Plants and flowers branch out from the iron structures that cross Lina Bo Bardi’s living room. It is as if the tropical forest that surrounds the house of the emblematic Italian-Brazilian architect, in São Paulo, had finally managed to invade the space, penetrating his windows.
The tension that hangs over domesticated nature – and its possible loss of control at any moment – is the theme of the work of Camille Henrot, a French artist who exhibits her ikebanas at Casa de Vidro, a residence designed by Lina herself in 1950.
Ikebana is the Japanese technique of flower arranging. More than the manipulation of plants for aesthetic pleasure, this practice with Buddhist roots reflects the harmony between man and nature. Henrot studied the Sogetsu school, founded in 1927 by Sofu Teshigahara, which advocated that arrangements could be made “anytime, anywhere, by anyone.”
The Frenchwoman began creating these arrangements when she moved to New York, and her belongings, including books and equipment, were lost in a misplaced suitcase. She found a book about Japanese tradition and decided to turn flowers into material to create art.
Henrot began translating the thoughts of his favorite authors into arrangements, among them Clarice Lispector. The concept of “flow of life”, used to define the author’s style, which used the thoughts of his characters as a driving force for stories, gives its name to the exhibition.
In one of the compositions, for example, only rose stems full of thorns emerge from saucers, cups and teapots. The work is linked to “The Passion according to GH”, in which the protagonist, a sculptor, is unable to develop her creativity, while wanting to control the environment around her. With the thorns, Henrot reflects on the impossibility of remaining vigilant about everything, and on how alienation due to automatic tasks, especially in the case of women, can be harmful.
The idea of lack of control is also present in “Grosse Fatigue”, a work by Henrot who popularized his name in the art world after winning the Silver Lion at the Venice Biennale, in the promising artist category, in 2013. The video, broadcast on a screen at the Casa de Vidro, recounts the creation of the universe mixing science and religion, images of everyday life and objects from the Smithsonian, a museum in Washington, in the United States, where she studied – and today one of the institutions that has suffered the most. reprisals linked to Donald Trump’s offensive against the cultural sector.
In Henrot’s work, the chaos of life emerges. “Museum activity is a bit like a neurosis,” she says, walking through the room that once belonged to Lina, full of objects collected by the architect – from paintings and sculptures to tree branches and Catholic saints. Henrot likes to mix and says that accumulation is part of his creative process.
Like “Grosse Fatigue,” “Egyptomania,” another video broadcast on a tube television, revisits the role of a museum in cataloging objects. The engraving shows various objects related to ancient Egypt, from ancient sculptures to trinkets such as pharaoh and mummy keyrings.
It’s as if the artist is using disorder to reveal how flawed the most reliable methods of organizing the world can, in fact, be – this applies to institutions like museums, but also to widely held theories, like the Big Bang and the existence of God.
Analyzing the limits of control in the face of the different stimuli of contemporary life is linked, in a certain way, to Lina’s philosophy. To the question “which comes first, houses or museums?”, the architect replied that “everything must come at the same time”. For the Henrot generation, anxiety about life’s possibilities has intensified thanks to the algorithmic chaos of social media.
The artist, however, understands his work as a kind of artificial intelligence that takes multiple references from different sources and brings them together into one thing – with the aim of answering an existential question.
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