I’ve been on the search for a new swimming pool in São Paulo since my regular haunt, Estádio do Pacaembu, was first closed to house a Covid-19 field hospital on the adjoining football pitch. And while cases have eased, the pool remains drained and shuttered as it undergoes refurbishment. The plans for Pacaembu, which includes an E-Sports center, hospitality areas, and the new Brazilian outpost for the Italian gallery Continua, are a far cry from the musty changing rooms and faded concrete terraces of its previous incarnation. But the old Pacaembu was free and attracted a wide range of Paulistanos, an oasis in a city of concrete, traffic, and noise. The alternative public pools I searched out are in near-dereliction or closed; the private club a well-meaning friend (clearly unfamiliar with the economics of art writing) recommended was off-putting not just in price but in its website’s reminder that members’ nannies were not eligible to swim. The swimming pool is a microcosm for Brazilian society, its class and racial fractures reflected in the chlorinated water. For the past ten years the Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade has been collecting swimming trunks he finds discarded or forgotten in the changing rooms …