Lina Bo Bardi, the artist’s architect: Artists to create works for “discreet intervention” in São Paulo’s Glass House

© Foto: Mishmoshimoshi/Flickr

Vía The Art Newspaper

By Charlotte Burns | Web only
Published online 1 Aug 11 (Museums)

SÃO PAULO. Hans Ulrich Obrist will curate an exhibition in São Paulo's "Glass House", the former home of Brazilian modernist architect Lina Bo Bardi, in 2012. "Lina is one of the great women architects of the 20th century, and her major contributions haven't been recognised enough," says Obrist, co-director of London's Serpentine Gallery.

"Exhibitions come through artists, and more and more have been talking to me about Lina: she's an artist's architect," says Obrist, adding: "Architects love her too. [Sanaa architect Kazuyo] Sejima put her at the centre of her Venice architecture biennale [in 2009]."

Between 15 to 20 artists and architects will be invited to create projects in the Glass House, says Obrist. "It's going to be an homage, and a discreet intervention in the house," he adds.

The artists will be both international and Brazilian. "I have such great enthusiasm for Brazil. It is in an extraordinary moment of optimism and has an incredible art scene," says Obrist.

Bo Bardi was born in Italy but moved to Brazil with her husband, the influential curator Pietro Maria Bardi, in 1946. She became a naturalised citizen in 1951, the same year in which construction of the Glass House was completed. Located on a 7,000-square-metre plot of land, it was the first residence in the Morumbi neighbourhood. It is surrounded by species from the Atlantic forest, and the garden is now a preserved example of old Brazilian forest.

Bo Bardi also designed the Museum of Art of São Paulo (Masp), one of the most important institutions in Brazil. Her creations were not limited to architecture: her design for the São Paulo building Sesc Pompeia also gave rise to her invention of the non-profit organisation of the same name which promotes cultural and educational activities in Brazil. She was also famed for the furniture and jewellery designs that she created until her death in 1992.

The project is the latest in a series of domestic interventions by über-curator Obrist. "These house exhibitions are something I have always done. I started my career as a curator in my kitchen," says Obrist. He adds: "Artists do different kinds of work than they would in a museum or bigger space. That sense of intimacy is important." He has previously staged exhibitions at London's Sir John Soane's Museum, as well as the homes of architect Luis Barragán in Mexico City, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in Sils Maria, Switzerland and poet Federico García Lorca in Granada, Spain.

This exhibition will be produced by Isabela Mora, international projects manager at the Fondation Beyeler, who worked with Obrist on the 2008 Lorca show.

The Glass House is now home to the Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi, which promotes Brazilian culture at home and abroad.

In Conversation with Julian Assange Part II

World map of internet usage. Courtesy of Chris Harrison, Carnegie Mellon University.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Before we begin with the questions from the artists, I wanted to ask you about the Bourbaki, an anonymous group of mathematicians that you have often referred to. I am very curious to know more about your interest in them, and whether they were related to your own decision to appear in public rather than remain anonymous.

Julian Assange: The Bourbaki were an anonymous group of French mathematicians who published a series of mathematics books over a period of about 20 years under the collective allonym Nicolas Bourbaki. They kept their individual identities anonymous, and their books are still regarded as some of the finest math books ever published in French. In 2006, I saw that WikiLeaks needed to be, if not completely anonymous, then pseudo-anonymous—ideally publishing under a collective allonym such as Bourbaki. First of all, as a young organization publishing very controversial material, we didn’t want to be more of a target than we needed to be. While I was publicly a member of the advisory board, that is different than being the editor in chief or one of the principal writers. I also wanted to remove ego as much as possible from what we were doing, to make sure people were writing and conducting their work for reasons other than ego. Also, as an organization that did not yet have a reputation, we needed a personalized voice to quickly get a reputation. If we pulled our collective efforts into a name like Jack Bourbaki, or another collective allonym, our personality would quickly gain a reputation because of the relatively high level of our output.

But within a month of our coming to the public stage there was a leak of one of our internal mailing lists by a New York architect named John Young, who had been involved in his own primitive, but aggressive publishing project. John saw from the press publicity that WikiLeaks would become significant in the field and might threaten his own project. But it was quite a revelation to have our own leak very early on. And I thought to myself, well, this is very interesting—now we get to taste our own medicine. And actually, this medicine tasted quite nice, in that what I saw was a group of very committed, idealistic people whose internal dialogue was even stronger than their external dialogue. So, there was no hypocrisy in what we were doing, precisely the opposite—we were even more principled and idealistic internally than we were externally.

Luis Camnitzer,This is a mirror. You are a written sentence, 1966–1968. Vacuum formed polystyrene mounted on synthetic board, 48 x 62.5 x 1.5 cm. Daros Latinamerica Collection, Zurich. Photo: Peter Schälchli.

Early on, I already had an existing reputation, and I spent that reputational capital to get volunteer labor from good people. But when the press started sniffing around, very curious as to who some of the principle people in this project were, some of my friends, rather unfortunately, said, well, it’s Julian, and he deserves all the credit. I could’ve shot them! And then I saw that, by trying to engineer a position in which I was not seen as an authority figure for the organization, we ended up with people who were not involved in the organization at all claiming to represent it. And so we started suffering from reputational opportunism, which we had to stamp out. We also grew more politically powerful with many supporters all over the world. So we no longer needed anonymity for ourselves in quite the same way—I still needed locational anonymity for security reasons, but my name being known was not so important anyhow, given that the information was already floating around for anyone who really cared to look.

Para ver el resto de la entrevista, haga click aquí.