WELTSTADT

Patricia Almeida © Goethe-Institut

Written by Luis Berríos-Negrón

The creation of the third Y-Table for Nós Brasil! We Brazil! focused on artistic and museological situating. Through Marcelo Rezende, directing curator of the Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM) da Bahia, we were offered to build the table and implement the workshop at the excellent "oficina" spaces originally developed in the 1980's by Salvador artist Juarez Paraiso. These ateliers are still actively used for local and visiting artists to teach and develop lithography, ceramics, painting, sculpture, and other crafts with both the neighboring poor communities of the Museum and other academic institutions in the city. Thereafter, the local Weltstadt curator Ícaro Villaça, put us in contact with the local art and architecture collective Gruna whom already had an expansive installation in the "oficinas" titled "Cambio Exchange Change" composed of many small modular wood pedestals holding a over a hundred Spathiphyllum or "Bandera Branca" plants. This Salvador-based collective, sharing broad interests with the Anxious Prop on matters about collectivity and curatorial production, immediately offered to work with us to build the Y-Table at MAM. The first step was to choose a material for the table. On our initial visits, the Museum offered the use of a rare madeira de lei called Maçaranduba. This wood is not only intensely beautiful, for its reddish, dark, dense constitution, but also, and more importantly, it was recovered from a section of the floors of the conservation and restoration wing of the original Lina Bo Bardi 1962-65 conversion of this colonial, wharf building into what today is still the MAM. What makes the appropriation of this wood particularly relevant is Bo Bardi's deliberate attention to local artisanship, materiality, and displays used and created for the MAM (and other of her expository buildings such as the Bahia Benin Museum). Thus, the recuperation and implementation of this Maçaranduba wood, estimated by the museum's carpenter and collaborator, Marcos da Silva, to be circa 100 year-old, provides not only an obvious presence by weight and color, but more importantly, it embodies the spirit of the building itself, the curatorial concerns of Bo Bardi, and the concerns over material economies shared by the collectives. The surfaces were again programmed to not only hold the power strips and workshop question cards, but also with found ceramic objects made by students from the "oficina" itself. The lighting was also made from 6x6cm carved strips of Maçaranduba with LED ribbon, cantilevered from two steel rods, same material used for the trestles. We felt these trestles, which are an original design by Gruna developed for their own studio, would be perfect to be readapted to the Y-Table. In the end, the Salvador Y-Table will be an enduring evidence of the collaboration towards the Weltstadt, Nós Brasil project, as it will remain in the Museum's workshops to be used as teaching tool and environment by the education program of the Museum, "Nucleo de Arte e Educação" directed by Lica Moniz.

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