Português
Pivô Art and Research and Storefront for Art and Architecture present the exhibition Letters to the Mayor: São Paulo, curated by the architects Bruno de Almeida and Fernando Falcon.
The exhibition is part of a larger project conceived by Storefront for Art and Architecture, as an itinerant show that already took place in cities such as New York (USA), Athens (Greece), Bogota (Colombia), Buenos Aires (Argentina), Panama City (Panama), Mexico City (Mexico), Taipei (Taiwan), among others. In each of these cities the exhibition featured a set of documents written by fifty local architects to their Mayor, expressing their ideas opinions and wishes for the city.
São Paulo’s edition will strategically take place during the electoral campaigns for the Municipality of São Paulo. The letters will be exhibited at Pivô Art and Research, in the iconic Copan building at the heart of the city. The is exhibition will be accompanied by an intense program of conversations, round-tables and lectures that will take place during the month of August. Afterwards all the exhibited letters will be sent to the Mayor’s office. By bringing a set of relevant voices to the public awareness and to the agendas and desks of the potential mayors, the exhibition intends to intensify the discussion about the growth and development of the city at a very complex moment -both politically and economically in the country.
The group of invited architects offer a varied spectrum of the architectural thinking in Brazil, including both stablished and emerging names working in different areas within the architectural field, such as the project developers, scholars, critics, artists with a training in Architecture and curatorial perspectives on the subject.
Participants:
23 Sul (André Sant’Anna, Gabriel Manzi, Ivo Magaldi, Lucas Girard, Luís Pompeo, Luiz Florence, Moreno Garcia, Tiago Oakley), Abílio Guerra, Aflalo/Gasperini Arquitetos (Roberto Aflalo Filho, Luiz Felipe Aflalo, Grazzieli Gomes, José Luiz Lemos), Agnaldo Farias, Álvaro Puntoni (Grupo SP), André Vainer, Andrade Morettin Arquitetos (Vinicius de Andrade, Marcelo Morettin), Apiacás Arquitetos (Anderson Freitas, Acácia Furuya, Pedro de Barros, Giancarlo Latorraca), AR Arquitetos (Marina Acayaba, Juan Pablo Rosenberg), Atelier Branco (Matteo Arnone, Pep Pons), Carlito Carvalhosa, Carlos Alberto Cerqueira Lemos, Ciro Pirondi, Cristiano Mascaro, Ermínia Maricato, FGMF (Fernando Forte, Lourenço Gimenes, Rodrigo Marcondes Ferraz), Francesco Perrotta Bosch, Francisco Spadoni (Spadoni e Associados Arquitetura), Gabriel Kogan, Grupo Técnico de Apoio (GTA) + Movimento de Trabalhadores sem Teto (MTST), Guilherme Wisnik, Héctor Vigliecca (Vigliecca & Associados), Hereñú e Ferroni Arquitetos (Pablo Hereñú, Eduardo Ferroni), Hugo Segawa, Instituto de Arquitetos do Brasil – IAB, Instituto Pólis, Laura Sobral, Ligia Nobre, Lizete Rubano, Lucas Simões, Luis Espallargas Gimenez, Marcio Kogan (Studio MK27), Marcos L. Rosa, Maria Cristina da Silva Leme, Martin Corullon (Metro Arquitetos Associados), MMBB Arquitetos (Milton Braga, Marta Moreira), Monica Camargo Junqueira, Nitsche Arquitetos (Lua Nitsche, Pedro Nitsche, João Nitsche, André Scarpa), Observatório de Remoções, Paulo Caruso, Piratininga Arquitetos Associados (João Beugger, José Arménio, Marcos Aldrighi, Renata Semin,), Raquel Rolnik, Regina Meyer, Renato Cymbalista, Rodrigo Cerviño Lopez (Tacoa), Cesar Shundi Iwamizu (SIAA), Silvio Oksman (Oksman Arquitetos Associados), Terra e Tuma (Danilo Terra, Pedro Tuma, Fernanda Sakano), Vão Arquitetos (Anna Juni, Enk te Winkel, Gustavo Delonero) and Vera Pallamin.
About Storefront for Art and Architecture:
Storefront for Art and Architecture, founded in 1982 by Kyong Park, in New York, USA, is an institution committed with the advancement of innovative and critical ideas at the intersection of architecture, art and design. As well as an experimental forum and exhibition space for activating and engaging emerging voices and promoting public discourse around issues effecting, influencing and challenging the built environment.
Storefront’s exhibitions, events, competitions, publications, and projects provide alternative platforms for dialogue and collaboration across disciplinary, geographic and ideological boundaries.Throughout its history, the organization has investigated critical social issues such as public housing (1984), homelessness (1985), gender identity (1994), and has responded to geopolitical and economical conflicts and movements such as the Gulf War, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Occupy Wall Street movement (2011) from a design perspective, while offering emerging artists and architects the opportunity to present new ideas and exhibit innovative work. Over one thousand internationally recognized artists and architects have shown at Storefront, including Peter Cook, Diller+Scofidio, Tony Feher, Dan Graham, Coop Himmelblau, Alfredo Jaar, Kiki Smith, Lebbeus Woods, Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós, Eyal Weizman, Bjarke Ingels, Didier Fiuza Faustino among many others.
About the curators:
Bruno de Almeida
1987, Brazil. Holds a degree in Architecture from the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Oporto, Portugal. And a Master in Architecture from the Accademia di Architettura della Svizzera Italiana, Mendrisio, Switzerland. Worked as an architect in London, UK. And was a curatorial assistant at the Independent Research Institute of the Fondazione Archivio del Moderno in Mendrisio, Switzerland. Is the founder and curator of SITU (www.projetositu.wordpress.com) a research platform that promotes a discussion about the potential of a dialogue between art, architecture and the city, through sequentially commissioning contemporary artists to create site-specific works for the exterior of Galeria Leme’s building (São Paulo, Brazil), designed by architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha.
Fernando Falcon
1977, Brazil. Holds a degree in Architecture from the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of São Paulo, Brazil. Since 2005, is a partner of the architecture office Tacoa Arquitetos (www.tacoa.com.br). Among the office’s projects are the art galleries Fortes Vilaça (2008) and Luisa Strina (2011), the cultural association Pivô (2013), the residential complex Vila Aspicuelta (2013), the competition for the headquarters of MIS-RJ (2009) and the spatial design of exhibitions such as Arte-Vida (2014), 31st Panorama of Brazilian Art (2009) and Casa 7 at Pivô (2015), among others. Tacoa was also part of the selection for the 33rd Panorama of Brazilian Art (2013) e developed the site-specific installation Jardineira (2015) as the core of the exhibition Liga 18 for the gallery Liga DF in Mexico City.
“(…) Thereby some brothers who were sent to this village, which is called Piratininga, arrived on 25th of January of the Year of the Lord 1554, and celebrated the first mass in an extremely poor and narrow lodge, on the day of Apostle Saint Paul’s conversion, thus dedicating it to him (…) The Indians built this lodge for our use. We have now demanded a bigger one to be built, and we are going to be its architects, with the sweat from our faces and the help of the Indians.”
(Padre José de Anchieta. Letters. From May to September 1555.)
São Paulo’s birth certificate is a letter.
In his epistles to the Society of Jesus in Rome, Priest José de Anchieta methodically narrates the day-to-day events of the newly founded São Paulo village. His letters are an extensive production, replete with reflections, concerns and questions that were often left unanswered. The inherent uncertainty of this type of correspondence, between two worlds so geographically distant from each other, highlights a fundamental element of this medium: composing a letter is, above all, to dialogue with oneself. To look at one’s own thoughts materialised into words, to witness the construction of something fleeting and intimate through a convention of language symbols, norms and laws, and ultimately to recognise oneself, almost narcissistically, in the reflection of what is written. A careful reading of Anchieta’s letters tells us more about the afflicted face of an Iberian, Christian man in the New World than about the Indian who perhaps never understood his world as new.
However, composing a letter is not only a narcissistic exercise. Submitting oneself to this type of writing implies an awareness and acceptance of a series of external factors, some of which are uncontrollable.
First of all, it implies the existence of a recipient to receive the letter, turning the letter into a double-sided mirror and a sort of dialectic construction locked in limbo, anticipating a conversation yet to happen.
It also implies the compliance with certain codes and norms that allow the correspondence to be delivered. And if language wasn’t a sufficient (excluding) convention there is also the need for stamps and money, and that the recipient has an officially recognised address.
Finally, to write and send a letter is to subject the message to a trajectory in the city. Similarly to a flâneur who wanders seduced by different routes, a letter is subject to other hands, voyeurs and the potential to be lost.
When reaching its final destination, the letter carries another dimension beyond the initial message. The limits of its paper sheets and envelope are now parallels and meridians of a new cartography of the city, that conveys the places, arrangements and hands that it has gone through. The moment in which the message reaches its recipient shows what it means to live together: a constant definition and negotiation between co-citizens in the urban environment under complex administrative and regulatory arrangements.
The letter does not start – or finish – at the time of its writing; it is a vector towards the future. It is not by chance that 400 years after Anchieta’s letter, the design of Brasília was also born as a letter.
By proposing the use of this language-form as a communication exercise between a group of professionals that think and act upon the city and the main representative of municipal authority, the exhibition Letters to the Mayor aims to place the city, with all its complex social-spatial networks, at the centre of the debate. The time of the exhibition, at the beginning of the electoral campaign to elect the new Mayor of São Paulo, means that it is inserted in a moment of (re)definition of strategies and expectations for the future of the metropolis. In order to maximise its impact on the realignment of objectives and to include the greatest number of voices, the show will co-occur with the seminar Open Letters, a series of discussions with agents that have been actively working on the structuring of a critical and propositional thought for the city. Fully aware of the reductive character of having to select from such a complex collection of voices, to ‘open letters’ to the public is, above all, an attempt to (re)activate desire as a transformational tool beyond the possible.
To talk to and about the city is also to reflect oneself on the desire to make and be the city.
São Paulo, 12th July 2016
Bruno de Almeida and Fernando Falcon
