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ANDRÉ MARTINEZ
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Instructions for Listening to the City
Manifesto book / Editorial project (2 booklets + poster)
São Paulo, 2024
A movement to reveal the city within us.
We are trained to rely on vision as the primary sense through which we read and navigate the cities we inhabit. We orient ourselves by what we see, we trace paths, occupy spaces, write our stories. But to what extent are we aware of how the city passes through us? We are in the city — but how is the city in us?
“Instructions for Listening to the City” proposes a shift: to suspend the primacy of sight and activate listening as a way of perceiving urban space. The city is no longer just a setting, but a sensory field — vibration, rhythm, murmur. An aesthetic experience that unfolds through the act of listening to urban soundscapes, revealing layers of everyday life that usually remain unnoticed.
More than a publication, the project takes the form of a manifesto. It is an invitation to slow down and to build a more attentive relationship with the urban environment. A subtle form of activism that begins by transforming perception, as a way to transform how we relate to the city.
Structured in two complementary booklets and a manifesto poster, the project brings together reflection, practice and experience.
The first booklet presents a detailed guide for organizing and facilitating collective listening sessions. It is designed as a simple, replicable device, enabling individuals, groups and institutions to activate the experience in their own contexts. The project unfolds as a movement: each new session generates a new listening, a new reading, a new city.
The second booklet gathers the results of the first application of the practice, carried out with high school students in a program focused on arts and architecture. Drawings, testimonies and sensory records form a visual repertoire that emerges from listening — images that do not begin with sight, but with the sonic experience of the urban environment.
Each city, when listened to, produces its own set of images. The project does not end with the book itself; it expands with each activation, continuing wherever new participants engage with and carry forward the proposed practice.
Conception and Direction: André Martinez, Leandro Loureiro and Victória Lobo
Mentorship: Celso Longo, Daniel Trench
Lab collaborators: Ben Ferrari, Fabio Natrielli Meirelles de Souza, José Eduardo Pereira Tic, Loreto Carini Casaroti, Sebastião da Silva Dojcsar
Technical details
Typography: PP Mori and Silva Text
Paper: 120 g/m² High Brightness offset paper
Printing: offset
Developed within a postgraduate program in Design and the City, the project stands as an authorial investigation into sensory practices, editorial design and the relationship between body and urban space.
PlayPauseForwardRewind
Environmental design project / urban installation
São Paulo, 2024
The city is complex. The whole is present in each part, and each part is present in the whole.
São Paulo can be read as a microcosm of contemporary urban life — and within it, the Elevated João Goulart, known as Minhocão, condenses these tensions in a radical way. A territory marked by disputes between local and global interests, where processes of urban transformation unfold amid contradictions, in asynchronous times and at the edge of collapse.
Disordered growth, submission to capital interests, gentrification, housing precarity, environmental and noise pollution all put the right to the city at stake. In this entropic environment, urban experience fragments into a succession of movements and discontinuities.
“PlayPauseForwardRewind” emerges as an environmental design intervention that takes this condition as both context and material.
Conceived through the logic of point of view, the installation reveals itself fully only from a specific location: the Minhocão itself. One of the few places in the city from which it is possible to grasp an extended panoramic view — almost like a wide-angle lens over the urban fabric.
From this vantage point, the observer is able to perceive the installation as a whole — composed of structures distributed across different buildings in the city, yet visually articulated only when seen from this precise position. Outside of it, the image fragments. The reading dissolves.
The work shifts the perception of urban space into a field of choice and awareness. To see or not to see becomes a matter of position — of perspective.
The installation engages multiple layers: the possible futures of the Minhocão, the conflicts that shape it, the decisions that have been deferred over time, and the role of each citizen and social group within this contested space.
Acceleration that overwhelms? A pause that paralyzes? A stop that interrupts? A return that excludes?
Which command responds to our needs — and what is the cost we pay for it?
Between passivity and intervention, the project calls on the observer to recognize their co-responsibility in the occupation and governance of urban space. Everything depends on seeing in perspective, making choices and acting.
More than an installation, “PlayPauseForwardRewind” operates as a device for urban awareness — an attempt to make visible what, dispersed across the territory, remains invisible in everyday experience.
Concept and Direction: André Martinez, Helena Aranha and Rafael Rossi
Mentorship: Celso Longo, Daniel Trench
Developed in São Paulo within the context of a postgraduate program in Design and the City.
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