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.

Crocco's studio gorgeous sleeping quarters

Heloísa is trained as an artist, but has been working as a designer for many years. Most of her time is dedicated to the design of surface patterns and decorative panels, where she explores wood texture elements in varying levels of abstraction, namely in her own line of decorative ceramics at Tok&Stok. She is also a pioneer in developing community-based design and craft projects, and this was what interested me most in meeting her.

Heloísa is a co-founder of Piracema Design Lab, a research project dedicated to “form in Brazilian culture” initiated by a multidisciplinary 7-person team: herself, photographer Fabio del Re, artist and professor José Alberto Nemer, twin sisters and architects/designers Lui Lo Pomo and Tina Azevedo Moura, Renato Imbroisi and Marcelo Drummond. I met some of the other members later in my trip.

Image taken from a Piracema Design Lab presentation

Piracema is seen as one of the most consistent and respected projects in this field; through its “Faber” project, it has been instructing professionals (artists, designers, craftsmen) to work in projects that bring together design and craft. This is thus not a one-hit-wonder project where a group of designers goes to a remote community and teaches people how to improve their craft through design. In a way it’s also about that, but this 1-year program is mostly about providing the knowledge and tools to understand both the market (in its potential and limitations) and the communities these professionals will work with in the long run.

Through its scientific base and multidisciplinary approach, Piracema avoids the empirical methods and unilateralism of other, similar projects. Allowing the artisan to be sovereign over its work and authorship, it wishes to cultivate the product of his or her work as a materialization of a cultural heritage, observed in its context and anthropological complexity.

Jalapão (image from the rosenbaum® blog)

Mainly with the support of Sebrae, Piracema has developed community projects in several states, the last of which took place this July in Jalapão, a landlocked plateau region in the state of Tocantins. During the time I spent with Heloísa in Porto Alegre the experience of being in that remote place was still very fresh in her mind. We talked a lot about what happens when a team of designers goes to places like these: how the community they meet reacts, how much they learn from one another and how significant the impact of the experience is on both.

The day after I arrived we (Heloísa, her son Thomaz, Tatiana and myself) went up to Bento Gonçalves for the first day of the Casa Brasil Design fair. We got there just as Marcelo Rosenbaum was finishing his talk, right on time for him to join us for lunch. Rosenbaum had been the invited designer for Piracema’s Jalapão project, and this was the first they had reunited after the experience.

Heloísa, Thomaz and Marcelo ('s tatooed arm).

Over what was a remarkably northern Italian lunch near Bento Gonçalves, they shared many stories from those unforgettable ten or so days working with local people and capim dourado. This tall plant, whose naturally golden stem is used to make a myriad of objects, was the material of choice for this project. Also at the table was Ademir Bueno, design manager at Tok&Stok, who had been following this and other Piracema projects closely, as some of the resulting products find their way to its nationwide network of stores. You can see some photos of the project’s team and results on Rosenbaum’s blog or on Tok&Stok’s website.

Normélio's stuff

On our 2-hour car journey back from Bento to Porto Alegre, we bought bergamot oranges by the roadside, and as we passed the village of São Sebastião do Caí, Heloísa made sure she stopped at her friend Normélio’s to say hi. He welcomed us in the kitchen of his amazing wooden house for tea. Normélio collects and restores antique German colony furniture and surrounds himself of decade-, in some case century-old, artifacts that in this part of Brazil don’t feel even particularly exotic.

Normélio's Tea

Having turned 60 this year, Heloísa told me she feels it’s now time for her to go back to her own work and “pass on the torch”. She wishes Piracema to evolve as a project, to involve younger people and adapt to future challenges. Judging from her contagious enthusiasm and energy, but also Piracema’s talented team and track record, I have no doubt the project will remain as relevant and inspiring as it is now.

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.

When I met him today at the Casa Brasil Design fair in Bento Gonçalves, and we walked around the fair before lunch, he was constantly stopped by people wanting to take a photo next to him. Marcelo’s fame comes however not so much from his interior and product design work for brands like Melissa or other high-profile clients, or even his radio show, but largely because of his TV show on Globo, called Lar Doce Lar. It’s a sort of Brazilian Extreme Makeover, where he goes around the country making a difference in people’s homes and communities. Marcelo has also taken part in the latest Piracema Design Laboratory project in the deep in the state of Tocatins town of Jalapão, as well as other community initiatives, like the Oasis Santa Catarina project in the flood-stricken area of Blumenau.

Rosenbaum’s energy is captivating; both his persona and the work produced by his studio manage to speak to a broad spectrum of Brazilians, from ladies-who-lunch and stroll down Óscar Freire to the poor masses who watch him on TV. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to talk to him, as after our lunch with Heloísa Crocco, her son Thomaz, Tatiana Sperhacke and Ademir Bueno, (design director for Tok & Stok, Brazil’s largest furniture retailer he disappeared into the fair’s crowd. I’ll be catching up with him later in my exploration.