'NOVO MUSEO TROPICAL ORIENTAL' A PROPOSITION

Yesterday night I did this drawing of the Novo Museo Tropical inspired in Japanese Landscape drawings, with the result being in Oriental Tropical style.

I'm still not sure of how the architecture of the Museum is. I only know it has a concrete roof (in which you can also walk), no windows or enclosed spaces (although some spaces might be closed with mosquito nets). The roof is mostly supported by pilotis (from which you can hang hammocks), or there could also be monolith free standing concrete walls, creating some kind of labyrinth.

Because it's located somewhere in the tropics, in the future the Museum will probably be covered by the jungle and disappear. In one of the free standing walls (or maybe on the floor) the plans of the museum will be inscribed in concrete, to allow future archeologists, if they wish, to reconstruct the museum.

I have also been thinking seriously about the contents of the museum, which art works would exist there, and how they would survive the climate. Apart from temporary exhibitions (in Kippenberger MOMAS style), and of works of art that required no technology and could survive the weather (and age with it), there might be no works exhibited in the Museum. In the past, I had been thinking of some works which would definitely have to be part of the Collection, for example, Dominique Gonzalez Foerster's 'Promenade' from 2007, where the space is filled with the sound of rain, or Oswaldo Macias 'Something Going on Above my Head' from 1999, where the space is filled with the sound of birds. As much as I love this works, at the moment they wouldn't be needed in the Novo Museo, as these sounds and effects would happen outside the Museo naturally (unless a catastrophe occurred where birds and rain disappeared and we would need to resort to the recordings to remember them). As such the Novo Museo Tropical would be, in Dominique Gonzalez Foerster's words "a place to observe, enjoy and describe the effects of tropicalization", (in DGF, SET: Sitio Experimental Tropical).

I've also been thinking on the collection of the Novo Museo. Some of the works or artists that could form part of the collection form part of the Diagrama Tropical. But maybe these works don't exist inside the museum in the physical sense. Maybe information would be available about the works in the museum's "library", and there would be an Instruction Manual/Time Capsule, which would allow for the works to be recreated at present time, but also reconstructed in the future. There should also be some kind of alphabet/code to allow for future inhabitants of the planet to decipher and read this instructions in order to reconstruct works and museum, should human kind as we know it disappear from the planet.

Read here the Novo Museo Tropical Manifesto.

'DIAGRAMA TROPICAL' UM POSTER BANANEIRO, AN ATTEMPT TO CONSTRUCT A TROPICAL HISTORY

Invited by curator Kiki Mazzucchelli I developed this tropical diagram/chronogram, as an attempt and a first approximation to construct a new tropical history and historiography. It was also freely inspired (and a response to) Alfred Barr's 'Cubism and Abstract Art' from 1936 and to Ad Reinhardt’s, 'How to Look at Modern Art in America', 1946.

As any collection, it is necessarily incomplete, please feel free to suggest names and moments you believe are absent. If you have some friends that we overlooked there are some extra bananas, fill in!

The poster also includes the Novo Museo Tropical Manifesto, and is also an attempt to create an expanded field for tropical manifestations, which de-localises it from any geography (or brasilianes). As the Manifesto says: 'Being Tropical is not about location, it's about attitude.'

Click on drawing to make it bigger and be able to read it, feel free to download it and print it.

The poster bananeiro tropical was printed as an edition of A1 posters as part of the project 'O Cartaz Como Espaco Expositivo Expandido', curated by Kiki Mazzucchelli and designed by Mel Duarte, with the support of the Fundacao Bienal de Sao Paulo. Two other posters were printed as part of the project, one curated by Carla Zaccagnini, the other by Inti Guerrero, more on them later.


Alfred Barr, 'Cubism and Abstract Art', Diagram, MOMA, 1936


Ad Reinhardt, 'How to Look at Modern Art in America', PM magazine, June 2, 1946.

'TRISTES TROPIQUES' A GRAN SAUDADE COLLETIVA AT THE BARBER SHOP IN LISBOA

The Barber Shop, Lisboa and Novo Museo Tropical present:

Tristes Tropiques
A proposal by Pablo Leon de la Barra
A gran saudade colletiva with works byAlexandre da Cunha, Patrizio Di Massimo, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pablo Helguera, Runo Lagomarsino, Mauricio Lupini, Donald Urquhart, Jean-Michel Wicker, Carla Zaccagnini, a journal by Elein Fleiss, poems by Walter Gam, soundtrack by Arto Lindsay, and documents from the Flavio de Carvalho and Helio Oiticica Archives.
With the support of Luiz Augusto Teixeira de Freitas
Special thanks to Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, Julieta Gonzalez and Adriano Pedrosa.
The Barber Shop, Rua Rosa Araújo 5, Lisboa
March 4, 2010, 10PM
http://thisisthebarbershop.blogspot.com/

In memory of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009)

“Tropical countries, as it seemed to me, must be the exact opposite of our own…”

"As we got steadily near the tropics, the heat made the hold more and more unbearable, and turned the deck into a mixture of dining-room, dormitory, nursery, wash-house and solarium"

"I imagined Brazil as a tangled mass of palm leaves, with glimpses of strange architecture in the middle distance, and an all permeating smell of burning perfume"

“The transition from house to street was less clearly marked than it is in Europe. No matter how smart the shop-front, the goods have a way of spilling over in the street, so that you hardly notice whether you are, or are not, ‘inside’ the shop. The street is a place to be lived in, not a place to pass through. It is at once tranquil and animated – more lively, and yet more sheltered, than our streets at home.”

“People generally think of travel in terms of displacement in space, but a long journey exists simultaneously in space, in time, and in the social hierarchy. Our impressions must be related to each of these three before we can define them properly; and as space alone has three dimensions all to itself we should need at least five to establish an adequate notion of travel.”

“That I had crossed the Atlantic and the Equator and was near the tropics I knew form several infallible signs: among them, the easy-going damp heat which emancipated my body from its normal layer of woollens and abolished the distinction (which I recognized, in retrospect, as one of the marks of our civilization) between ‘indoors’ and ‘outdoors’.”

“The tropics are not so much exotic as out of date. It’s not the vegetation which confirms that you are ‘really there’, but certain trifling architectural details and the hint of a way of life which would suggest that you had gone backwards in time rather than forwards across a great part of the earth surface”

Quotes from Claude Levi Strauss, ‘Tristes Tropiques’, Criterion Books, New York; first American Edition 1961, French Edition 1955

'NOVO MUSEO TROPICAL' AT JUST MADRID

Novo Museo Tropical no budget presentation at Just Madrid.
Somewhere better than this Place (after Felix Gonzalez Torres)
No Sea Marginal, No Sea Heroe (after Alexandre da Cunha (after Helio Oiticica))


invitation to get out of the fair and instead visit the green house next door


novo museo tropical office


novo museo tropical curators, Adriano Pedrosa and Maria Ines Rodriguez


novo museo amigas, Katy Hernandez, Agustina Ferreyra and Carolina Caycedo




Novo Museo Tropical temporary space without art at the Invernadero in Madrid

Novo Museo Tropical (Museu without walls)

when museums and cultural centres outside of the hegemonic centres remain empty because they don't have budget for a programme or curators...
when artists living in the semiperipheries produce specifically for the international market, art fairs and biennales, while ignoring their local public and contexts, or while abusing of their local public and context...
when art produced elsewhere is bought legally (without looting as in the past) by international patrons and museums...
shouldn't we rethink the kind of 'art' we do?
shouldn't we rethink the kind of exhibitions we produce?
shouldn't we rethink the kind of museums we aspire to have?

Novo Museo Tropical
a museum without walls...
an invitation to rethink the museum outside the centre...
do we need new museums and mausoleums?
can we think a different kind of collection?
do we need art bought in galleries, biennales and art fairs?
how to protect the collection from the climate without resorting to air condition?
can we think a museum that exists beyond the conventions of the XX century contemporary art world and its structures?

how can cultural production and memory survive humanity after humans disappear from the earth?

novo museo tropical...
soon somewhere near you...