Une superbe installation intitulée “Fat Monkey” par Macaco Gordo et créé à l’occasion de la conférence Pixelshow 2010 à Sao Paulo (Brésil). Des étudiants ont constitués un singe format XXL, avec des milliers de tongs de toutes les couleurs. Explications en vidéo et images dans la suite.
A l’occasion des JO 2016 à Rio de Janeiro, voici le projet du cabinet suisse Rafaa Architecture. L’énergie sera produite par la chute d’eau et cette tour incluera un amphithéâtre, un balcon à 105 mêtres de haut et une centrale solaire permettant d’alimenter le futur village olympique.
Une amusante campagne vidéo pour le client : la chaîne jeunesse “Cartoon Network”, autour de l’univers des jouets. Un travail efficace de production du studio Animatorio, basé au Brésil. Le court spot est à découvrir en images dans la suite de l’article.
The focus on Brazil’s tourist meccas of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Salvador makes Belo Horizonte—the country’s third largest city and where I stayed on my recent visit to art park Inhotim—all the more appealing. Full of hidden gems, the city’s a worthy stopover when traveling to Brazil, exemplifying another angle of the famous Brazilian hospitality.
The Sion neighborhood stands out as one of my favorite under-the-radar stops. Although located next to the boutique-heavy district of Savassi, its residential, hilly streets give it a quiet, almost pensive side. Architect Patricia Naves, owner of design-objects shop Grampo (whose passion for design is a combination of her Brazilian background and schooling in Europe) introduced me to it.
Featuring Brazil’s best industrial product designers from Estudio Manus and the Campana Brosthers to locals like Anna Cunha (stationery) and Lucia Lou (jewelry), Naves—whose own inventive line Oiti combines elements of design with architecture; Karim Rashid brought home the Toast It cork trivets (pictured) on a visit—makes it a point to also incorporate tees and other assorted items within a wide price range so that everyone can leave with something. To inquire about their collection, part of which can be viewed online, call Grampo at +55 (31) 3327-4674 or email (info [at] grampodesign [dot] com [dot] br).
A few doors down is the ateliê of Rogerio Fernandes, a blazingly prolific artist who specializes in lithography. His pure pop illustrations burst with color and have a consistently upbeat nature about them. He likes to explore themes of love, which explains why so many of his pieces show people locking lips. Fernandes’ prints and other merchandise sells from his site.
A charming upstairs chocolatier producing artisan-quality Belgian chocolates, Ernestina Degryse and her Belgian husband Bertrand run Degryse, opening the shop after living in Brussels, where Ernestina learned to make candies like locals.
What most impressed me was not only the quality and taste of the chocolates (most Brazilian-made chocolate tend to load on fillers and fat), but also the incredible variation of shapes. Horse and pharaoh heads, pianos and grapes filled with gooey caramel or mint are all molded from the pre-formed trays the Degryses brought back from Belgium.
In a Brazilian twist, Degryse stocks bonbons filled with cachaca and caipirinha, which I’ve never encountered in Brazil before. The store takes international orders via e-mail—chocolates [dot] degryse [at] bol [dot] com [dot] br—and phone—+55 (31) 3227-4202.
Belo Horizonte, in the mining state of Minas Gerais, is a few hours by plane and eight hours by bus from Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
Brazilian designer Mauricio Arruda has designed a collection of storage units that house ubiquitous plastic crates. (more…)
The pet project of paint company Dulux, Let’s Colour is an international outreach project in which volunteers travel to drab and dreary corners of the world and enliven them with a fresh coat of paint. “Color your world” is the tagline for the program that hopes to transform communities by the brushstroke.
This year the Let’s Colour crew has travelled to London, Rio de Janeiro, Paris and Jodhpur to find and help neighborhoods paint themselves anew. They hope to expand to other countries, including Turkey, throughout the year.
In an interview with CH, Fernanda Romano—Global Creative Director of Marketing at Euro RSCG—talked about Let’s Colour. Says Romano, the idea behind it was: “let’s find locations, places around the world, they’re a bit dull, a bit grey. Let’s engage the local community.” She adds, encouraging community involvement was crucial to succeed: “Mandating things to people feels a bit old fashioned. People want to collaborate, people create content to share with the world.”
The project turned into something more than a P.R. campaign for Romano and her team. “We really wanted to get people excited about painting and color. We really wanted to get people excited about the effect color has on you. it was about a spiritual, emotional regeneration.”
When Dulux, a subsidiary of AkzoNobel, approached Romano, they brought a video of employees painting houses in Brazil that had sparked the original concept. The company approached countries where the company has a big presence about participating in the project and found enthusiasm from the local communities.
Romano found the response hopeful: “It was quite touching to see how much the community appreciated what was happening and how much they saw the benefit.”
The Let’s Colour blog documents all the locales, as well as their color choices and inspiration in each neighborhood. The project also has filmmaker Adam Berg filming the entire process. The individual video for the four places is online, and Berg has plans to release a full video of the project in the next month.
Says Fernanda, “by showing it and being it rather than telling people to do it, it’s a truer way to invite people to bring color into their own home.”
On site to present their new collection at Milan Design Week, Fernando and Humberto Campana recently sat down with CH at Spazio Rossana Orlandi to talk about their latest works—a collaboration with Corsi Design Factory called Nativocampana. The collection, 15 vases and baskets, combines fluid resin with the Brazilian designers’ most loved materials, leather, natural fibers and wooden benches. Mixing Italian craftsmanship (each piece is handmade in Corsi’s lab in the heart of Milan), highly-technical resins requiring extensive experimentation and production, along with their signature natural and recycled materials, the resulting gorgeously amorphous forms toe the line between high and low in true Campana fashion.
Fernando Campana: For me it’s from hard work, everything I do starts from the hands and sometimes things come unconsciously without even knowing if is going to be beautiful. I learn from my mistakes because sometimes the ugliness can be attractive and you can construct beauty from the ugliness.
Humberto Campana: For me beauty starts from your eyes, from the education of your sight. It can be spontaneous or come from hard work, but you get and process it through the way you look at things. This is the procedure to get to beauty. Some people have this sense more easily, but it certainly relies on the education of the eyes.
FC: The concept of beauty has changed drastically in the past 10 years. For instance, when you use gold, it’s already beautiful, but sometimes you have to build nice things from very ugly materials. This is the trick whenever you work with pieces of discarded things—you have to find order into chaos and build something elegant.
HC: Part of our work is to out point beauty within something, which is not so for most people, and so we find beauty wherever it’s not clearly visible. This attracts me a lot. We live in São Paulo, a city with 20 millions inhabitants, which isn’t an easy city at all. The city is also unattractive, you really have to work hard to find and build beauty, because it’s necessary for your well-being.
FC: In Rio de Janeiro instead everything is already beautiful—the nature, the beach, the people, everything is more gentle.
HC: Gambiarra in Brazil can be a bad word, since we also use it to describe those who steal electricity from their neighbor! It can also be something very amateurish, but on the contrary we try to use this attitude to make very professional things. In our point of view there’s a dose of improvisation there, which is something connected to our work. We are passing through a very bad crisis that makes people do gambiarra, they are finding solutions in order to survive. It’s something very contemporary, even in the European society, meaning smart solutions for very crucial problems with lots of added creativity.
FC: The vases we made with Corsi for example are a kind of gambiarra, but from this Brazilian concept we have deleted the idea of dirt and unclean approach to things, finding a nice, clean solution.
HC: Today sustainable products can have any kind of style. Before it was different, because a few years ago it had to be an abhorring aesthetics. Now we can add more elements and make it happier.
FC: Whenever you work with your hands we can talk about sustainability—creating by hand is human ecology.
Nativocampana at Spazio Rossana Orlandi runs through 18 April 2010.
Visiting the Franco-Brazilian architects Triptyque in their São Paolo offices, this video explores the firm’s work, including their recent buildings Harmonia_57 and Loducca. Two of Triptyque’s four partners, Carolina Bueno and Guillaume Sibaud, share insight on recent projects and the city’s role as muse.
In the upscale São Paulo neighborhood of Higienopolis, Rojo Artspace inaugurates their newly-acquired digs with a show called “Born Into This” by Japanese-Brazilian graffiti artist Yusk Imai.
Housed in an ornate 1920s building on a quiet residential street, the new space actually belongs to Galeria 600, which underwent a major reform to house its new reincarnation.
Artgoers now enter the gallery space through a huge driveway into a pebble-filled back area set with shipping containers painted black that function as show spaces.
They’ll then be able to go inside the building to see additional artworks, and soon, check out books in a store on the mezzanine level that will feature Gestalten publications. Rojo struck up a partnership with the German-based publisher to showcase their lineup in Brazil, a collaboration with lots of promise for both parties and will hopefully utilize Rojo’s print component.
The space contains various rooms, which founder David Quiles Guillo says will allow Rojo to extend its art reach by hosting workshops and other cultural events.
“Born Into This” show runs through 8 May 2010.
A private, 178-acre lush botanical garden of 3,500 plant species, the outdoor museum Inhotim is home to commissioned and collected works from artists such as Doug Aitken and Matthew Barney. A visit to the immense Brazilian art park, an hour away from the country’s third-largest metropolis, Belo Horizonte, feels both unusual and completely natural in this breathtaking setting.
Created in 2004, Inhotim didn’t gain international fame until recent years, when the local iron magnate Bernardo Paz commissioned some high-profile American artists to make site-specific pieces. Because it expands continuously, each visit tends to be different, whether due to the opening of a new pavilion or finding that pieces from his 500-strong collection have rotated to new locations.
The quality and range of the artwork in Inhotim is truly magnificent. Coming up to Doug Aitken’s Sonic Pavilion by golf cart (some of the pieces are more easily accessed by vehicle transport) looks like you’re visiting a set of a different planet. When you enter, a buzzing sound that varies with the time of day amplifies the noise coming below the earth 300 meters deep.
Danish-Iceland artist Olafur Eliasson has several contributions here, including a large-scale kaleidoscope and a dark igloo with spurting water fountain inside. Chris Burden’s “Beam Drop Inhotim” references an earlier piece of his (“Samson”) but was created for the park using locally-sourced steel beams.
Perhaps the best non-American works come from the architecturally-outstanding Adriana Varejão pavilion, a hard-edged concrete box housing her work. Rivane Neuenschwander’s installation is another exceptional piece. A house boasting an opaque ceiling filled with tiny Styrofoam balls moves with the wind, seeming to come alive with each breeze. Tunga’s bizarre “True Rouge,” a series of suspended red nets and liquids, lives in a gallery off the edge of a pretty lake full of black swans.
Modern, sleek food stands spread throughout the grounds stock everything from beverages to hot dogs, but two chic restaurants in clear view of a Paul McCarthy sculpture, serve a delicious high-end buffet and a la carte plates.
Check the site for a list of artists and visitor info. In September, Inhotim will show permanent works from Helio Oiticica, Miguel Rio Branco and Lygia Pape.
Visitors are recommended to stay in Belo Horizonte and make the drive to the park, however, count on two to three days for the full experience.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
