Patrícia and Renato

After meeting Patrícia Naves in New York during ICFF, I decided Belo Horizonte had to be a stop in my itinerary. After 4 days and also thanks to her, BH became my favorite Brazilian city – even if Rio would win the “where would I live were I to move to Brazil?” contest.

Patrícia and I we were introduced in New York by Zoë Melo, a fellow “mineira” (native of the state of Minas Gerais), as some of Patrícia’s designs are part of Zoë’s Touch collection and were shown at Destination Brazil, a Brazilian product design showcase that took place at the MoMA SoHo store in May of 2009.

Trained as an architect, Patrícia has her own product label, Oiti, and runs her own design store in Belo Horizonte, Grampo. She also designs accessories for fashion designer Ronaldo Fraga, a celebrated mineiro who has been taking the Brazilian fashion world by storm with his intricate, sometimes surreal fashion collections that establish dialogues between Brazilian culture and the contemporary world and are inspired by such disparate things as Disneyland or Santos Dumont (Brazil’s air travel pioneer).

I flew in from São Paulo on a Friday afternoon; Patrícia was going to leave town with her boyfriend Renato the next day for the weekend (she would also later go to Copenhagen for designboom’s designmart), so we planned to meet for dinner with some of their friends, which was a lot of fun.

Raquel, Alexandre and I

One of Patrícia’s friends I ended up spending a lot of time talking to, Alexandre Mancini, is an artist who works in the tile panel medium. He is also truly passionate about the history of tiles and tile panels, particularly the fascinating history that connects Portuguese and Brazilian tile panels and the many, virtually unknown influences between the two since the 16th century. Tile panels have been an important part of Brazil’s architecture from Baroque churches (excluding the ones in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais’ World Heritage town, which are tile-less – for a reason) to modern buildings in Brasília. Alexandre told me about Athos Bulcão, the celebrated artist who worked with Niemeyer on many of his buildings and developed a unique way of designing and building his abstract tile panels by creating modules that would later be randomly applied by workers on site. Alexandre speaks passionately about Bulcão, whom he sees as his main inspiration; the panels he’s designed for buildings by his architects and friends Carlos Alberto Maciel, Alexandre Brasil, Bruno Santa Cecília and André Luiz Prado (who also publish an architecture magazine, MDC) reflect that influence.

Together with Alexandre’s girlfriend, Raquel (who is a direct descendent of the Távoras, Portugal’s powerful and infamous aristocratic family) we talked about what is was like to live and work in Belo Horizonte and the culture of being “mineiro” – from the food to Guimarães Rosa, one of Brazil’s great modern writers. It was great to spend an evening with people so proud, but also actively involved, in the life, history and heritage of where they’re from.

Inhotim is one of the most sophisticated places in the world to see contemporary art. The large property about 60km from Belo Horizonte, owned by mining millionaire Bernardo Paes, feels – as Marcelo Drummond put it so well – like ”Berlin in the sertão”. There are some amazing artworks from Brazilian and foreign contemporary artist to be seen around the gardens and inside the pavilions. More photos after the jump. Photography is only allowed outside, but some of the art can be seen in the Institute’s website.

I spent my first day in Belo Horizonte with graphic designer and professor Marcelo Drummond. Marcelo is one of the founders of the Piracema Laboratory, and long-time friend of Heloísa Crocco (who introduced us by email while I saw stil in Porto Alegre). He picked me up from my hotel and we went straight to the Central Market, in what was a great introduction to the city (and where I ate three different kinds of Pão de Queijo for breakfast). Then we went to Pampulha, to have take a look at the buildings designed in the 1940s by Óscar Niemeyer on the banks of the artificial lake. We marvelled at the what was then a luxurious casino for the rich and famous of Minas Gerais and is now the Pampulha Art Museum, directed by Marcelo’s twin brother, Marconi. After lunch at Xapuri (also in Pampulha, a classic destination for the region’s food), we went back to Belo Horizonte to check out the Arts and Crafts Museum (in what was before the city’s central train station) and the bookshop at the Arts Palace (a 1970 design also by Niemeyer).

Marcelo and I covered a lot of ground during this very full day; from his PhD thesis on vernacular typography to concerns over the future of Piracema and other like-minded projects to using museums as places for material culture (and therefore design) classes. One of the things we spent quite a long time talking about was what he calls the aesthetization of poverty, this sort of fascination artists and designers – from Brazil and abroad – have with the precarious, makeshift  belongings and ways of the poor. This perverse fascination galvanises the desperate resourcefulness of the “have nots” into the creative inventiveness of the “haves”, who are seldom bothered with the actual conditions people live in, or how to improve them. Many times during my trip I’ve heard this is a trait of “brazilian design”, something that always leaves me with an uneasy feeling.

The Belo Horizonte airport is a great place to arrive (in Brazil or anywhere). I couldn’t figure out who the architect was, but the curving concrete structure is more open air than an air-tight building. The air, the late afternoon light and the openess reminded me Sandakan airport in Borneo . It’s also full of those little modernist dark wood+concrete details, and you can still see some of the certainly original lowercase Helvetica Medium signs (after the jump). I’ll be coming back in a few weeks.

09:45 TP 139 Lisboa > Belo Horizonte
(on Business Class, courtesy of a lovely TAP groundstaff lady and due to overbooking)

16:55 TAM  3225 Belo Horizonte > São Paulo