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Thanks to our efforts the pineapple jam is nearly finished! Fortunately there was a brand new batch of home made strawberry jam waiting for us!
This shower is still fickle and temperamental- just when we think that we’re learning its ways, and we’re (or in this case I’m) having a nice shot shower, it goes cold and leaves us (me) stood frozen with a head full of conditioner!
We got some photos of the labs today. They’re so organised, efficient and spacious! We can’t get over it!
After having a quick chat with everyone at the Pinacoteca, Teodora picked us up and took us to the Estacao Pinacoteca, the Pinacoteca’s partner gallery. The Estacao Pinactoca was used as a prison for political prisoners during the dictatorship and now has a permanent exbihition about this era of the country’s history. There’s also a library, a big meeting area and some temporary exhibits.
We spent a lot of time in the exhitibions of Mario Cravo Neto’s work. We were big fans of one in particular that was a room full of projects of photos that he had taken in New York in the late 70’s/early 80’s that were set to a soundtrack of bluesy tunes.
We compared it with the William Kentridge exhibition at the Pinacoteca that we saw on Sunday.Kentridge’s work involved sitting in dark room watching projections of metronomes and strange silent movies about marching bands and people dressing up as papier mache worlds and exploding to intense, busy music. It was pretty mindblowing stuff in a confusing, unsettling, pretentious kind of way.
Cravo Neto’s exhibit was much more accessible and easy to understand. A person could walk into the exhibit and sit facing any direction for any amount of time and they would still experience the art the way he wanted. He just wanted to show you the magic of those fleeting little moments in a big city… snap shots of signs, people, cars, buildings, all from different angles. Nobody sees all of these little things or has the same thoughts about them and I reckon that he wanted to encapsulate that. Also the photos that he’s included can only have been taken without care as they’re all a bit dodgy in some way- from wonky compositions to being out of focus. They have the same erroneous charm of holiday photos taken before the naughties and photos taken on £2 disposable cameras from Home Bargains when my friends and I were teenagers!
Cravo Neto clocked onto this charm about three decades earlier and its nice to think that they would have been an inconvenience rather than a novelty to his original audience and he would have been trying to show people that they could be beautiful and used to create a certain atmosphere.
Butterflies and Zebras was interesting. Cravo Neto changed the context of different objects, turning them from unsettling images into beautiful compositions that played with tones and textures.
Once we had got our art fix for the day we had lunch with Teodora in the Pinacoteca cafe. Our culinary highlights were passion fruit juice that knocks the Rubicon stuff, a nice little chocolate mousse called a “Brigada” (at least I think it is) and some lovely coffee!
After lunch we spent a few hours removing prints from their frames, putting them in Tyvek envelopes and repacking the frames. Again, we couldn’t believe how great the stores are! There is so much room and equipment here dedicated to conservation! We were also impressed how high everybody’s standards are- they are all so neat and organised and keep the equipment as such.
On the way home we saw a man in this tshirt. People had warned us about organised crime in Brazil but they had no idea…
We should mention some of the people that we’ve met so far too. Staying in a hostel there are lots of different characters coming in and out.
On Saturday we met a Canadian man called Keiran who is having (in his words) his last holiday for a long time before moving to London to study medicine at UCL.
On Sunday night we had dinner here with a smiley Argentinian man called Charlie who has moved to Sao Paulo to work in a restaurant. He asked, quite genuinely, if we were a couple and I can confirm here to the world that we’re not.
Yesterday morning we met another Canadian man called Nima who was staying at Uvaia for a couple of days to attend some important meetings about his company that gives eco-friendly holiday ratings. https://www.facebook.com/impactourbrasil
There is also a quiet but friendly French man on his laptop who bobs in and out, microwaving cups of tea.
That means the greetings here are “hi/oi/hola/salut” then “how are you doing?/como vai?/ que tal?/cava?” and “good thanks/bom obrigada/bien gracias/bon merci” and we’re still not even sure if all of that is right!
We’ll be fluent in something soon!
We hope that you’re all doing well in England!
Thanks for bothering to read this- we’re still surprised when we see that anybody who isn’t us has looked at it!
