Projeto e destino/en

Projeto e destino

Tiago Alem Santinho

When in the month of April of this year, the newspaper Folha de São Paulo published an article calling attention to the fact that MASP was using two of the glass stands designed by Lina Bo Bardi in the 60s as mere obstacles to separate the kitchen and the cashier line in its restaurant, a movement of indignation was born on the part of the artistic and intellectual class. As it could not be otherwise, it understood such use not only as a departure from the original sense of the project, which was to serve as the basis for the exhibitions of the museum's works, but, moreover, as a true outrage of the legacy of modern art, or, as the architect Marcelo Ferraz declared on the occasion, "a violence against a modernist ideology." The situation thus exemplarily brought up the contradictions experienced by the modern project today: its condition of ideology demoted and displaced, without place in the current political-social logic.

The work of Santinho proposes to analyze this sense of degradation of the modern project. It takes by reference the models of Walter Gropius for the construction of popular houses in Germany after World War I, which the artist rebuilt faithfully. Like the situation experienced by Lina Bo Bardi's stands, however, he subjects them to a new condition: resting them vertically so that they gain another sense of use, a new destiny, more mundane and less heroic than the original. Converted into shelves crowded with books and banal objects, such models now appear to us no longer as projections of something given to the future, but as urgently present pieces, concrete objects devoid of that abstract dimension of "being more than if" typically attributed to different scale effects.