The Sao Paulo Biennial, which opened on September 6, is traditionally a contemporary art festival, but this year’s event puts new emphasis on architecture. Chief curator Charles Esche commissioned nearly 70 percent of the exhibition’s artworks, collaborating with a five-person curatorial team that included an architect for the first time in the biennial’s 63-year history (fun fact: it’s the world’s second-oldest contemporary art biennial). That designer, Tel Aviv-based architect Oren Sagiv, who specializes in exhibition design, worked with exhibiting artists to develop and build an immersive, three-part exhibition space inside the Pavilion Ceccillio Matarazzo, which was designed by Oscar Niemeyer in 1957. ARTINFO spoke with Sagiv about fitting his vision into Niemeyer’s building, designing an exhibition space without exact artworks in mind, and the optimal relationship between art and the architectural space it occupies.
Oscar Niemeyer’s pavilion isn’t exactly primed for an art exhibition. It’s extremely long and relatively narrow, more like an industrial building than a museum-style display space. What interventions did you make in the interior to improve visitor circulation, and how do they relate to the art currently being shown there?
The interventions were basically aimed at articulating the interior of the building. In the same way that, if you have a very large novel, it would be a very hard experience to start it in one word, to end it on a last word, and to have hundreds of thousands of words in the middle without chapters. There needs to be some kind of inner structure that creates its own dialectics, not just one huge container for art. Speaking with people who have attended many previous Sao Paulo Biennials, like people who have visited since the late ’60s without missing once, I realized that people had the feeling of fatigue. Just looking at this endless divisions and boxes that enclosed the different artworks, separated them into territories; people felt the space was just too large. It wasn’t a good place to stage an art exhibition that makes sense as a whole, singular display. And this building wasn’t designed for art exhibitions — it was designed for industrial exhibitions to show mechanical and agricultural achievements.
Because we are commissioning projects for the architecture, we thought about the building as a site, and understood architecture as the backbone for our curatorial syntax. We had to create a field rich enough, and loaded with qualities to begin with, so that it would be able to receive the artworks. The pieces, as they come, are directed into some kind of architectural field of meaning.
The first thing I did was a thorough analysis of possible ways to articulate the building into various blocks. It’s almost like combinatorics — there are so many possibilities.
So how did you narrow down the possibilities?
At first, I just looked at the different ways and different floors to enter the building. There are four entrances, and you can circulate within the floors in many different ways. I had to start to understand how the accumulation of the different parts started to give me some kind of qualitative information to articulate the building in ways that has to do either with proportions, or to dissect the building in ways that give us very different architectural typologies — ways that accentuate different pieces in order to create a more orienting — or disorienting — experience.
The first physical intervention came directly from choosing one way of circulating and looking at the four parts and calling them by first names. So, looking at their qualities and attributes to determine their identities. We started to program them in different ways. For example, what we call the “park area” — this resulted from a spatial wedge that is piercing through the building vertically at its center. It’s what we call the “middle area,” but it kind of disappeared by allowing for all the areas in front of it and behind it.
The park area is on the ground floor, an area that was meant to receive the people. The idea of this ground floor now is that it’s no longer a public park, but it’s not an art exhibition either. It’s an intermediary space. I designed a very large piece of furniture — almost 200 feet long — that we call the “plataforma.” It’s a continuation of the surrounding park, but also a part of the exhibition site. So people don’t have to immediately feel obliged to see the art exhibit. We wanted to provide a zone of acclimation.
The next area would be what we call the “ramp area.” It has this amazing void that Niemeyer created — it’s the most iconic area of the pavilion. The key idea of separating it from the rest of the building was to create simultaneity. As you enter the first floor of that building, all three floors are exposed to you. This idea of vertical affinities, of vertical connections, of something that you see in the corner of your eye happening on the third floor while you are standing on the first floor — they connect pieces as omnipresent artworks.
When we started to commission artists to create works for the biennial, this idea of simultaneity affected how they went about making their commissions and the way that we, as curators, thought about their projects.
What are some of the ways you used architecture to establish connections between artworks?
We actually divided the space with very few walls. The idea was to direct the vision of the visitor within each of the three floors horizontally, and also the oblique vision. In the vertical, we’re trying to optimize what the visitor can and cannot see. We had to create an architectural matrix to receive the artworks before we knew exactly what they would be. So we created a very potent space to establish relations between artworks, we placed those walls in that area in a way that they organize the vision. We placed walls to organize trajectories of vision within that field of space, and that vision is on the horizontal and vertical level. When the artworks started to come in, we had already created a syntax for them to relate to one another.
The last area that we created, on the other side of the ramp area, is the “columns area.” It’s almost the opposite of what I described in the ramp area. It’s a very deep horizontal space that goes on for 130 meters, and it’s based on horizontality and depth. Here, something is hiding another thing. You have to move and explore 29 different galleries that are surrounding you from the center to the periphery of that space. It’s a very different experience of what it means to engage with artworks. In the ramp area, every move one makes changes your perspective and changes the way you see the accumulation of the artworks. But in the column area, one is basically paying attention to one work at a time.
