Lina’s Times
Growing worldwide interest in Lina Bo Bardi’s oeuvre can be explained by the following: a rising awareness of gender in the architectural field; decolonial debates and valorization of architecture in the Global South; discussions around the future of global cities, in which São Paulo is always a paradigmatic case study; and even the internationalization of an endemic movement of “return to Lina” that began with the book Lina por Escrito (2009), a compilation of her most important texts.
Yet the exhibition Lina Bo Bardi—A Marvellous Entanglement, curated by artist Sir Isaac Julien, goes far beyond that. An assemblage of floating screens and earbuds in a dark space creates a simple but effective ambiance that explores the nonlinearity of time and, as the title indicates, its entanglements. Bo Bardi’s migration from Italy to Brazil may have favored this time collapse; after all, is there a European country where the glorious past is more present than Italy or an American country where an optimistic future is more present than Brazil?
Bo Bardi always revered other concepts of time, like the slow time of preindustrial Brazilian communities and the eschatological time of the Socialist revolution. However the time of African religions influenced her complex conceptualization most strongly. For many precolonial African cultures, time is never linear but rather a superposition of past, present, and future. The Sankofa bird of the Ashanti culture describes a bird looking back and feeding the future with seeds it gathers from the past. Unlike Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history,” the bird is not a victim of the winds of progress; neither does it look back with anxiety. The African bird shows serenity, its wings awaiting the right moment to take flight. This harmonic yet intricate time guided Bo Bardi’s works in Salvador and São Paulo, as well as Julien’s exhibition.
In the film two giants of Brazilian dramaturgy, Fernanda Montenegro and Fernanda Torres, mother and daughter, are invited to play the same character: Lina Bo Bardi. This allows physical similarity, which strengthens the temporal continuity and the eventual break of this temporality from the moment they meet at the abandoned Coati Restaurant (1987). There, time breathes through every panel of the ribbed concrete, which dialogues directly with the very fibers of Rudolph Hall. Bo Bardi’s cycle of work in Salvador best represents her understanding of ancestral time. But if this never-operated restaurant is a ruin, symbolically located on the ramp that connects Salvador’s historic downtown to the new city, Bo Bardi’s Benin House (1988) takes up the African-style rural house in its courtyard and in its magnificent roof, thus speaking about the Black culture that built Bahia and Brazil.
In São Paulo Lina Bo Bardi is depicted as a vibrant young architect reciting her thoughts from the mighty red staircase of MASP (Museum of Art of São Paulo, 1946), sequentially blended into a scene with an already elderly Bo Bardi inside Teatro Oficina Uzyna Yzona (1986–94). In the theater she is directed by the great Brazilian director José Celso Martinez Correa—Zé Celso—who died in 2023, and for whom she made the design. In this scene we notice how Montenegro respects the director’s guidance, just as Lina did, but is never subsumed in his or anybody else’s presence. Her words are always her own words.
It was at MASP that Bo Bardi designed the mighty free span in the heart of São Paulo, creating one of the most important public spaces in the city, and at the Oficina Theater that she created a Dionysian heterotopia of the performing arts. But it was at SESC Pompéia (1986) that she achieved her greatest act of urban generosity. By reverberating the street, industry, childhood, Brazilian northeastern heritage, and rawness of civil construction, Bo Bardi created an amalgamation of the time when Brazil had just emerged from the dictatorship—a “Big Brazil” that seemed to be able to achieve progress only at the expense of human flesh.
By bringing all these facets of Bo Bardi’s work into a nonlinear set of projections and audio records, Julien comments powerfully on the architect’s humanism, which moves away from any positivist space-time determination and gets close to the mysteries of life and death. Bo Bardi’s wisdom resided in setting apart silence from emptiness and rawness from poverty. For her the “thickness” of the Brazilian craftwork was a sign of both our backwardness and the power of our inventiveness. The material of her work is thus memory and how we shape it—the pure drive of life.
—Jaime Solares Carmona (PhD ’29) is a Brazilian architect and urban planner with a BArch and MSc from University of São Paulo who researches the theory and criticism of contemporary architecture through the lens of gender, the body, and sexuality.
