Issy & Grace's Conservation Journey

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!

 

 

So the day started with, you’ve all guessed right, pineapple jam and bread! Then on the metro straight up to the Pinacoteca, we arrived early at the museum then had a funny time trying to explain to the security guard with our poor Portuguese that we are conservation students on placement here, and in the end he knew who we were from the beginning!

We then met all of the conservation staff at the museum and Teodora who is our mentor while we are here, everyone is so kind and spoke to us in English, or with the few people who couldn’t speak English Grace brought out the Spanish/Portuguese mix. The department labs are great, light, airy, clean, modern, organised and very large.  On our tour we met more members of staff and went into the park next to the museum to look at a Sculpture called “Collar” 2000 By …  this is a very large ceramic piece based on a giant necklace that is draped over the trees and ground. One of the large ceramic beads had broken into three pieces, we took this inside and cleaned it in the sink, plunging us straight into work here which was great. After we had finished cleaning the bead it was already lunch time, Teodora and some of the others took us to our first kilogram restaurant, where you pay by weight of the food! There are large buffets of salads, hot food and desserts. This restaurant was modern and very busy, it also themed its food daily and todays was Mexican. I had some of the hot Mexican food and salad then a small selection of desserts, while Grace had a chili salad selection and we both had some of the tastiest fresh mandarin juice too.

The area the museum is set in is not the safest at night, but during the day its a bustling full of people. Teodora has been so nice to us and given us lots of advice as to where to avoid and where she lives if we need to get away from anything. But at the moment we feel very safe in our lovely hostel, but it is very comforting to know that she cares for our safety while we are staying here.

After lunch we walked back through the park which on a Monday is shut to the public, just like the museum, and is only open to museum staff and the police who use it as a running track for training. On each gate and through out the park, even though it is not huge there is a constant security presence keeping a eye on what is going on. We went back to the main office and then all of the staff went and brushed their teeth after lunch, it was a surprise to us as the English only normally brush their teeth twice a day. We then also met the museums creative director who worked in England for a few years and speaks exceptionally good English, he also is about to go to London to open an exhibition at the Tate about Brazilian artist called Mira Schendel. Once we had been introduced to some more members of staff, we went outside with the newly clean ceramic bead, Teodora and 3 members of the maintenance staff to repair the sculpture “Collar”. The ceramic beads are attached onto a steel rod, the bead that had been broken was from a different part of the sculpture as to where we have placed it, because the steel rod had broken that used to support the original bead. The maintenance men soldered the two sections of the rod together and once it had cooled down Teodora and I adhered it back together using an adhesive we do not have in the UK, it was very fast setting so all three pieces were put together at once. Grace took lots of photographs on the department camera but we did not mange to get them off today, so tomorrow we upload them.

Once the adhesive had set, the maintenance men set to creating another section of the Collar by soldering on more lengths of the steel rods. We gathered the previous beads that had fallen off and unwrapped new ones the artist had created to continue the sculpture. While unwrapping the new beads we found a small lizard, our first native Brazilian animal, it was frightened by us and as defence method the lizard detached his tail! We released him and his tail back into the park to go and grow a new one.

The new beads are so beautiful, brightly coloured glazes and have interesting patterns carved into them, we stood and watched as the maintenance men soldered new lengths onto the existing parts and put on the majority of the new beads. Once the sculpture was complete we packed up and went inside for a cup of tea, just like all good conservators do!

We were also given passes…

 

At 5:30 it was time to go home, we got the metro straight down to our stop, a quick shop to buy a aubergine for yet another yummy meal, moussaka with a beer on the side!