Chico & Filó

A love story. The focus of the work is a heart-and-arrow with the names Chico and Filó inside, carved into the bark of a tree from the grounds of the abandoned Matarazzo Hospital. Chico and Filó are Francesco Matarazzo and Filomena Sansivieri, his wife. He, the hospital’s founder and the patriarch of one of the most economically powerful and socially prominent families in São Paulo during the first half of the 20th Century; she, the wife who was forever by his side and who bore his thirteen children. We might imagine Count Francesco declaring his love for Filomena. The memory of Matarazzo Hospital runs in tandem with the very history of the city and covers a period during which the community and the institutions walked hand-in-hand, much like Chico and Filó.