As an exhibition, Of Memories & Detours: Laercio Redondo and Birger Lipinski comprises three

installations, one in each of the University Galleries. The main space presents Detour (2015); the

Gary R. Libby Focus Gallery showcases Restoration (2012, from the series Memory from Brasília);

and the Grinter Gallery hosts the new site-specific commission Displays (for Memories & Detours)

(2024). Taken together, what these works demonstrate is how Laercio Redondo and Birger Lipinski

superimpose various grids of meaning to interrogate official histories and question the particular

exclusions and naturalized assumptions by which they often proceed. In so doing, the artists

implore us to read past and present representations through past and present histories, creating a

space for the viewer to assess the complexity of historical memory and its ambiguities from

different perspectives and material supports, including a filmed movie, designed curtains and

decorative murals, live plants, and the pages of books.

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First presented in Redondo’s mid-career retrospective at the Museu de Arte Moderna do

Rio de Janeiro (MAM-RJ), Detour focuses on Lota de Macedo Soares, a self-taught architect and

landscape designer, and aims, albeit ever so discretely, to bring attention to her pioneering role in

the construction of Parque do Flamengo (Flamengo Park). The park is a massive recreational

area for the city of Rio de Janeiro, which was inaugurated in 1965 and is usually exclusively

referenced in relation to Roberto Burle Marx’s landscape project for the site. Redondo redresses

the historical oversight not via direct reference, but in the film installation that takes us from

MAM-RJ’s public building to the Casa Samambaia (Fern Residence), the private home in

Petrópolis where Lota lived with her partner, the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. The film

alternates between extended travelling shots of this route with blank screens and a voiceover that

evokes a range of affective and cultural values associated with the private and the public. In so

doing, it presents a spatial and historical detour: it begins and ends with Lota’s contributions to

public and private architectural projects and through the soundtrack calls upon visitors to reflect

upon the possible motives for Lota’s absence from Brazilian collective memory.

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Detour’s original institutional frame (MAM-RJ), works in tandem and in tension with the

work’s evocation of memory, given that the museum is sited in the very park for which Lota had

relentlessly labored. Yet by travelling to a private dwelling in Petrópolis, Detour also obliquely

introduces the question of the love and intimacy of its residents: an international lesbian couple

at mid-century in Rio de Janeiro. This said, love and intimacy—as they are conventionally

packaged and deployed—is nowhere visible or apparent in Redondo’s film or in its installation,

which was designed in collaboration with Lipinski and combines fabric curtains, a screen and a

viewing platform with ferns nestled below. Thanks to the rituals of their watering, the ferns make

visible the acts of care that go into cultural production, while the handcrafted curtains recall the

structure of the couple’s Petrópolis home. Through a calculated economy of representation,

Redondo’s and Lipinski’s work activates a thoughtful assessment of the history of architecture

and urban planning, but also of the personal intimacies of which such histories, in part, could be

made and (re)written. Such intimacies come together, one might say, in the film’s alternative

route.

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Kaira M. Cabañas and Jesús Fuenmayor

Co-curators

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Credit:

Wall text is an excerpt adapted from Kaira M. Cabañas, “Intimacies,” in Laercio Redondo: Intimacies / Proximidades (Rio de Janeiro: Museu de Arte Moderno do Rio de Janeiro; Berlin: The Green Box, 2016).

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Of Memories & Detours: Laercio Redondo and Birger Lipinski is sponsored by University Galleries and the School of Art + Art History (SA+AH), University of Florida, Gainesville.

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Parallel exhibitions:

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Restoration, from the series Memory from Brasília, Gary R. Libby Focus Gallery, September 5–November 1, 2024.

Curated by Damon Reed

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Displays (for Memories & Detours), Grinter Gallery, September 13–October 18, 2024.

Curated by Valerie Luciow