Rochelle Costi | Reforma

Clandestine Infiltrations

"Images of informal and improvised constructions, some of them abandoned or on the verge of falling apart, infiltrate the solar and crystalline order of the modern house designed by Rino Levi. But they do so without preserving the framed and distant aura of art photography, but rather as a common element of the house’s own architecture, in the form of a curtain, parasitizing the fireplace in the living room, camouflaged in the garden, or taking various other supports. This is not about a dual opposition between erudite rationalism and popular improvisation. The images that appear here do not exactly conflict with the modern house. They are its shadow, its fold, or its nightmare. This is what gives rise to the ambiguity between measured and unmeasured scales, or between reality and model, so well explored in the work of Rochelle Costi. The maquettes, present in the video and in one of the photos, are not designs for future architectural projects, but rather delvings into the world of intimacy, popular culture, children’s toys and the baroque excesses of collections of objects, the house and the dream of the house, ritualized in an ex-voto of procession.

A swimming pool taken over by moss, an ordinary cabinet that takes the place of the fireplace in the elegant central monument-totem of the house, Juscelino Kubitschek’s pink pajamas caged in a glass display case in his bedroom in the “Catetinho” – the wooden palace constructed as a residence for the president when he visited the capital under construction and an icon of the image of modernity in Brazil during the “golden years.” The artist’s gaze is at the same time affective and ironic. How does one live in a modern house? In what way does the normativity of its clean, reductive and essential design clash with the somewhat irrational overflowings of daily life, people’s needs for flexibility and change, which often wind up leading the residents to remodel their homes? Without seeking answers for an ideal compromise between design and use, Rochelle Costi leads us to imagine lines of escape, perversions, measures of avoidance. Between the design and the ex-voto, we can also begin, ourselves, to desire other such houses."

Guilherme Wisnik

São Paulo, August 2018