The curators
requested us for a public project in the urban area of Sao Paulo
and in addition to that bring one or more old existing works
for the pavilion.
We did our preliminary visit to Sao Paulo in April 2006.
In the very beginning we got interested on the large scale
minimal concrete structures that we ran across in different
parts of the city. To us these structures seemed to exist
somewhere in the middle ground between a building, a sculpture
and anonymous bit of machinery.
These architectons turned out to be ventilation towers for
Metro Line 1, which runs north-south trough the city. Although
all towers are all different they are still somehow the same,
like variations of same architectonic theme.
The aim of the project is to get people to notice the unified
entity that these towers form in the cityscape. The relationship
between the towers and the surrounding cityscape varies. They
crop up in surprising places, in architectonically, socially
and ethnically different parts of the city, fitting into or
contrasting with the surrounding cityscape. More generally
they represented the beauty of spontaneous and anonymous (anti-)architecture,
which metropol like Sao Paulo was stuffed with.
The first part of the project is a publication which documents
and displays the architectonic variations in these 22 towers.
At the same time, this publication available at the book shop
of biennial constitutes a guide book that can be used to find
the towers.
For the second part of the project we chose a six-tower fragment
in the central part of the city. The towers selected are a
cross-section of the different tower variants. At night, the
towers are brightly lit from inside, to form a series of light
sculptures running through the city center. This is also intended
to get the locals to see these everyday structures in a new
light - in a way, through outsiders´ virgin eyes.
In the pavilion
"Antigravity Model" from 2005 was the old work
we showed in the biennial. The installation was situated in
the center of the second floor of the pavilion. The installation
was situated in the centre of the building next to the free
shaped void and therefore it was visible from different floors
of the building. "Antigravity model" is a construction
made of powder paint coated aluminum tube in which four interlocked
rings rotate inside each other suspended on two pillars halfway
between floor and ceiling. The rings of more than three meters
in diameter can be put in to motion simply by giving a push
to the largest one of them. They orbit each other moving slowly
and effortlessly.
> Antigravity
Model in Berlin, 2005
The other work we showed in the pavilion was a new site-specific
installation called "Pattern Recognition Setup".
It was built above the central staircase and escalator connecting
the second and third floor of the pavilion. This work was
a version of the site-specific led-installations that we been
working on for several years.
The installation was made of 1875 self-blinking led-lights
which are soldered to thin brass wires stretched across darkened
void above the staircase. The led-lights formed a 75 x 25
pcs grid, sized 6 x 2 meters hovering above the staircase.
The blinking sequence of each led differs slightly from others
and together they create a randomly blinking matrix in which
about 50% of the lights are on simultaneously. Human eye perceives
the simultaneously blinking lights as patterns which constantly
move across the matrix.
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