Unfortunately my fast approaching retirement has made me a somewhat lazy blogger. But I pledge to do more. Today I merely wish to report on a happy professional coincident.
A while back, I published an article on the ‘Paulista’ variant of Brazilian modernism commonly known as anthropophagy (i.e. cannibalism). While doing the research, I got a bit carried away. Because the article was so far off from what legal theorists normally do, I was sure no one would read it. Then out of the blue, Dr Marie Tavinor from the Royal Academy of Arts in London contacted me and invited me to participate in a symposium (thank you!) arranged in conjunction with their ongoing exhibition together with distinguished experts in Brazilian art and culture.
I focused my presentation on Flávio de Carvalho who was represented at the exhibition by his paintings. Instead, I dealt with Flávio as an architect: he was trained as an architect and civil engineer, but notwithstanding his own home and a few residential buildings in São Paulo, none of his designs seem to have been realised. The plans and the sketches that accompanied them were more like provocations against notions of bourgeois ‘good taste’.
Instead, Flávio excelled as a radical thinker, a painter, a graphic artist, a set designer for experimental theatre, a fashion designer, a performance artist, a film maker, an adventurer, and even a furniture designer. So you couldn’t really say that Flávio was an unaccomplished architect because it seems that he seldom intended his architectural plans to be realised. I would rather call him a reluctant architect in the spirit of the surrealists.
An additional bonus from the symposium were the ‘visual minutes’ that artist Julia Miranda kept and later kindly sent to me (see above). This is such a fantastic idea that if I ever organise another symposium again – unfortunately I first have to complete the edited volume from the previous one – I will surely hire her to keep the minutes.
I urge you to do the same.