Ouvidor 63 on Sauchiehall Street

Ouvidor 63 is an illegal but tolerated artist-led occupation of an office block in downtown São Paulo. There are perhaps two hundred artists living and working in the ‘largest artist-led occupation in Latin America’.

Occupations have become rarer in the UK, especially since 2012 when legislation in England and Wales made squatting a criminal offence punishable by six months’ imprisonment. But for many people of my generation, squatting was formative. My social life as an art student in 1980s London centred on gigs in abandoned cinemas and police stations.

The culture is alive and well in Brazil, though, and in São Paulo in particular. In May 2023 the Folha de São Paulo listed five artist-led occupations in the city, including Ouvidor 63 and the long-established Ocupação 9 de Julho. The artist-led occupation had become a middle-class cultural attraction, to be visited like a museum or cinema. The Ocupação 9 de Julho provided the catering for the 2023 São Paulo Bienal, blurring the distinction between unofficial occupation and official culture. They built wooden shacks outside the Bienal’s modernist HQ, selling street food from northeastern Brazil, with a larger restaurant inside, the profits going to support the occupation. They sold T-shirts and tote bags too.

Ouvidor 63 is on the Rua Ouvidor, a narrow street in the historic centre São Paulo that rises up from a tangle of motorway overpasses. In one direction there’s a bus station, all diesel fumes and graffiti. In the other, Rua Ouvidor is surprisingly quiet and intimate. The occupation’s building was once municipal offices, thirteen floors in all, built, like a lot of the city centre, in the 1940s. It has a factory-like appearance, with steel framed ribbon windows, and a blank rendered façade, once white. But the first impression is less of structure than surface. Everything flat is covered in marks: graffiti, large-scale street art, notices everywhere explaining the rules. The building is a canvas.

From the entrance corridor there is a steep climb up through the building, past children playing, the sounds and smells of cooking, everywhere filled with animated discussion. My first visit there, one late afternoon in early 2022, was with colleagues from the Federal University of São Paulo. I sat in on a discussion about housekeeping. It was lengthy because of the horizontal nature of the organisation; everyone is in charge, and everyone must be heard. The motorway traffic roared through the open windows. People wandered amiably in and out. It took hours to reach conclusions, if indeed conclusions were reached, but then later I realised this was perhaps the point. It is a deliberative democracy which exists in part to be itself, a model of an alternative organisational universe. We left the meeting and went up to the roof. In the thick dusk, the view of central São Paulo was epic. From there anything seemed possible.

Last November, four members of Ouvidor 63’s Projeto Ocupações team visited me at the University of Edinburgh. They spoke to mixed audiences: students in all areas of the visual arts, some in the social sciences, and a few curious members of the public. For the older people in the audience, like me, Ouvidor 63 smelled agreeably of 1980s squats in London, or Amsterdam or Berlin. For the others, most of them born after those squats had vanished, it seemed wildly utopian. Art students these days can hardly stick anything on their own university walls, let alone take over a building. For them, Ouvidor was practically science fiction.

Projeto Ocupações wanted to see a local occupation, or something like one, so I took them to the abandoned modern seminary of St Peter’s at Cardross. Twenty miles outside Glasgow on the Clyde estuary, St Peter’s is a Category A listed monument. It is also a complete ruin. You access it through a fence just outside the town, traipse though woods, and then the craggy seminary appears. Designed by a Glasgow-based firm that specialised in churches, Gillespie, Kidd and Coia, it was completed in 1965, and subsequently much compared with Le Corbusier’s monastery of La Tourette. While La Tourette still, just about, functions as a monastery, St Peter’s is abandoned, its grounds overgrown and its structure stripped back to the concrete frame. But it’s rare to visit it now without seeing artists there, or a film crew or two. We don’t have artist-led occupations here, but this is the nearest thing: a building transformed by informal appropriations.

We pushed through the steel fencing surrounding the main staircase and levered ourselves up to the main floor. A combination of church and refectory, it is where the trainee priests would have dined and worshipped. It’s still an impressive space, overlooked by the outlines of the priests’ cells. The granite altar has been smashed: it must have been a hell of a party. We headed up the cracking concrete stair, then made our way along the galleries overlooking the main space. It’s precarious now; anything wood, glass or otherwise perishable has gone, and four metre drops have opened up everywhere. We picked our way over to the lecture theatre, or what remains of it. ‘FUCK GOD!’ says the graffiti on the old toilet block. What if the priests wrote that, smashing the place up in one wild binge before quitting? St Peter’s might not have found a new formal use but like Ouvidor 63 it has become a space of the imagination, where anything might be done.

We drove back into the centre of Glasgow, first of all to Tramway, an arts centre built from a Victorian tram depot, then the Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA), and next door the ruins of the Glasgow School of Art, perhaps the single most important work of modern architecture in Scotland, destroyed by fire in 2018. We wandered along Sauchiehall Street, once one of the city’s great retail areas but now a mess of boarded up shopfronts and stalled building projects.

CCA was in the last days before an enforced closure. It has now reopened, but the GSA site remains sealed off, under wraps. A general air of decay pervades the place. It could use some occupation, you might say, to get it out of this mess. St Peter’s is genuinely creative, but similar solutions aren’t possible in the centre of Scotland’s cities where the law makes occupation more or less impossible. In our instinctively regulated, statist economy, especially when it comes to culture, things aren’t just allowed to happen here. In times of austerity, it might be better if they were.