In this talk Brazilian architect Paulo Tavares navigates through his recent projects that unravel the complicities between modernism and colonialism in architecture, its archives and medias. The talk focuses on the multi-media installations Des-Habitat Didática and An Architecture Botany currently on display in the exhibition pre-architectures at CIVA.
Des-Habitat Didática presents a visual research project that examines the politics of modernism through exhibition architecture, graphic design and printed media. The project explores the cultural context of Habitat, the magazine created by architect Lina Bo Bardi and her partner Pietro Maria Bardi as part of a broader pedagogic vision for the São Paulo Museum of Art, the MASP. Appropriating and subverting means and languages, the project unveils how visual design and exhibition making served as a framing devices to mask the colonial viewpoint of modernism’s ideologies on primitivism and the so-called “primitive art”.
An Architectural Botany revisits the photographic archive produced by ethno-botanist William Balée during his path-breaking research with the Ka’apor Indigenous people in eastern Amazonia in the 1980s. Gazing this botanic archive through an architectural lens, the project questions the epistemological and ideological foundations of modernity’s definition of nature and its associations with modernist tropes such as primitivism and primitive architecture.
