'TRISTES TROPIQUES' SOME WORKS

French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1908-2009) in Amazonia in Brazil c. 1936


Donald Urquhart, ‘Carmen Miranda’ poster, 2010 (courtesy Herald Street/Maureen Paley)

It was suggested to me that a picture of Carmen Miranda may be ideal for this tropically themed show. All I really know about Carmen Miranda (from Kenneth angers’ “Hollywood Babylon”) is that she hid cocaine in the heel of her platform shoe.
Luckily I happened to chance on a cute young gay Brazilian bartender in my travels around London looking for truth and beauty. I asked him if she was indeed Brazilian. He narrowed his eyes and hissed “No!”
- “Argentinian?”
- “No.”
- “Peruvian?”
- “She grew up in my country but she was not born there.”
- “Where was she born?”
- “Portugal. And the Portugese they used to hate her because she always said she was Brazilian. She grew up in Brazil but she was born in Portugal.”
‘Alas,’ I thought to myself, ‘but this is to be presented in Portugal.’
Perhaps this could be construed as a posthumous admission of true nationality.






Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, untitled (SET-janeiro 2010), 2010 printed photographs
photographs of vegetation at DGF's SET (Sitio Experimental Tropical)
a kind of reference to Terence's Malick biodiversity
Supersaudade



Elein Fleiss, ‘Jornal do Inverno’, 2010,
A4 publication in black&white, printed on recycled paper, edition of 200



Jean-Michel Wicker, ‘Pocket Posters’, 2010
studies for forthcoming fanzine on Lina Bo Bardi
Le Edizioni Della China, Berlin




Patrizio Di Massimo, ‘Ten Little Nigers’, 2009,
selection from a series of ink drawings, 29.7 x 21 cm
antropophagic drawings, a desire for the other...


Flavio de Carvalho,‘New Look’, 1956, drawing









Helio Oiticica,‘Boys & Men’, 1970s
script for an unrealized film to be filmed in Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro


Alexandre da Cunha,‘Nao seja marginal, nao seja heroi’ (after Helio Oiticica), 2009



Carla Zaccagnini, Duas Margens, (Atlantico), 2003
Video by Sofia Ponte recorded at Praia da Calada, Portugal, on December 5th, 2003, from 4:00 to 5:00 PM; video by Wagner Morales recorded at Praia do Iporanga, Brazil, on December 5th, 2003, from 2:00 to 3:00 PM.
Duas Margens (Brazil) will be shown at the Barber Shop, Lisbon while Duas Margens (Portugal) will be shown at the same time in Capacete, Rio de Janeiro.



Mauricio Lupini, ‘Read after Reading (BimBom, DibuDuDa, Bada Didi)’, 2006
music videos


Pablo Helguera, ‘He says he is curating a biennial and he wants to know if anyone here does video’, 2009, cartoon

The Barber Shop, Lisboa and Novo Museo Tropical present:

Tristes Tropiques
A proposal by Pablo Leon de la Barra
A gran saudade colletiva with works by Alexandre da Cunha, Patrizio Di Massimo, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pablo Helguera, Runo Lagomarsino, Mauricio Lupini, Donald Urquhart, Jean-Michel Wicker, Carla Zaccagnini, a journal by Elein Fleiss, poems by Walter Gam, soundtrack by Arto Lindsay, and documents from the Flavio de Carvalho and Helio Oiticica Archives.
With the support of Luiz Augusto Teixeira de Freitas
Special thanks to Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Julieta Gonzalez and Adriano Pedrosa.
The Barber Shop, Rua Rosa Araújo 5, Lisboa
March 4, 2010, 10PM
http://thisisthebarbershop.blogspot.com/

In memory of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)

PATRIZIO DI MASSIMO'S SLADE DEGREE SHOW

1.
Ten little niggers
2009
Series of 20 drawings, ink on paper
29,7 x 21 cm each (A4)
Ten little niggers is a series of 20 drawings inspired to colonial iconography. The title is taken from Agatha Cristie novel, now translated as “Ten little indians” because of ratial concerns.

2.
“As every artist I’m first of all a painter of women”
2009
4 drawings, ink on paper
84 x 56 cm each (A1)
The title of this work is the quotation of the famous sentence by the artist Pablo Picasso. These paintings are a mixture of cubism and return to classical references combined with the relationship between western and oriental culture.

3.
The secret proceedings in Benghazi, 15 september 1931
2009
Audio, voice John Rayment
33’44’’
This secret trial is the one that led to death the leader of the Libyan resistance Omar el-Muchtar, The lion of the desert. It is gived in a threefold document in which the same interrogation is written in three different ways.

'EPPUR SI MUOVE (AND YET IT MOVES)' OPENS AT FONDAZIONE RE REBAUDENGO

Eppur si muove [And yet it moves]
Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
8 May - 21 June, 2009

Opening on Friday 8 May at Palazzo Re Rebaudengo in Guarene (Piedmont), the exhibition comprises works by Rosa Barba, Emanuele Becheri, Eva Cenghiaro, Rä di Martino, Patrizio Di Massimo, Caterina Nelli, Giulia Piscitelli, Moira Ricci, Davide Savorani and Elisa Strinna.

Eppur si muove [And yet it moves] is curated by Inti Guerrero (Colombia/the Netherlands), Julia Kläring (Austria) and Pieternel Vermoortel (Belgium/UK), fellows of the third edition of the Curatorial Residency of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, coordinated by Ilaria Bonacossa (Italy).


Le Mepris (1963) Jean-Luc Godard

*
In Le Mépris (1963), French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard sets silent movie director Fritz Lang on the roof-terrace of the modernist Villa Malaparte in Capri shooting The Odyssey. The final shot pictures Odysseus facing endless waters as an invitation for the viewer to project his/her own narratives upon the void between past and present.

*
In 1908, on the Mediterranean island of Capri, the exiled Russian writer Aleksei Maksimovich - better known as Maxim Gorky - was planning his Capri School. Far from the epicentre and ideals of Lenin’s Bolshevism, the School saw myth and religion fulfilling a central role in the revolution. It was then, during the summer of the following year, that eight Russian workers arrived to take part as students in Gorky’s peculiar utopia.

*
At the SISMOS center of the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia in Rome, Italian artist Elisa Strinna found a seismographic recording of the Messina earthquake of 1908. This scientific data collected during the movement of faulting tectonic plates in the Mediterranean, is an excerpt from a registration of one hundred years of Natural History. Through a musical translation, Strinna recalls the archival strata.

*
The true method for making things present is to place them in our space (and not us in theirs). That is why only anecdotes have the power to move us. (Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, conceived in 1927 - unfinished).

It seems as though when artists deal with data, documents or moments from collective or personal histories, their ways of relaying them, acting upon them or even modifying them, are close to Benjamin’s aforementioned potential of the anecdote and its retreat from messianic historicism. In this exhibition the anecdote does not depend on the viewer’s empathy with the story told, but allows the event to be seen through diverse temporalities.


Opening: 8 May, 15.00
Contact Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo for info for transport from Turin and Milan
info@fondsrr.org | t + 39 0113797600

8 May- 21 June, 2009
Palazzo Re Rebaudengo - Piazza del Municipio, Guarene d'Alba, Italy

AT THE CLOSET IN THE NEW NEW CENTRE FOR THE REVOLUTION WITH MATHIEU AND PATRIZIO

Mathieu Copeland, Patrizio Di Massimo

at the Olde Mitre Tavern, Ely Court, Hatton Garden, London EC1N
http://www.pubs.com/pub_details.cfm?ID=219

PATRIZIO DI MASSIMO IN TORINO

Leptis Magna, I was born here
2008
Possible painting of Mario Schifano (Leptis Magna, Libya 1934 - Rome, Italy 1998) bought for 350 euros the 12th of october 2008 at Porta Portese.
market, Rome, in a scavengers’ stand. Painting measurements are 99x99 cm, author’s signature is on the back and stretchers are antique.