Havaianas

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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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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.

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…)

Tatiana Sperhacke and her husband Raul Krebs picked me up at the Porto Alegre airport this morning, and we went straight to the Fundação Iberê Camargo for lunch. Álvaro Siza’s only second (thanks Paulo Moreira for the correction!) building in South America is a true architectural gem – despite the silly toilet symbols his clients still let him get away with. Walking along its narrow corridors and spacious halls on a sunny, crisp day like today made the experience even grander. (more…)