‘This Exhibition Is an Accusation’: The Grammar of Display According to Lina Bo Bardi

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Previous articleNext article No AccessArticle‘This Exhibition Is an Accusation’: The Grammar of Display According to Lina Bo Bardi 1Roger M. BuergelRoger M. Buergel Search for more articles by this author 1The quote stems from Bo Bardi’s ‘Account Sixteenth Years Later’, in Marcelo Carvalho FerrazandMarcelo Suzuki (ed.), L’Impasse del design. Lina Bo Bardi: L’esperienza nel Nordest del Brasile, Milan and São Paulo: Edizioni Charta and Instituto Lina Bo e P.M. Bardi, 1995, p.5 (of the English insert). In 1980 Bo Bardi started editing material for this book, which was to become a testimony of her Northeastern period, which will be discussed further on in this text. In 1981 Bo Bardi stopped the editing, convinced that the whole undertaking would be of ‘no use, all this is going to fall into a void’ (p.1). Fortunately, the Instituto Bo Bardi, which fights for the preservation of Bo Bardi's legacy, continued and eventually finished the editing. From the account the book provides, it becomes clear that the research done from the late 1950s until 1964 was part of a larger collective effort that, like Glauber Rocha with his ‘aesthetics of hunger’, pursued an artistic agenda with the aim of aligning the practical, mostly raw aspects of this culture with a politics that sought to address the actual living conditions of its people. An excellent source that covers the wider history of this period in Bahia is Roger Sansi’s Fetishes and Monuments: Afro-Brazilian Art and Culture in the 20th Century (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007). See in particular chapter 6, ‘Modern Art and Afro-Brazilian Culture in Bahia’.PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Afterall Volume 26Spring 2011 Published by Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/659295 Views: 358Total views on this site © 2010 by Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.