Artist:
Florian Pumhösl (born 1971 in Vienna, Austria; lives and works in Vienna).
Materials:
Film, 16 mm; back projection; color and sound; 7 min, 49 sec.
Description:
“The 16mm film is a portrait of the Casa Modernista, one of the first modernist buildings in São Paulo, constructed in 1927 by Gregori Warchavchik (1896–1971). Warchavchik was a Jewish architect, born in Odessa and educated in Italy, and one of the pioneers of modern architecture in Brazil from the 1920s onwards. His house in São Paulo was the meeting place of the cultural avant-garde, which included writers such as Mario de Andrade and Guilherme de Almeida, and the artist Minna Klabin.”
—”Florian Pumhösl – Programm: 24 Apr – 1 Jun 2008,” Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
“The film Programm was initiated in 2006 during a visit to Brazil that lasted several months, of which I spent a number of weeks filming in Parque Modernista. An invitation to the 27th Biennale in São Paulo facilitated my stay. A few iconic works of the European avant-garde, their Brazilian reception, and the subsequent intermingling of the two were the starting point of the picture. My first idea was that the film could consist of two levels so that different events and observations could be combined in the images. Thus, Programm is at first simply a filmic study about a building, the Casa Modernista and the surrounding park. Yet for a few moments the film acquires a second illustrative level, which is based primarily on the reconstruction of a frame from the 1930s Rossi Films newsreel movie mentioned earlier. This frame deals with a short moment at the opening of the ‘Exposicao de uma Casa Modernista.’ The image made an impression on me when I saw its reproduction in a book about Warchavchik because it brings together various aspects that we had learned while studying the early history of Brazilian modernism: specifically, the presence of the predominantly European bourgeoisie of the late 1920s as one part of society on its way into the twentieth century. In the image, we see representatives of the avant-garde, among them de Andrade and de Almeida, and the hostess Minna Klabin in the middle with a higher-ranking military representative. Programm is an attempt to capture this image, to reconstruct it, categorize it, and memorize it.”
—Florian Pumhösl, “Florian Pumhösl: Programm, 2006,” Generali Foundation.