Heloísa Crocco and Normélio

I got to know Heloísa Crocco and her work through Adélia Borges, whom I met the day before I left to Porto Alegre. I was going to stay in a hotel there, but Adélia called Heloísa to ask if her “wooden box” studio on the outskirts of Porto Alegre, by the Guaíba river, would be free the next 2 days. This is where she welcomes friends, artists and curators there as a sort of informal artists’ residence. Lucky for me, it was free.

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Having arrived at the Casa Brasil Design around 3pm yesterday, I walked around and inside the fair’s stands, meeting some of the designers and manufacturers. Around 5pm there was a “bate-papo”, or conversation, between the jurors of the Salão Design Award. Bernardo Senna, Ademir Bueno, Guto Índio da Costa and Maria Helena Estrada. They held a lively debate over their work as jurors, about how they didn’t give out some of the awards in order to elevate the distinction’s level, and didn’t shy from making – especially Maria Helena – rather critical observations to the furniture factory owners showing their products in the surrounding halls.

After the talk I paid a visit to Ilse Lang. Her Faro Design stand was much calmer by then, and we could actually sit down and talk for a while, where we mostly talked about identity in design. Not that this issue is particularly dear to Ilse, but she is a good example of how the notion of Brazilian – as any other national bracket – design is problematic in itself. This is something Marco Romanelli reflected upon in his June 1991 article for domus that first presented the work of Fernando and Humberto Campana in the international press.

Ilse lives and works in Porto Alegre, but is from Caçapava do Sul, Brazil’s “south of the south”. She feels closer to the more monochromatic, wide open “pampa” landscape of the region that encompasses southern Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina than the tropical exuberance foreigners often associate with Brazil. Her name itself reflects her German-speaking immigrant colony ancestry. Her work, which has won several awards and can be found all over Brazil and abroad, also fails to express that “brazilian quality” we may be trying to find. And it shouldn’t have to. After all, there are so many landscapes, races, dialects, origins and qualities to Brazil’s 190 million people. Ilse Lang is just one of them.

Later that night the Award Gala for Salão Design took place in the Bangalô club here in Bento Gonçalves, where I spent a good time talking to Bernardo Senna and also to Fábio Yoshio on how mixed up a place Brazil is.

Graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister once said that a famous designer is like a famous electrician: design fame is, in the overwhelming majority of cases, limited to the design profession and, more recently, the “design world”. In the case of Marcelo Rosenbaum things are a little different. He may be virtually unknown outside of Brazil, but here the guy’s really famous. (more…)