What ends every day
From December 12 to February 14, 2016, the RJ’s Museum of Modern Art receives the exhibition “What ends every day”, anthology of the work of Laercio Redondo. The exhibition brings together 11 works produced in various media from 2007 to the present day. Highlight of the individual is “Detours”, a unique video installation in honor of Lota de Macedo Soares, who designed the Flamengo Park. In “What ends up every day,” Laercio reflects on the city and the country that surrounds it, with all its complex social dynamic, rethinking the relationship of architecture with identity, both on the personal level and in the national. Curated by Justine Ludwig, the exhibition also includes other works that deal with collective memory and their deletions in society. The exhibition is touring and will be presented in 2016 in Dallas Contemporary.
Laercio Redondo unearths memories, often using architecture and its practitioners as a point of departure. Deeply invested in researching cultural dynamics, Redondo merges poetic narrative with personal vision to create multi-faceted installations. In this exhibition he examines such important Brazilian figures as Athos Bulcão, Lota de Macedo Soares and Lina Bo Bardi. Often giving voice to those who have been silenced, Redondo illuminates the universal implications of collective forgetting. What ends every day brings together work in diverse media created between 2007 and the present. Central to the exhibition is a new film installation, Detour, that traverses the distance between Flamengo Park designed by Lota de Macedo Soares, where the museum is located, and Casa Samambaia, her private home outside the city of Rio de Janeiro in the hills of Petrópolis. The soundtrack of the film brings attention to de Macedo Soares’s conspicuous absence from Brazilian collective memory.
Also highlighted in the exhibition are Lina Bo Bardi and her Glass House. Redondo explores her masterpiece in two works—the video The Glass House and a series of photographs Blow Up/ The Glass House. The video shows documentation of the home on two occasions, one in 1999 and the other in 2008. It brings attention to the lived-in nature of the home, in contrast to being seen as an architectural remnant. The focus of Blow Up/ The Glass House is on details and objects that have been blown-up from the original images of the house to the point that they lose their sharpness. They act as a counterpoint to traditional architectural photos as the building itself is obscured. The images bring focus to objects that remained in the house during a period of restoration—transforming them into artifacts devoid of their original purpose.
What ends every day is a reflection of the city and country that surrounds it, with all its complex societal dynamics. It ruminates upon architecture’s relationship with identity, both personal and national. Redondo, through his practice, resurrects cultural practitioners whose works still remain relevant today.
