The people, events, and spaces I have experienced in São Paulo confirmed ruangrupa’s collective interest towards the notion of “surplus”. To be more precise, I have divided these surpluses into three:

1. Spatial—dwelling as a political act is possible in this city, where spatial production is plentiful, while spatial ownership is totally the opposite. The various “ocupação” movement renders the faith in the rules of supply and demand to be absurd.

2. Temporal—I noticed at least six different words used to refer to “party”. Happy hour is funny. Which one is happy? — the time, the people who are having the time, or the fact that time needs to be designated exclusively for certain feeling? Could it be that time is the most-designed aspect of our life?

3. Resources—from natural, material, to human. Reinterpreting waste is possible when we consider it as excessive necessity of any productive process. This way we can easily make visible the invisible, placing our gaze somewhere we’re not supposed to look at.

PS: Images taken from a journal I kept during my last SP visit, using the ‘surplus’ materials of the visit itself — items that I used and keep using, those items that usually are discarded after they’re no longer usable: maps, ticket stubs, receipts, contact cards, etc.