From his site:

At dawn on July 13, 2006, I started work on an intervention in the Max Feffer tunnel joining Av. Europa and Cidade Jardim. The intervention was through a process of subtraction, scraping off layers of soot from vehicle exhaust built up on tunnel walls to produce images of human skulls.

Police checked us out several times during the early morning when I was working on "cleaning" the tunnel. However, as expected, they could not stop me drawing skulls in the tunnel. "Cleaning" is not a crime. What is a crime is the environmental damage caused by unashamed pollution. And, as also expected, the State did not let the matter rest there. There was only one way to prevent me "cleaning" my way, and that was for them to clean up too. And they did!

The intervention had reached 160 meters when São Paulo municipality started its own first cleaning operation there. However, contrary to my expectation, they did not clean the whole tunnel. What would really have prevented me continuing would have been their removing all the soot, which was the raw material used for the work. The State's intention was to just remove the intervention. They annulled the message by creating a huge clean area and leaving the rest of the sooty tunnel as it was. So this was another crime: censorship! lol...

But since the raw material was still there, I came back with more provocation on August 13th. After working for several nights, the intervention had reached around 120 meters, and the municipal team, complete with traffic department staff and the police turned up to clean the whole tunnel.

After that, every tunnel in the city was cleaned. After finishing work on Cidade Jardim, Rebouças was next, followed a number of other tunnels in the city. But they will all be dirty again in less than 4 months. It would be better to stop polluting instead of cleaning up.

Alexandre Orion
visual artist