever enters it will have fulfilled his deepest and truest wish. Hence the importance of the Stalkers, the only people capable of knowing the intricate and unseen paths of that forbidden area.
At one point, a non-Stalker explorer sees the room – a small insignificant building in the middle of the woods – and heads straight for it. He is stopped by a voice coming from nowhere in sight that warns him that if he takes a single step further, he will be struck down. There is no option but to follow the directions indicated by one of the last Stalkers still in activity, in the Zone there are no obvious or logical paths.
There are no obvious paths in the Zone.
Não existem caminhos óbvios na Zona.
From an experience of more than two decades as an urban cyclist and a decade as a road cyclist, I started to understand and feel that cyclists are the only ones who know routes that are invisible to other people. Not unlike Tarkovski's Stalkers, cyclists see and sense paths unknown to users of other modes of moving throughout the cities, traversing paths that, when viewed over a city map, can seem counterintuitive. We are, for example, the only ones to know exactly where all the climbs are – something that not even pedestrians know. Part of my experience as a cyclist is sometimes transformed into short chronicles published mainly on Facebook and Instagram. One of them, Deliquents, was turned into a short comic book in 2018. Sign of the Cross is one of my first attempts to graphically condense and convey a narrative taken along a path of just over 100 km through the city of Curitiba. It is an account and a commentary on the city, based on recording the path taken and specific points on the city map, recorded using a GPS and then worked on graphically. The graphic elements, made up of the planned path design, the design of the path actually traveled, and the occurrence locations, overlap. The material produced was part of the Pragaescuta project – the publication's name combines the words in Portuguese "praga" ("plague") and "escuta" (in this case, meaning the act of listening to someone) – of the SESI-PR's Center of Visual Arts in 2018.
