Lina Bo Bardi's own Casa de Vidro, designed and built in 1951 by Bo Bardi, 5 years after arriving to Brazil.
hammocks for Lina, an offering by Pablo Leon de la Barra as part of the Novo Museo Tropical at Lina Bo Bardi's house
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's observation platform with stool in the shape of MASP. The platform, covered with blue tiles in the same way as Casa de Vidro's interior. The shape reminds us of Bulre Marx, but the idea of the platform also winks to Felix Gonzalez Torres, an old friend of DGF. A platform for dancing, kissing, but also for seeing the city from afar, and experimenting the tropical vegetation from near.
Christina Iglesias water fountain, a vagina of jungle life, with a wink to Ana Mendieta.
and Paulo Nazareth's concrete watermelon's, maybe a little too close to Erika Verzutti's concrete watermelon's as seen in the
or maybe they are actually abstract concrete turtle's, friends of Lina Bo Bardi's turtles
in the space underneath the house, Lina Bo Bardi's tripod chair, and one of Rivane's popular chairs
http://www.institutobardi.com.br/
*****
‘The Insides Are on the Outside’
Hans Ulrich Obrist
curators text
With its harmonies of light and geometry, density and apparent weightlessness, Casa de Vidro [Glass house] by Lina Bo Bardi (Rome, Italy, 1914 – São Paulo, Brazil, 1992) in Morumbi, São Paulo, is one of the most beautiful of all architect’s homes. It is also, certainly, one of the most important works of 20th-century Latin American architecture, forging ideas and motifs that would later be extended and reworked in such projects as MASP – Museu de Arte de São Paulo (1957–1968), along the Avenida Paulista, and the Sesc Fábrica da Pompeia (1977 – 82), a huge multidisciplinary complex born of an old factory. Lina Bo shared Casa de Vidro with her husband, Pietro Maria Bardi, a respected critic and art historian. The building was completed in 1951, the year of Lina’s naturalisation as a Brazilian, roughly five years after her relocation from a devastated Italy. Lina once wrote, following the war, that ‘in Europe, man’s house is now rubble’. But just as much as the ruin allegorises loss, Casa de Vidro looks out onto its tropical surroundings with a defiant sense of optimism, symbolising rebirth and renewal. It seems to be both grounded within and floating serenely above its environment, combining a stability and a lightness similar to that which Bardi achieved with the freestanding space of MASP, and with her glass planes, designed as display features for artworks in the museum.
The present exhibition extends throughout the house and its grounds, as well as beyond, to Sesc Pompeia. It thereby connects two of Lina Bo Bardi’s most important works in São Paulo. Restoring an old factory instead of designing a new building, Lina created in Sesc Pompeia a very impressive and democratic centre of leisure and culture, adding at the back of the complex a new concrete tower devoted to sporting pursuits. Sesc Pompeia is a ‘freedom citadel’, to quote Lina’s own words; it opposes the richness of many cultural centres with a strong povera architecture. Inviting artists and architects to make site-specific interventions in both locations, the present show expands its field of action to encompass two very different phases of Lina’s career.
The house’s complex configuration of interior and exterior is reflected in the exhibition’s title, conceived by Douglas Gordon as his contribution to the show: ‘The Insides Are on the Outside’. Gordon’s title also suggests the possibility of reading the building as a portrait of its creator: is the Casa de Vidro in some way an externalisation of Lina Bo herself, and how might we approach the figure of Lina Bo Bardi today? Sarah Morris has titled her contribution to the exhibition after the architect, her intervention is inspired by Lina’s famous chair, ‘Bowl’, designed in the year of Casa de Vidro’s completion. Isaac Julien, is searching for a Doppelgänger of Lina Bo Bardi, in addition to creating a poster for a future film project which will take place at Casa de Vidro. Renata Lucas has taken as her point of departure a painted portrait of Lina, remaking it and reframing it in a manner inspired by Lina’s glass stands at MASP.
The exhibition is conceived as an homage to both the Casa de Vidro and its creator. The diversity of artists presenting works in the show is testament to the enduring fascination that Lina Bo Bardi’s work continues to hold today. In my discussions with artists, architects and curators in the many years since Cildo Meireles first introduced me to Lina Bo’s work, I have been struck by the frequency with which she is cited as a decisive influence on practices of very different kinds.
The works in the exhibition have been commissioned especially for the site, and the more than thirty participating artists and architects address various aspects of the building’s locality as well as its domestic function and scale. A number of exhibitors have personal links to the architect: besides creating many set designs and renovating the Teatro Oficina (1984) for the theatre director Zé Celso [Martinez Corrêa], Lina was contemporary to Paulo Mendes da Rocha. From the late 1950s, both were key figures of the so-called ‘Escola Paulista’ [Paulista School] of Brazilian architecture. Here, under the pilotis – the freestanding space of the house – visitors can listen to a monologue by Mendes da Rocha, in which he evokes Lina Bo Bardi’s astonishment upon her arrival in a foreign land – Brazil – in the 1940s. The installation is a poetic reconstruction of her arrival, a creative clash with the country’s culture and geography.
Other participants never met the architect, but nonetheless have a clear creative connection to her work: Kazuyo Sejima of SANAA included a prominent display of Lina Bo’s designs in her Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010. Here SANAA have reconfigured the building’s library space, creating a series of architectural models.
A number of works were debuted at the exhibition’s Prelude in September 2012, including those by SANAA and Mendes da Rocha. A postcard by Gilbert and George, first distributed on that occasion, features the artists posing together as living sculptures in the building’s living area. Caricatures of husband and wife by Alexander Calder, from 1948, hang side by side in the same space – records of Calder’s first visit to Brazil, at Pietro Maria Bardi’s invitation for the artist to produce an exhibition in Brazil. Waltercio Caldas has also responded to the partnership of Lina Bo and Pietro, installing in the master bedroom a work originally commissioned for an exhibition at MASP, a configuration of mirrors that creates an infinite series of reflections of both the room and the landscape outside. Cinthia Marcelle’s recorded performance, Audição [Audition], takes its leave from the couple’s vinyl collection. Eleven musicians play diverse pieces of music simultaneously; a cacophony of superimposed sound becomes a sonic portrait of musical married life.
Also unveiled at the Prelude, Meireles’s piece for the exhibition is an acoustic and aromatic recreation of a domestic scene frequently recounted by Bardis’ guests: at the first sign of a an argument, Pietro would ask Lina to make a coffee (“Lina, va fare un caffé”). Throughout the exhibition there is a complex interplay between archival and phenomenological responses to Lina Bo Bardi. The assembled works invite us to consider the extent to which these two modes of response may be thought separable: are the archival and the phenomenological always active in and through each other, as the work of memory?
Cerith Wyn Evans in collaboration with Pascale Berthier has taken her cue from the building’s sloped ceiling – a magazine and a radio are installed in the bathroom of Casa de Vidro as an invitation for the visitor to similarly recline. Casa de Vidro is a very tranquil place, and a number of works have sought to augment this aspect of the site. Cerith Wyn Evans does so by way of an exquisite pairing of an audio rendition of Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit with an installation of spotlights in the garden. Cristina Iglesias has created an artificial garden and water feature within the existing environment. Pedro Reyes draws specifically on the wildlife of the setting, providing nourishment in the form of a fried ant meal to the exhibition’s visitors, while Olafur Eliasson’s Fading Self Wall comprises a sheet of mirror glass facing the court garden from the dining room, supported by a concrete base designed by Lina Bo Bardi. If, like Caldas, Eliasson brings the exterior indoors, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster has taken the inside to the exterior, creating an outdoor room using the same blue Vidrotil glass mosaic tiles that appear in Lina Bo Bardi’s original interior spaces. Paulo Nazareth, in turn, has placed banana crates outdoors, evoking socio-economic and historical concerns with great deftness and concision. Paulo often points out that bananas are tropical, cheap, and silly, but also that they are elegant and quintessentially Latin American.
Participants have been free to explore and work with any aspect of the site, from the building itself to the trees in the garden, as well as the archive and collection of Lina Bo and Pietro Maria Bardi. Pablo Leon de la Barra’s contribution is expressly archival and archaeological: besides drawings derived from his ongoing curatorial project on the art of the tropics (and Brazil in particular), he has created a diagrammatic genealogy of Latin American art, in response to the celebrated designs of Alfred Barr as well as those deployed by Pietro Maria Bardi in his practice as a scholar and curator.
Koo Jeong-A has installed fifty ceramic reproductions in phosphorescent color of an ex-voto sculpture from Lina Bo Bardi’s collection, and Juan Araújo has made paintings approximating the number of original works that used to hang on the wall of the dining room, as revealed in an old photograph from the 1950s. Furniture is a singularly evocative vehicle for Madelon Vriesendorp – who has distributed many tiny chairs around the house, alongside delicate chair designs by Lina Bo Bardi herself – as it is for Rivane Neuenschwander, whose handmade stools can be used and moved around the house. They celebrate the qualities of anonymous and spontaneous design.
Adrián Villar Rojas is showing film of his assistants working at the Casa de Vidro, compulsively and silently engaged in various activities over the course of one weekend, and Tamar Guimarães has invited a group of people to spend a weekend living in Casa de Vidro in order to plan a new issue of the magazine, Habitat, that Lina Bo and Pietro co-edited for five years. Also, on show at Sesc Pompeia, is Pedro Barateiro’s Feitiço [Spell], which combines footage of Casa de Vidro with found footage of theatre productions in Lisbon and São Tomé and Príncipe. Laercio Redondo’s two-channel video, co-authored with Laura Erber, investigates displacement and remembrance through a meditation on the architecture of Casa de Vidro: two films of the house are shown simultaneously, one dating from 1999 and the other from 2008. Here and elsewhere, the works on show tell stories, revealing aspects of the house and its history, and that of its owners, that are invisible to the naked eye. Through the exhibition of individual works within the house and the garden, the temporary reconfiguration of Casa de Vidro itself emerges as the unifying focus of the exhibition as a whole. A number of works have a clear architectural focus, ranging from Philippe Parreno’s layered drawings of the floorplan of Casa de Vidro, to Dan Graham’s and Ernesto Neto’s interventions at Sesc Pompeia. Graham creates an ambiguous play of interiority and exteriority with the combination of a ‘hot’ orange trellis and a ‘cold’ two-way mirror, while Neto’s huge organic intervention suggests a black & white bubble parasite that has invaded the austere geometry of Sesc Pompeia’s sports tower. Both works integrate the artists’ signature materials and motifs with Lina Bo Bardi’s own designs. Jonathas de Andrade’s intervention introduces the movement of the sea tide into the Casa de Vidro. The piece puts five hundred and six glass photos occupying the house in a wide circle and interfering with the path of the visitor. A concert and parade organised by Arto Lindsay, at Sesc Pompeia, likewise takes its inspiration from Bahian culture and its African heritage, while for Acupuncture, José Celso Martinez Corrêa travels by bus to different sites in São Paulo, visiting realised and unrealised projects by Lina Bo Bardi and performing needle interventions into the buildings.
The Insides Are on the Outsides seeks to recompose temporal experience by way of the manipulation of space, creating overlapping and colliding rhythms and tempos as the viewer progresses through the building and its grounds. Rirkrit Tiravanija’s contribution to the show fosters just this sense of openness and unpredictability, its precise content remaining undeclared until the moment of the exhibition opening.
House-Museums
I have curated a number of exhibitions in domestic spaces that have since become ‘house-museums’, as a way to make shows that produce time as well as space. This all began with my very first exhibition, The Kitchen Show, curated in my kitchen in 1991 at the suggestion of Christian Boltanski and Fischli & Weiss with a special exhibition of Hans-Peter Feldman in the fridge. Most often, the time of museums and Kunsthalles is undifferentiated – a kind of neutral suspension of the everyday time of the world outside. The time of the home, on the other hand, is highly individual and nontransferable. By definition, domestic space is human-scaled.
In the two decades since The Kitchen Show, alongside curating large-scale exhibitions, I have been continually drawn to the intimate scale of domestic and quasi-domestic spaces precisely as an antidote to the art world’s relentless drive to ‘go large’. In a succession of exhibition projects, I have tried to recover something of the intimacy of the 1991 show, and the present exhibition sits very much within this lineage. This show has been envisaged as both a continuation and a development of the ‘house-museum’ model, following on from previous exhibitions that I have organised at the Huerta de San Vicente, home of the poet Federico García Lorca in Granada, 2007–2008; the UNESCO World Heritage Site Casa Luis Barragán in Mexico City, 2002–2003; the Sir John Soane Museum in London, 1999–2000; and the Nietzsche Haus in Sils Maria, Switzerland, 1992, a solo show by Gerhard Richter. Each of these sites has a deep resonance with an influential cultural figure, and today Casa de Vidro pays testament to its creator, Lina Bo Bardi.
In particular, the exhibition at Casa de Vidro responds to and develops themes explored in the most recent of these exhibitions, Everstill-Siempretodavía at the Lorca House. On that occasion, many site- and time-specific works examined the domestic sphere as a link between the architecture and the figure of the former occupant in a spirit of homage. As with the earlier exhibition, the present show has been the result of an intensive period of research. Participants have been invited to immerse themselves in Lina Bo Bardi’s world – the house itself as well as its environs – in order to establish intimate relationships with this singularly important figure. As the offices of the Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi, the building houses part of her and her husband’s collection of Brazilian art and artefacts. Since 2006, the Instituto has been closed to the public. With the building’s reopening, it has been our aim to open up the world of the Bardis to a new audience, and to a new historical situation, in order that their vision may once again come to play a part in the production of reality.
Everstill-Siempretodavía was underscored and presented to the public in two phases, the artists and artworks involved varying from one phase to the next. The Casa de Vidro project develops this model, and may be viewed as a complex organic system with feedback loops, or as a dynamic learning machine. As with Everstill, the exhibition at Casa de Vidro has developed in phases, beginning with the lecture of Rem Koolhaas and Petra Blaisse at Sesc Pompeia, followed by the Prelude, on September 5, 2012. In April 4th 2013 begins the final phase, when the exhibition will feature the works of every participant. The Insides Are on the Outside | O interior está no exterior will remain open until the end of May 2013.
This project could only be accomplished thanks to the extraordinary vision of Isabela Mora, producer of the exhibition, who accompanied me on previous projects, including both The Air is Blue/El aire es azul at Casa Barragán in Mexico City, and Everstill-Siempretodavia at Federico García Lorca’s house in Granada, Spain.
I would like to thank the Instituto Lina Bo & P.M Bardi and Sesc (Servicio Soçial de Comércio) for being the exhibition’s hosts and for believing in the project since its inception. I extend my gratitude towards the Instituto’s directors, Anna Carboncini, Eugenia Gorini, Renato Anelli and Sonia Guarita do Amaral, and to the indefatigable Danilo Santos de Miranda at Sesc.
Profound thanks to the generous sponsors of the exhibition, Oi/Iguatemi, and in particular to Carlos Jereissati, to Credit Suisse and its CEO José Olympio Pereira, to Fundación Colección Jumex, and in particular its president, Eugenio López Alonso, and director, Patrick Charpenel. Thanks to all of the members of the Supporting Comittee, in Brazil and abroad, and to all of the institutions that have supported the project: Fondation Beyeler, Inhotim, Cahiers d’Art, British Council and Consulat General de France in São Paulo.
Many thanks also to Isabella Prata for leading the Comité de Apoio in Brasil; to Aurea Leszczynski Vieira, Juliana Braga and Roberto Cenni at Sesc for their knowledge, passion and dedication; and last but not least to Viviane Simoes at Iguatemi, and Juliana Salomao at Credit Suisse for their invaluable help.
I’m deeply grateful to Ricardo Sardenberg for being the associate producer of the show and for leading with such diplomacy in all kind of circumstances. Thank you also to the entire team at Base 7, our executive producers, and especially to Ricardo Ribenboim, Arnaldo Spindel and Maria Eugenia Saturni; to Adelaide d’Esposito for being an impecable general coordinator of the show, and to all of the team at the Instituto and Sesc Pompeia for mediating with the dedicated curatorial team, Guilherme Wisnik, Luisa Duarte, Luiza Proença, Denis Joelsons and Luis Felipe Abbud. Thanks to Augusto Malzoni for his great ideas, to Sam Keller for being the greatest supporter, to Bernardo Paz, Jochen Volz and Rodrigo Moura, to Staffan Ahrenberg, to Richard Riley and to Joel Giraud.
Thank you to Anna Lena Vaney for producing the feature film of the project, to Erica Bolton for networking the project all over the world, and to Marcy Junqueira for doing so in Brazil, to Bruno Lara and Cecilia Gandarias (This Side Up) for their wonderful graphic design, and to Eduardo Ortega and Luis Asín for their great images. Many thanks also to the production coordinators Roberta Cibin and Carolina Escobar and to the international coordinators Iciar Sánchez-Mangas and Leire García.
This project would never have happened without the help of Jeanete and Bruno Musatti, Idel Arcuschin, Alessandra d’Aloia, Marcia Fortes, Alexandre Gabriel, Cristiana Thompson, Luisa Strina, Karla Meneghel, Fernanda Feitosa, Eduardo Leme, Camila Siqueira, Felipe Dmab, Pedro Mendes, Matthew Wood, Noemi Blager and Pablo León de la Barra. The Insides Are on the Outside | O interior está no exterior would not exist without the participation of the artists and architects.
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