STELA BARBIERI · GeNiUs lOCi – O esPÍritO DO lUGar Maria aNtôNia, sãO PaUlO - sP. CRITICAL...
Transcript of STELA BARBIERI · GeNiUs lOCi – O esPÍritO DO lUGar Maria aNtôNia, sãO PaUlO - sP. CRITICAL...
STELA BARBIERI
STELA BARBIERI
Stela Barbieri Stela Barbieri is an artist, curator and consultant in
education, arts and literature. She is a counsellor of the
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation since 2012. She was the
educational curator of the São Paulo Art Biennial (2009-14)
and the Educational Action director at the Tomie Ohtake
Institute (2002- 2014). Stella is an arts advisor at the Vera
Cruz School, where she began to work as an educator
in 1988. She is also an author of children’s books and a
storyteller. Currently, she directs the Binah Arts Space, a live
studio, with experimental labs, lectures and courses.
RECENT EXHIBITIONS
2013 - 2016
MÁQUINAS DE PAISAGENS - CRIA
MINAS TÊNIS CLUB - 2019
stela barbieri, 2018
MÁQUiNas De FaZer PaisaGeNs
MiNas tÊNis - bH
stela barbieri, 2018
MÁQUiNas De FaZer PaisaGeNs
MiNas tÊNis - bH
stela barbieri, 2018
MÁQUiNas De FaZer PaisaGeNs
MiNas tÊNis - bH
stela barbieri, 2018
MÁQUiNas De FaZer PaisaGeNs
MiNas tÊNis - bH
stela barbieri, 2018
MÁQUiNas De FaZer PaisaGeNs
MiNas tÊNis - bH
stela barbieri, 2018
MÁQUiNas De FaZer PaisaGeNs
MiNas tÊNis - bH
stela barbieri, 2018
MÁQUiNas De FaZer PaisaGeNs
MiNas tÊNis - bH
stela barbieri, 2018
MÁQUiNas De FaZer PaisaGeNs
MiNas tÊNis - bH
stela barbieri, 2018
MÁQUiNas De FaZer PaisaGeNs
MiNas tÊNis - bH
MIRANTES
SESC JUNDIAÍ- 2018
stela barbieri, 2018
MiraNtes
sesC JUNDiaÍ - sP
stela barbieri, 2018
MiraNtes
sesC JUNDiaÍ - sP
stela barbieri, 2018
MiraNtes
sesC JUNDiaÍ - sP
stela barbieri, 2018
MiraNtes
sesC JUNDiaÍ - sP
stela barbieri, 2018
MiraNtes
sesC JUNDiaÍ - sP
stela barbieri, 2018
MiraNtes
sesC JUNDiaÍ - sP
stela barbieri, 2018
MiraNtes
sesC JUNDiaÍ - sP
stela barbieri, 2018
MiraNtes
sesC JUNDiaÍ - sP
stela barbieri, 2018
MiraNtes
sesC JUNDiaÍ - sP
stela barbieri, 2018
MiraNtes
sesC JUNDiaÍ - sP
stela barbieri, 2018
MiraNtes
sesC JUNDiaÍ - sP
ALINHAVOS
EMIA- 2018
stela barbieri, 2018
aliNHaVOs
eMia - sP
stela barbieri, 2018
aliNHaVOs
eMia - sP
stela barbieri, 2018
aliNHaVOs
eMia - sP
stela barbieri, 2018
aliNHaVOs
eMia - sP
stela barbieri, 2018
aliNHaVOs
eMia - sP
stela barbieri, 2018
aliNHaVOs
eMia - sP
stela barbieri, 2018
aliNHaVOs
eMia - sP
PAISAGENS GRÁFICAS
CULTURAL CENTER PORTO SEGURO- 2016
stela barbieri aND FerNaNDO Vilela, 2016. PaisaGeNs GrÁFiCas
CUltUral CeNter POrtO seGUrO, sãO PaUlO-sP
SÓNONÓS
BRAZILIAN BRITISH CENTER - 2016
stela barbieri, 2016. sóNONós
braZiliaN britisH CeNter, sãO PaUlO-sP
PLACES PROJECT
2014 - 2015
stela barbieri, 2014
PlaCe tO Create sPaCes
sesC sãO CarlOs-sP
stela barbieri, 2014
PlaCe tO Create sPaCes
sesC sãO CarlOs-sP
stela barbieri, 2014
PlaCe tO bUilD
sesC baUrU-sP
stela barbieri, 2014
PlaCe tO bUilD
sesC baUrU-sP
stela barbieri, 2014
PlaCe tO reaD
sesC sãO CarlOs-sP
stela barbieri, 2014
PlaCe tO reaD
sesC sãO CarlOs-sP
stela barbieri, 2014
PlaCe tO PlaNt
sesC OsasCO-sP
stela barbieri, 2014
PlaCe tO PlaNt
sesC OsasCO-sP
stela barbieri, 2014
PlaCe OF liQUiD COMbiNatiONs
sesC sãO CarlOs-sP
stela barbieri, 2014
PlaCe OF liQUiD COMbiNatiONs
sesC sãO CarlOs-sP
stela barbieri, 2015
PlaCe tO DraW
sesC beleNZiNHO-sP
stela barbieri, 2015
PlaCe tO DraW
sesC beleNZiNHO-sP
stela barbieri, 2015
PlaCe tO sOW
sesC bOM retirO-sP
stela barbieri, 2015
PlaCe tO sOW
sesC bOM retirO-sP
stela barbieri, 2015
tO see tHe laNDsCaPe
OFiCiNa CUltUral OsWalD De aNDraDe-sP
stela barbieri, 2015
tO see tHe laNDsCaPe
OFiCiNa CUltUral OsWalD De aNDraDe-sP
stela barbieri, 2015
eNJOY
OFiCiNa CUltUral OsWalD De aNDraDe-sP
stela barbieri, 2015
eNJOY
OFiCiNa CUltUral OsWalD De aNDraDe-sP
VORTEX
CENTRAL GALERIA DE ARTE - 2014
stela barbieri, 2014. VOrtex
CeNtral Galeria De arte, sãO PaUlO-sP
stela barbieri, 2013
CirCUit OF liQUiD NarratiVes
CeNtral Galeria De arte, sãO PaUlO-sP
stela barbieri, 2013
CirCUit OF liQUiD NarratiVes
CeNtral Galeria De arte, sãO PaUlO-sP
INSTALLATIONS
stela barbieri, 2001
PaisaGeM Passa aGeM
exCHaNGe
arka kUlltUrWekstatt e. V.
esseN e HaGeM - aleMaNHa
stela barbieri, 1999
UNtitleD
Galeria ValU Oria
sãO PaUlO - sP
stela barbieri, 1999. UNtitleD
Galeria ValU Oria, sãO PaUlO - sP
stela barbieri, 1998
stela barbieri, 1998
stela barbieri, 1990
CeNtrO CUltUral sãO PaUlO-sP
stela barbieri, 1991
MaM, sãO PaUlO - sP
stela barbieri, 1990
CeNtrO CUltUral sãO PaUlO-sP
stela barbieri, 1990
CeNtrO CUltUral sãO PaUlO - sP
stela barbieri, 2005
aGUaDas
stela barbieri, 1990. UNtitleD
CeNtrO CUltUral sãO PaUlO - sP
stela barbieri, 2005. UNtitleD
stela barbieri, 2014.
PlaCe OF liQUiD COMbiNatiONs
sesC baUrU-sP
stela barbieri, 2003. Feast
MUseU De arte De ribeirãO PretO - sP
stela barbieri, 2004
UNtitleD
esPaçO CUltUral bM&F,
sãO PaUlO - sP
stela barbieri, 2007. UNtitleD
CeNtrO CUltUral sãO PaUlO - sP
stela barbieri, 2005. UNtitleD
stela barbieri, 2007
DRAWINGS AND ARTIST BOOKS
2009 - 2014
stela barbieri, 2010. artist bOOk
stela barbieri, 2010. artist bOOk
stela barbieri, 2014. artist bOOk
stela barbieri, 2007
artist bOOk
stela barbieri, 2014. artist bOOk
stela barbieri, 2008. artist bOOk
stela barbieri, 1999. MONOtiPias
Galeria ValU Oria, sãO PaUlO-sP
stela barbieri, 2002
GeNiUs lOCi – O esPÍritO DO lUGar
Maria aNtôNia, sãO PaUlO - sP
CRITICAL TEXTS
2014 - 2015
ACTION AREA
Agnaldo Farias
The Places Project, with authorship by Stela Barbieri, has currently five
of its works: PLACE TO READ, PLACE TO DRAW, PLACE OF LIQUID
COMBINATIONS, PLACE TO CREATE SPACES and PLACE TO SOW. It
could comprise others, all of them related to the wide spectrum of
actions, concepts, materials and territories - disciplinary and poetic -
developed by the artist. The recurrence of the term place, a common
denominator for all the works belonging to this project, some already
made, others to be invented, explains the focus of her research: the
production of spaces equipped with specific qualities.
The concept of space, despite its widespread use, brings along a highly
abstract inheritance. With its roots founded in analytic geometry, the
space concerns the idea of coordinates, position, without qualities,
homogeneous, white and accurate as much of modern architecture.
Stela dramatically rejects this concept and the images that relate to it.
In a world in which technological breakthrough generates, conversely,
the loss of experience, the direct and conscious contact with
phenomena, things and processes, it is essential, vital, to take action. It
is necessary to make people allow themselves to be taught by things,
to know through them, to know about oneself through them. It is an
urge to let their senses be fed from a parcel of the universe offered by
the sensitive world so that the being can be irrigated, so that sensitivity,
imagination and expression may arise.
Stela’s measures are, at this time, workshops-works, one of the highest
points of her career, and involving the construction of places that are
powerful, warm, challenging sites, whose artist’s brightness - who
orchestrates the situation, who proposes the field to be upturned, who
offers ways of working it as a game with rules, materials and devices so
that anyone can play it - is combined with those of the visitors, or - as
Lygia Clark would say - with those with whom Stela echoes in this
series of works: the agents.
Each of the proposed PLACES is a space of action and dream, of
engineering and poetry, of body and emotional contact, of decision
and intuition.
PLACE TO READ
Reading is an action similar to travelling, with the difference that it is
motionless. The reader, any reader, is like still traveler. Wasn’t it so that
Cioran coined Jorge Luis Borges - the great Argentine writer, director
of the huge National Library of Buenos Aires which is the subject of
several of its labyrinthine tales - the one who even after getting blind
never stopped writing?
We associate reading with books and it is normal to do so. After all,
since the invention of printing the world was populated by this object,
this portable means of transportation that takes us while we take
it home, to the sofa, to bed, to school, to everywhere we travel to,
because there is nothing like the silent company of a book. The kind of
company strictly on hand.
Books carry within them, ingrained, texts of all kinds, theories,
narratives, geographies and intimate stories that can be distant,
plausible, extraordinary. What is it that can fit into that small dense
thick object, composed of dried stacked leaves and glued on one of its
edges? Virtually all or almost all (let us leave a wide and infinite room
for all the books yet to be written).
If it is true that almost everything can fit into a book, presented in the
form of illustrations, sketches, drawings and… letters, the most abstract
of signs; if the set of figures dyeing the quadrangular pages feed our
imagination, this should be a lesson for other forms of reading. And
isn’t it a fact that one talks about the “book of the world”?
More important than the book, this lazy machine, it is the reader, the
one who sets it in motion. Learning to read is not something that
comes down to a language, but what stretches to everything. All that
there is, made or not by men’s hand, is waiting to be deciphered,
because that’s what we desire, because we cannot resist this impulse.
From the written word to the wind direction, from the most prosaic of
objects to a photo sent by Hubble, everything tells a story, everything
gives off an aroma. In fact, even a scent sets out its source which, in
some cases, is rooted in our affections.
With tables and benches, with the books collection authored by the
artist herself, with a wide range of materials, PLACE TO READ is an
area of reading expansion which doesn’t only invite to read, but to
produce narratives, even enigmatic ones, those whose content we
cannot reach to understand. For, considering the successive daily
misunderstandings, the reading of our actions does not always
coincide with what we had wanted. We are constantly read beneath
amazing optics. So why not to produce a book whose understanding
runs away from us, but which can make sense to others?
PLACE TO DRAW
To draw is to see the world up close, scrutinising its details, contours
and structure, as well as designing a world from within, expressing it
through a sketch, a figure on a piece of paper or a cave wall, or even
performing a construction.
Although admitted as a source of various human expressions, since
all of us, artists and non-artists, are used to projecting or taking notes
of ideas in the form of scribbles, doodles, sketches, the drawing that
is commonly exposed on the walls of museums and galleries is that
considered an end in itself, and not part of a long and intricate process.
Drawing, however, has to do with looking, commenting, registering,
launching an idea, both in a more advanced stage and in larval
condition. It is equivalent to putting yourself with regard to something,
whether it is before us now or it comes as memory, or even the attempt
to translate a report, such as the famous drawing of a rhino conceived
by Dürer from a description. Drawing is also a way to launch yourself
to the future, opening up to imagination and impossibility. In any case,
drawing has to do with expanding the subjectivity.
PLACE TO DRAW supports and deepens this perspective, this way of
understanding the drawing, noting that in addition to the role played
by this practice in the various processes of cognition and expression
that we use, internal or external to art, to draw concerns the way we
organize ourselves in the world, collecting from it the raw material with
which we build spaces, establish rhythms and structures.
From the beginning of her career, Stela Barbieri, who has ever been
interested in materials, combined drawings made with pencils and
brushes on paper and fabric with a varied cast of materials, both organic
and inorganic, eventually articulated. From the classic situation of the
pencil pressed by the fingers and pointed to the paper or cloth surface,
the artist threw herself into wools soaked with paint thrown against
the wall, the membranes produced by cellophane sheets stiffened
with glue, structured with metal wires, supported and arranged in the
exhibition environment.
PLACE TO DRAW provides the practice of drawing in its various versions,
ranging from the intimate scale of what is produced with the fingers to
that obtained through the body.
PLACE OF LIQUID COMBINATIONS
Analyse a kind of material, handle it, gradually understand its
peculiarities, its behaviour, its temperament, its appearance, the way it
relates to other materials, gets old; its wills, some of these hidden and
only available to be seen after lengthy studies, what is equivalent to
internalise it, become it the same way as, in the words of Camões, the
amateur becomes the loved thing.
PLACE OF LIQUID COMBINATIONS is an invitation to the involvement
held on the water, the primary liquid, an opportunity to learn some
of the lessons it offers. It is also a curious building located between
a chemical laboratory, a center of hydrological research and a water
garden with coloured blooms, planted by the visitors. It has the form of
hard containers such as glass and porcelain bottles, soft as porous tissue
or plastic bags, nearly all transparent or white, strategy to highlight
some of its most distinctive properties.
One lives thanks to the water. There is not a single day that we go
without it, what does not mean that we notice its scope, its material
and symbolic depth, bigger, much bigger than the immense importance
we attribute to it. Thus are we today: we know about things, but we
refuse to experience them; we know abstractly, and when it rains, we
rush to open umbrellas.
It is really surprising the extent of the presence of water, its ubiquity,
to know it composes most of our body, flows and spreads through
capillary webs at the same time it scatters in the air, moistening it or,
when there is a large volume, depending on environmental conditions,
getting condensed, pouring on the floor or gushing from within,
running like an outburst, in love as it is with gravity, until it settles
in lakes, ponds, thin blades whose sensitivity is denounced by how it
reacts to the breeze that rubs its surface.
PLACE OF LIQUID COMBINATIONS portrays the sweet submission of
water assuming the body of the bottle that contains it; it also portrays
the voracious and uncontrollable desire for all that is, from the rain to
the mucosa of the marshes, soaking tissues and refreshing the clay,
keeping it supple. It also shows the solubility of water, the powerful
solvent it is. And maybe just because it is odourless, tasteless and
colourless, it frays the earth pigment clod, takes the pasty ink bit stuck
in the brush upon itself, eager of the color it loads.
PLACE TO CREATE SPACES
Lines, dots, plans in sizes, shapes, textures and varied colours ... What
is it necessary to produce spaces in the space of a sheet of paper’s flat
surface? Lines and points are beacons for the eyes, elements that attract
and guide them along the inner corridors, doorways, subtle events,
garbled or not, noisy situations, tense, clenched, as in the case when the
edge of a thread bristles, when the dramatic rhythm of hatched plans
behave like capture nets, allowing the eyes to momentarily flounder as
live fish. And when it comes to colours, the drawing lights in varying
atmospheres; plans, lines and dots radiate, get exalted, escape from
themselves contaminating the nearby presence with their breath and
their sonorities, which can be discrete or aggressively acid.
Stela Barbieri draws with pencils, brushes, papers, but also with scissors,
box cutters, sticks, wire, glue, fabric and what else she empathises
with in the construction of spaces. And if paper has been her starting
point, one cannot know what her point of arrival will be, as the spatial
volume of any room is more than enough for her to invent a myriad
of environments, so that she can put in motion her ability to compose
spaces.
So it is with PLACE TO CREATE SPACES, a polymorphic, kaleidoscopic
work, founded by warm colours - red, in this case - with wooden
stakes that can be fitted together and over a kind of floor that has
been precisely prepared for this purpose, with fabrics assuming the role
of walls and ceilings, covering heights, sliding in variable speed falls,
settling, smooth or wrinkled, in solutions with the same tenderness of the
huts made of sheets and pillows that we used to build in the living rooms
of our homes on rainy days, or even better, the more enduring stalls we
used to raise in the backyard under the trees, the tiny houses where life,
watered by the imagination, was so intense and glad we could barely
stand it.
Place to create spaces is a work and a dream offered by the artist so that
everyone, both children and adults, can exercise the production of spaces.
They arrive and organise their affectionate clearings of warmth, building
houses indoors: a shifting city, taking the materials upon themselves,
undertaking with hands and bodies, deciding together the feature of the
place they want for themselves, the warm space, immersed in reddish
twilight, in which, among the children’ crystal laugh, they will talk and
play for a moment, forgetful of the outside world.
PLACE TO SOW
In 1990, Stela Barbieri exhibited in a group show held in the Paço das Artes
in São Paulo, an artwork composed by beans scattered over a rectangular
area made of layers of cotton and that occupied part of the exhibition
room. During the opening, some of her fellow artists commented quietly
that it could not properly be considered a work of art, since the author
could not control the outcome. The artist, indifferent or just oblivious to
the reservations, visited the exhibition daily in order to water the target
field, ensuring that the beans would flourish. As might be expected, soon
the delicate stems were breaking the thick web of clear and soft ground,
rising vivid, with bulbs on the ends like prying eyes.
With each passing day, the pace of alternating washes and dryness were
settling the layers of cotton, increasingly blurred by the growth of beans,
especially the roots that would be sticking and spreading underground
so as to ensure the firmness of the little plant. The progressive decay
of the cultivated field practically coincided with the peak of the beans.
The staggered design of the stems and roots, the light-brown and
green-tones sharp graphics over white fibres increasingly tarnished by a
ferruginous staining, ensured that the work, from the first to the last day
of the exhibition, would be continuously metamorphosing.
Up to what I know, this was the first time the artist exhibited a piece
orchestrated by herself, but organised in association with nature, a
co-author whose principles we do not often manage to understand.
PLACE TO SOW is the culmination of this process based on the
comprehension of the artist as someone who catalyses, or opens path for
the view of natural processes, such as the tiny, imperceptible ones, to our
naturally inattentive eyes, explosions occurring in the context of nature, in
the form of seeds that explode, disentrenching the meats and the colours
with what they will conquer the space.
The oval glass inside of which rests a minimum seed treasure, restlessly
colourful, the cylindrical tube filled up with water and a delicate green
plant, threadlike, arranged in a helical design, are examples of means
through which the mysteries and wonders of the plant world can be at
least partially revealed.
TO SEE WITH THE HANDS
Julia Buenaventura
There is nothing more annoying than going out with a long umbrella
on a sunny day. The citizen walks with the instrument like someone
who takes a strange package, being hampered by the smallest barriers,
by doors and turnstiles, and what’s more, he has to overcome adversity
with an only hand, as the other one takes the burden. Once at home, it
can only complain: Oh villain! If I had not taken you along, there would
have been a deluge!
However, I invite you not to act so severely with those umbrellas, as
they offer a particular and valuable service, that is, they teach us to see
with our hands. In fact, they offer news of objects at a distance with a
much higher accuracy than the eyes, as they often mistake: sometimes
they take soft for hard or rough. Whereas touch is infallible. It never
deceives itself. Every crevice, every change on the pavement, every
unevenness on the ground is revealed in detail. Children know well. It
is no coincidence they enjoy dragging branches on the walls: they offer
key information about the texture and hardness. What’s more, in case
a grid eventually appears, they become aware - with the compass - of
the time implied in the route.
One of the keys to enter the work of Stela Barbieri is to understand the
experience as a sensory problem, that is, the channels and the way we
feel the world. Thus, the work of this artist is an invitation for visitors
to explore their own perception mechanisms and their interactions.
An exercise that is only possible because Stela refuses to propose the
eye as king of the senses, she breaks this typically Western hierarchy,
revealing the relationships between vision and other sensory devices,
specifically the touch. Hence her work with liquids, fluids, with crushed
minerals, with flexible materials that account both pressure and weight
and - as I will explain later - with certain colours.
For her interventions at SESC, Stela Barbieri proposes the Places
Project. It consists of pieces that, far from constituting objects to be
contemplated, are open as spaces to be experienced, lived and still
transformed by the visitors, who will be able to play with the materials,
to play with the elements. That is, they will be able to know, what is
only possible through experience. The other class of knowledge, the
kind that is so much explored in universities and schools, that consists
of repeating something that another one has said, is forgotten during
that time. So here we have work-experiences that just happen in the
visitor’s time, when he loses his guest composure and becomes a
member of the family, when he begins to change the house. This is, in
short, the invitation of Barbieri.
Place to build consists of two main elements: wood and various foam
objects. The first element is structural. Thus, like a backbone, it is in
charge of chaining the space, articulating the set. The other objects are
foam cubes of an average density and dense foam boards; artefacts to
be moved easily; the foam is light and soft, it can be carried and in case
of fall, it will not affect anybody, not even itself. The foam absorbs the
force, it is flexible to the world, it can change its shape and retrieve it
later without the slightest inconvenience. These conditions oppose it to
the structures. In fact, in this space, there are two objects of different
categories: those made of boards, still, and those made of foam to be
moved, displaced.
A place where family-visitors are comfortable; they can touch and, as
the name indicates, build. They can raise a house, a passage and notice
with the experience not so much the size of objects and space, but
their own dimensions: how high is their head; how far away from their
nose is their little finger.
The second intervention, Place of liquid combinations, consist of
a room with metal structures, tables, glass objects and colours. The
metallic structures come from the drawings, from the sketches Stela
has been developing for years in her study notebooks. Thus, more than
pipes, they are ink strokes that have left the page and become volumes,
bodies in space, without losing the stroke condition. Its specific colour,
an opaque black that rejects any brightness and its non-industrial, non-
homogeneous character, emphasises this feature.
Completely different from Place to build, now we find ourselves in a
kind of chemical laboratory with tables and shelves for testing; and
cotton masses and an orange liquid inside glass containers as study
materials. In fact, I use the word laboratory because it is a place that
has no similarity with the world, but that is governed by specific rules,
issued from the color. A place where black, white and orange are the
only accepted tones.
There is a constant concern with color in the course of Stela Barbieri.
Several previous works since the 1990s have taken the color as a
fundamental issue. Thus, the choice of black, orange and white for this
installation hasn’t occurred by chance; it comes from previous research
with annatto seed - a very intense orange seed -, walnut extract and ink
- black par excellence -, and cotton - the image of white. In summary,
materials in which colour is essential, intrinsic.
In Metaphysics, Aristotle says that there are two classes of being. The
first when I declare: this is an orange; the second when I say: this is
orange. We might agree that in the first case I’m accounting the object,
the fruit, whereas in the second, I’m accounting a quality - attribute
or accident - of the fruit. Nevertheless, Stella Barbieri does not like to
deal with the attributes as if they were accidents, but as substances in
themselves, so that a particular colour or a particular feature becomes an
object. Therefore, it is not the thing in charge of possessing a determined
characteristic; it is the characteristic that is finally turned into a thing.
Thus, if it is usual to state: “This liquid is orange,” at an installation by
Barbieri we will have to put the phrase upside down, saying: “Orange is
this liquid.” Something I had been sensing also occurs: it is not that the
ink is black; but black is the ink.
In summary, the quality takes the place of the object, the adjective is
turned into a noun, the attribute is converted into substance. The roles
exchange that inevitably leads to a sensorial dialogue to the extent that if
a colour is an object, then it may be known not only through the eye, but
through touch, smell, hearing and even taste.
Thus, in a Barbieri’s artwork, the senses come into dialogue. Or rather,
ourselves, in this laboratory, in this place to be built, we notice their chat,
the conversation they usually keep without consulting us: I rarely listen to
the tip of my index talking to my eye, but I suspect they are always doing
intrigue. The work of Barbieri confirms my suspicion.
“(...) to find - to address - to penetrate is endless “*: Moving places in presence fields
Galciani Neves
A place is a state of mind. Although referring to a spatial dimension in
which things take up positions, it is made of human singularities and their
disorganisations, of frictions between different action modes, of voice
resonances, of voices that blow from us. In any case, the word place in the
dictionary of our imaginations is not a sealed shelter to be explained in a
geometric way, but maybe the intensity that pulses in the “delicate forest
dwellers of our own selves,” as stated by the poet Jules Supervielle. These
inhabitants who roam, map passages and create places like chores of life.
Stela Barbieri invites us to leave, to sight landscapes and return with
branches, winds, travel diaries, handfuls of sand and to contribute in
“workshops-works” where she blends perception and constructive
desire and where we can (re)construct other forests at the very time
we move into stories and plots in space. Thus, the “Places” are like
limitless maps, with tiny corners, points and shareable gaps in the vast
field in which we are not only the self. In her territories, there are scri-
bbles, visual essays and colours choreographing authorship in books.
While forms of sociability and affection verse, accumulate and transla-
te things, perceptions and flickering wills become part of the “Places”
and make them vibrate. Once there, one can experience details as “we
allow ourselves to unmechanise grammars of the body and space”,
proposes the artist. The history of these “Places” are many to be
invented and various are the contours to be drawn and overflowed at
the inside-outside of us.
Book: the place where we are
Waiting, in a way it might extend, as if it had tentacles, involving the
reader, the place between itself and the reader. This is the book. Place
to read is a library of books on standby, with extensions that are their
event - gestures that constitute, offering themselves to eyes and hands
that will change their scale and even their features. The books are there
in multiple personalities, in ambivalent versions: dispersed in coloured
pages, telling a bit of a story or eager to receive them; open in the
shape of wings or asleep guarding the time of writing. Place to read
92
121
is a workshop-work where Stela Barbieri flowed her artist books and
notebooks among books that are still to be. All of them are in constant
continuation, accustomed to the unpredictable of its inhabitants.
See-read-range are enjoyment conjugations of the artist’s books. They
appear as sequences of spaces where the drawing spreads, dipping
through the transparency of the pages, cutting them and unfolding
itself discontinuously. In these books, the idea / act of drawing occurs in
the palpability and experience of their materials, textures and colours.
So when we handle their wing-pages, distinct forms reveal themselves
as abstract landscapes frameworks expand. And a drawing-scripture ari-
ses by building bridges between the page and the place where we are.
The practice of storytelling, venturing into plans, ideas and works
projects, and the reflection on art, education and the numerous daily
crossings are fragmented in many books by Stela Barbieri. They are
longings and time records which tell a vigil of herself in permanent
porosity with the world, on pages, drawings and life remembrances. In
such notebooks, there is a concentration of tongue twists encouraged
by the organic nature of her drawings, so making an lexicon not at all
categorical in which image and word merge permanently in the artist’s
creative routine. Place to read is home to a multitude of readers-authors
that build covers, cover pages, pages, spines and invent different books
anatomies, migrating volume by volume, letter by letter, interline by
interline, navigating the rivers of stories to come.
Across the place: a playful poetic-action
Men can be defined, says Johan Huizinga, by the existence of a
“playful” component: and inborn impulse that shapes his personal
culture. Thus, men live conscious moments of reflection and verbal
and body expression, in which the phenomena of life and nature are
sighted so as to enable potential rhythms of transformation. Such a
view can dismantle some of our usual assumptions: “art is a serious
thing” or “someone in charge of any serious responsibility must move
away from a playful posture”.
We may think that Place to create spaces is an atmosphere of play - a
feature that is inherent to Stela Barbieri’s creation processes since a
long time ago - which engenders in that “place” a genesis of floating
architectures. The fundamental units proposed by the artist - coloured
rods, spherical shapes and a wooden platform - do not end as utility
tools, nor as formal truths for the construction of a space. Rather, they
are instruments of a poetic-action whose builders cross and conceive a
socialisation place to be and to act. Inspiration is free and it takes place
also on the hand that donates its shape.
Place to create spaces is a mutant stage, where coexistence relations
of spaces to be built and drawn embody scenes and imaginary
worlds. In this “place”, the “Homo Ludens” enjoys a playful reality
and experience, without delimitation verbs or social, ethical, aesthetic
fictions. And the ritual image of the play and the building spaces game
constitute rapture experiences before the new and, above all, those of
the excitement before the invention, propelling creative imagination
processes: tension, movement, change, enthusiasm for space, where
everything seems to gravitate poetically.
PLACE TO PLANT
Olivia Ardui
The gardens are associated, in the collective unconsciousness, to a com-
plex symbolic system with philosophical, mystical and political dimen-
sions. From the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, across the Renaissance
and oriental gardens, until it comes to the present urban backyards,
these spaces organise and include elements of the vegetable world in
an artificial structure designed by men. Maybe it’s this quality of middle
ground between men and the flora that the garden constitutes such a
privileged environment for the reconnection and rediscovery of nature
and its cycles, but also a place that emphasises the propensity to interio-
rity, urging a drift through the paths of imagination and memories. As if
the experience of the garden, distant but omnipresent reminiscence of
paradise, would intervene as an invitation to return to a more trustwor-
thy and simple experience.
For this capacity to reconnect men both the with physical nature and
with its very essence, the garden could be seen as an agent that raises
reflections about different aspects of their life. It is no coincidence that
the artist and educator Stela Barbieri adopts the garden in her wor-
kshop-work Place to plant.
Developed especially for SESC Osasco, the proposal is part of the Places
Project, a set of idealised workshops-works for different units of the
SESC São Paulo that stimulates direct interaction with the visitor, each
time with a different approach. If the other spaces made by Stela
Barbieri in this series are the result of considerations about own cultural
parameters, as the issue of reading or architecture, Place to plant pro-
poses a simple encounter with nature, from which we are increasingly
more distant in urban areas. This disconnection and this aloofness that
are characteristics of contemporaneity, in addition to the productivity
eagerness that leads our everyday lives, to the alienation induced by a
progressive virtualisation of interpersonal and work relationships, are
the cause of misfits, even if unconscious.
The green area outside the SESC Osasco, punctuated by fruit trees and
potted plants of various species, is occupied by some tables and shelves
with seeds, various herbs and flowers. As if in a laboratory, visitors,
both adults and children are invited to handle the seeds, plant them in
94
123
available pots, manipulate them to form compositions or mandalas, thus
being encouraged to observe carefully, touch, feel, to stop for a moment and
be present. The facility also draws attention to the perpetual regeneration
cycles of plants, from the birth, maturation and death to a transformation
and thus pointing to an alternative to linear and unidirectional temporality
that governs our lives. In this device, workshops and storytelling sections
will be organised, all of them geared to that existential return to nature,
even when manufactured, having passed through men’s filter as a garden.
The garden concept, besides being protagonist of the educational proposal
of this workshop-work, is also a relevant metaphor to address the set of
Stela Barbieri’s work. Indeed, in addition to the plant world has always
been a source of inspiration for the artist, the garden, because it is a hybrid
between the real and the artificial, nature and culture, embodies the idea
of a dialectic between two ends, a dynamic that is also inherent in various
other pieces by the artist.
After an early career in painting, Stela Barbieri turned her focus to experi-
ment with materials and their textures. The pigment ink formerly applied on
canvas started to dye liquids contained in glass or plastic containers, or to
impregnate irregular shapes made of latex or wool. In precarious and orga-
nic sculptures, this confrontation between liquid and solid states indicates
a fragile condition of impermeability in which a fluid element is restrained,
but at any time, and sometimes as a matter of fact, it infiltrates and pene-
trates its receptacle. This is the case for example of Untitled (“Hourglass”),
in which two pieces of plastic are nailed to the wall containing annatto
seeds. They have red dyed some oil which drips from a plastic to another,
likely to give in to their weight.
If these sculptural works, made in the 1990s, already had some autonomy
from the painting format, they were still attached to the wall. Progressively,
Stella Barbieri’s experiments got autonomous and the artist attempted to
develop larger scale installations, such as the Liquid Narratives Circuit,
held in 2013. In this installation, metallic structures are the support for
a series of glasses and mechanisms that sometimes retain, other times
make circulate an orange liquid, in a condition of constant movement and
transformation.
In addition to her educational proposal, Stela Barbieri’s workshop-work
proposes, in a more subtle and indirect way, the return of several key
aspects of her former production in a more introspective and reflective
moment of her career. First, Place to plant is a continuation of the recent
years’ large installations and precedes some projects in public spaces.
Then, the direct reference to nature in an urban context reiterates a cross
binomial in the artist’s work: solid and hard /soft and fluid. Finally, the
importance of the mock-up in the development of this work, as well as
the relationship between micro and macro scales, is also a constant in Stela
Barbieri’s artistic production. As the garden, historically associated with
the representation of the whole cosmos in miniature, the experience of
the workshop-work is a metaphor: it consists of sowing, planting, and
cultivating seeds for life.
ENJOY
The workshop-work “Enjoy” is the installation of an environment that
combines an orchard, a kitchen and a meeting table. Stela Barbieri relies on
fruits, edible leaves and kitchen utensils and invites the audience not only to
prepare food and to venture into unexpected mixtures, but also to engender
conversation, exchange subjectivities and experience collective negotiations. If
the table, according to Maffesoli, may be the place to establish the strongest
friendships, important discussions and decisions and many other emotional
ties, the artist proposes “Enjoy” as a place where trigger perceptions during
the making and the eating can be unleashed, like driving modes of communi-
cation and sociability expressions.
TO SEE THE LANDSCAPE
A landscape is a way to apprehend the world, a design that we draw from
relations with the reality around us or with the imaginary places that inhabit
us. Stela Barbieri invites us to invent landscapes, to perceive them as a an
artifice of the subject, as a kind of inventory or testimony made of symbolic
form in a phenomenological confrontation with the environment, with peo-
ple, with the wishes. In this “workshop-work” project, matter (cardboard
boxes and colours) and exhibition space are incorporated into the public’s
gestures, into the presence and gaze of this temporary resident who is invi-
ted to set conditions, perspectives, passages and sight opportunities to the
affective architectures that are planned there.
Galciani Nevesstela barbieri, 2014
“tO see tHe laNDsCaPe” aND “eNJOY” MODels
OFiCiNa CUltUral OsWalD De aNDraDe
sãO PaUlO-sP
Stela Barbieri rediscovers the vital load asleep in the industrialised
area. So her sculptures are not exhausted in the limits of its organic
unexpectedly appearances. Some exude odours, while others do not
cease to purge liquid. The relationship between her sculptures and the
organic mysteries began in the early achievements, full of reference
to some vegetable and animal surfaces that, when placed against the
light, reveal the wire eT-structural that shapes them. But the iron lines
pressed by cellophane sheets - elements of ancient sculptures - were
not enough for the artist, since it was necessary to awaken the mate-
rials out of their lethargic sleep. It was necessary that the iron would
oxidise and attack the paper, so that the result would be more than a
metaphor; that the beans would germinate under the cotton so that
an unusual topography could break out. Her sculptures aspire to life
and to all the fertility thereupon. This is where the merging between
its parts come from; the erotic engine that boosts them. Its making is
guided by the desire that the substances are animate and that time
restarts to drain in a whisper that proliferates in stains, patinas and
decomposition.
Agnaldo Farias
There is something of a receptacle in this organic construction suspended
in copper wires, sort of a shelter and protection to a volatile body with
sawdust and redness. Stela Barbieri is an artist who is sensitive to interiority
and to the directions that may arise from this commitment. The fault here
is search: to understand the behaviour of the matter through an expan-
sive use of space. A docile and slow search. Contrary to what the will of
warmth could indicate, the artist does not deny the matter, hiding it in
secret places. She prefers the hypothesis that there is not enough room
to the delicacy of emotion. Therefore, the contents leak out of a female
topography, forcing the exit of the borders. Nest lap emancipation.
Lisette Lagnado
Colour and line contribute to set up the drama. This dramatic condition,
between laughing and weeping, is recorded here by the red spilled on
wires coiled floppily. There is something playful in placing the wool
over the support, a movement similar to the free gesture of scratching
and splashing paint on the wall or paper. No control is imposed on this
spontaneity flow until the material is fixed between two transparent strips
such as blood in laboratory. In this spontaneous moment, it is surprised by
controlling the will.
M. A. Milliet
In Stela Barbieri’s sculptures, it is the interior and exterior nations that
merge, the paradox in which gut and skin, viscera and surface are, if not
identical, non conflictual territories, feeding all the work and responding
for the fluency of its formal solutions. By bringing together these two
opposite poles, the work starts to want everything: us, ties, bags, stacked
materials, thrown stuff, stacked, hanging, drained, glued. An expansion
of the idea of form follows the inside and outside prohibited neighbour;
an indifference for what is ordered appearance, individualisation of
a vision. Everything here is a passage, a cocoon of another cocoon,
ungoverned and hungry skin, in afflicted expansion. The matter varies
its state and displays its successive qualities, it becomes the footprint of
all forms. What gives interest to these works is its excessive plasticity, as
if they could receive all operations. There is this a mixture of expressive
power and extreme passivity, which at its best moments seems to point
to a tragic comprehension of life, as if doing and undoing, freedom and
destination were the same.
Nuno Ramos
Stela Barbieri creates environments permeated by transparency and
delicacy. In her objects, there is the pulse of life responsible for draining,
unfolding, balancing, tensioning, bending, tearing.
It contrasts the weak and the strong, the hard and the soft, the dense and
the volatile, which contaminate, weave, blur, aspire and sweat together.
Redemption and fight. Her works reflect the non-stopping conflict that
permeates the life of contemporary men. Expressive power in the art
territory, the subtle intention reveals the accident, the casualty that resists
to an excessive control of the artistic practice.
Vitória Daniela Bousso and Simona Misan Liberman
The doorway:
Strainers of an invisible materiality
Pregnant living-matter in suspension
The time being regurgitated by things.
The space enquired between one span and another
Basins pregnant with gravity swallowing everything
Omens corroding the daily life
Its tessitura draining through the doorway.
straining-vessels of our perceptions,
The lee suspends the pooled understanding
Invested in the possession of something immaculate
Rubens Espírito Santo
Editorial Coordination and Art Direction Fernando Vilela
Design Marilda Donatelli
Photos Ana Claúdia Rodrigues, Arthur Calasans, Daniel Ozana, Denise Adams, Fausto Chermont, Fernanda Beraldi, Fernanda Gomes, Fernanda Simionato, Fernando Vilela, Joseti Capusso, Laura Barbieri Gorski, Maetê Filizola Azevedo, Márcia Xavier, Mariana Francoio, Mariana Galender, Mauricio Simonetti, Rômulo Fialdini, Pedro Palhares, Raimo Benedetti - Estúdio B, Urga Maira Cardoso
Videos Caca Vicalvi, Camila Guerreiro, Carlos Zalazik, Documenta Vídeo, Fernando Vilela, Instituto Cultural Itaú, Luis Alexandre Kobal Lucato, Pedro Palhares, Raimo Benedetti - Estúdio B, Renato Barbieri, Rinaldo Martinucci, Tamara Ka, TV Escola, TV Senac
www.stelabarbieri.com