For the last two or three years I have been moving countless times along the Red Line of the São Paulo underground, which connects the centre with the east side of the city. Riding back and forth at its most crowded hours, I meant to join the emotionally and bodily intense experience of the three million people who live in the eastern periphery. Having to share the space, the smells, the sounds and the skin surfaces of a crowded, claustrophobic carriage is an involuntary form of intimacy. At the same time I was photographing jam sessions of contact improvisation, a dance founded on expansive and sensitive interaction between two or more bodies; built on weight transfer and bodily awareness, its movements are harmonious even though they are improvised, and what the dancers set out to do is to learn from the quality of another body’s movement, as a metaphor for human relations in life. When I brought the two realities together in the book I noticed how easily the pictures mixed once they were juxtaposed. The experiences were at once opposed and close, so that to an inattentive eye they could look like the same thing. Being opposite and complementary, the two essays made possible a visual narrative that settles on neither one nor the other but in between. What stays open is the question of how we bodily experience our life in the city.