Abertura: Lina Bo Bardi and the 1980’s
The exhibition Abertura: Lina Bo Bardi and the 1980s does not revisit Lina as a historical figure. It starts from a problem: her work has been widely absorbed, but also simplified — often reduced to a formal language.
What is at stake here is another reading: space as use — as a structure that organizes the body, coexistence, and time.
Furniture does not appear as historical design, but in use, integrated into the exhibition space. These pieces are not autonomous objects, but structures that mediate how people meet, move, and remain.
The focus is not form, but social function.
This becomes especially clear in SESC Pompeia, developed from the 1970s onward, in the context of Brazil’s political abertura. There, architecture and furniture operate as a single system, structuring conditions for circulation, permanence, and exchange. It is not simply an architectural project, but a structure for collective life.
The exhibition does not present these works as icons, but activates the logic that underlies them. The inclusion of other artists expands this field — not as reference, but as practices that continue to operate on the body, the construction of space, and social inscription.
