19. September 2024
Photo: Anna Mas
Brazilian artist Ciao Reisewitz is the latest artist to take over the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona. Suspendre el cel fills the pavilion with palm trees, ferns, and other plants that recall the Amazon rainforests and draw attention to their destruction and that of indigenous communities in Brazil.
Nearly 100 years after it was built for the 1929 Barcelona International Exhibition, and nearly 40 years after it was reconstructed, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich's German Pavilion remains a must-see for architects and architecture students. Thanks to the Fundació Mies van der Rohe and its collaborators, those visitors may encounter a building dramatically different than what they see in photographs. In 2017, for instance, architects Anna and Eugeni Bach covered the pavilion's walls, floors, and ceilings with white vinyl, and in 2021 curators Ilka and Andreas Ruby turned the pavilion's covered spaces into domestic interiors echoing Lacaton & Vassal's EU Mies Prize-winning Transformation of 530 Dwellings in the Grand Parc Bordeaux.
The latest installation, carried out by Brazilian artist Caio Reisewitz, and organized with the Prats Nogueras Blanchard gallery within the framework of Barcelona Gallery Weekend, effectively greens up the pavilion, bringing nature literally inside the building's flowing spaces through the introduction of potted trees, plants, and shrubs. Suspendre el cel, which translates as “to suspend the sky,” is on view from from September 18 until October 10. Take a visual tour through the installation below, with additional information provided in the captions.
One of Reisewitz's inspirations was Brazilian writer Ailton Krenak, who advocates for more harmonious living with the Earth, and who has written: “To suspend the sky is to broaden our horizon; not the future horizon, but the existential one. It is to enrich our subjectivities.” (Photo: Anna Mas)
Per a statement, Suspendre el cel turns the Mies Pavilion “into a platform to address urgent issues affecting Brazil, such as the destruction of the Amazonia, the dismantling of the public machinery responsible for protecting and valuing the environment, as well as the cultural erasure and genocide of indigenous populations.” (Photo: Anna Mas)
Although Reisewitz is known for photographs that focus on Brazilian cities and landscapes, vegetation is his media for Suspendre el cel. (Photo: Anna Mas)
A collage by Reisewitz that layers images of plants over archival photographs of the Mies Pavilion in 1929 captures the artist's intent, particularly in regard to the framing of views through the pavilion's spaces. (Image: Caio Reisewitz, courtesy Prats Nogueras Blanchard)
Other inspirations for Reisewitz were the Brazilian buildings and landscapes of Roberto Burle Marx, Oscar Niemeyer, and Lina Bo Bardi, “who sought to minimize interference in the natural environment that surrounds their projects.” (Photo: Anna Mas)
More specifically, the artist used Lina Bo Bardi's Casa de Vidro (House of Glass), “an example of how the Brazilian modern movement understood and incorporated nature,” as a reference. (Photo: Anna Mas)
Reisewitz selected around 600 plants from a Catalan nursery, introducing palm trees, ficus, philodendrons, ferns, and other tropical and Mediterranean plants and shrubs to form “a mass of plants.” (Photo: Anna Mas)
Some photographs indicate that the artist's placement of plants accentuates the framing of Georg Kolbe's Dawn in the small pool at the rear of the pavilion. (Photo: Anna Mas)
Here, for instance, Dawn is glimpsed through the “mass” of plants inside the pavilion. (Photo: Anna Mas)
Before Suspendre el cel is demounted, the Mies Pavilion will host a conversation between Reisewitz, architect Isabella Lenzi, and curator Clàudia Segura, on October 1, 2024. (Photo: Anna Mas)
