Using cutting edge audio-visual technology, a series of artists will reshape the verdant downtown valley, the Vale do Anhangabaú, presenting it in an altogether different light throughout this year's 24 hour cultural extravaganza, the Virada Cultural. Everything from video mapping to the creation of temporary, interactive structures – a total of 15 art interventions in total – will invite curious onlookers to explore all corners of the valley, and become an integral part of the high-tech art. 

The urban art collective BijaRi are most at home creating art in public spaces, though we've also loved seeing their creations on a smaller scale, too, in an exhibition last year at Choque Cultural. They'll be constructing a metallic bridge, 12 metres high and 40 metres across, spanning the valley and rigged up with LEDs that light up in sections when people cross over. The flow of people across the bridge, reflected in the light display, will run perpendicular to another flow in the valley – that of the river, the Rio Anhangabaú, which runs out of sight, underground down the valley, ever since it was covered over in 1906.

The São Paulo collective Visualfarm, which has created projects all over Brazil and beyond, will be creating large-scale projections on façades and surfaces throughout the valley, as will the multimedia artist Lucas Bambozzi. Meanwhile, the CoLaboratório collective will be highlighting the hidden spaces, projecting images onto unoccupied buildings flanking the valley (of which, sadly, there are a fair few), with an accompanying online collaborative map.

'This is an area that is void of value in the eyes of the developers and the city's conservatives,' says Baixo Ribeiro, of Choque Cultural and part of the CoLaboratório collective, referring to the Vale do Anhangabaú. 'It has a potent and underutilised infrastructure and a cultural diversity that's one of the most wide-ranging and representative of contemporary paulistano society.'