Artist:
Runo Lagomarsino (born 1977 in LundRun, Sweden; lives and works São Paulo, Brazil).

Materials:
Projection of 27 color 35 mm slides; 5 minutes 24 seconds.

Description:
“ContraTiempos documents the findings of Runo Lagomarsino’s wanderings under the Marquise, a concrete canopy that connects the different buildings in Oscar Niemeyer and Roberto Burle Marx’s 1954 Ibirapuera Park in São Paulo. Finding shapes that resembled the silhouette of South America in the cracks of the Marquise’s concrete pathways, Lagomarsino photographed the chance continental formations, displaying the images in a slideshow. For Lagomarsino, the fissures in the park’s modernist design serve as a metaphor for flaws in the modernist project as a whole, and for a colonialist ‘subconscious’ that threatens to reemerge from beneath its damaged surface.”
—”Runo Lagomarsino, ContraTiempos,” Guggenheim website.

“Lagomarsino is also interested in how Burle Marx and Oscar Niemeyer represent the epitome of modernist utopia and the modernist high ideal of Brazilian architecture, that is to say, the Modernist belief that architecture could induce a better way of living. He also explores how we look back nowadays at this period of time. Furthermore, the artist tries to imagine or to think visually about the ways in which we read South America today, and the process by which a map of today is constituted.”
—”Contatiempos: Runo Lagomarsino,” Domus, September 21, 2010.