The Digital City
by Marcos Mendonça,
Secretary of Culture of the State of São Paulo

To encounter São Paulo again in the images of Marc Ferrez and Militão Augusto de Azevedo—at that time (the 19th-century) with 25,000 inhabitants—is to re-encounter the history of our past and, therefore, that of our present projecting what will be our future memory. In the exhibition São Paulo, population: 25,000 the city appears calm, still asleep, before awakening as the 17 million people metropolis of our days.

This set of images also show that the rays of technology can perfectly broaden that which the gaze of Ferrez and Militão had already immortalized. The computerized intervention of Fernando Azevedo brought together the nineteenth and the twenty-first century. He created icons, re-framed images, brought back the characters that animated the daily life of the, then, province of São Paulo to a sequence of gestures generating a subtle dialogue between the cityscapes and their inhabitants. A dialogue indispensable to understand an urbis, that transformed so rapidly, exactly when it celebrates its 448th anniversary.