TAGS

artist, nicolas-robbio, 28b, plan-of-readings.

BIOGRAPHY

Nicolás Robbio was born in Mar del Plata, Argentina, 1975. Lives in São Paulo 2008 Por Puntos, Galería Nueveochenta, Bogotá, Colombia; Reação em Cadeia, Centro Cultural São Paulo; Gabinete de desenhos, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo – MAM-SP 2007 Bethanien Kunsthaus, Berlin 2006 Geração da Virada – 10 + 1: os anos recentes da arte brasileira, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo 2005 Maio, Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo Selected Bibliography Ice Cream: Contemporary Art in Culture – 10 curators, 100 contemporary Artists, 10 source Artists, London, Phaidon, 2007; PEDROSA, Adriano (org.), Desenhos [drawings]: A-Z, Lisbon, Madeira Corporate Services, 2006; RIBEIRO, José Augusto, “Nicolás Robbio – Maio Galeria Vermelho”, Revista Art Nexus, São Paulo, May, 2005.

INTERVIEW

Luisa Duarte: What are your plans for the 28th Bienal de São Paulo?

Nicolás Robbio: I am going to work on the newspaper that will be distributed weekly to the public during the 28th Bienal. Each week there will be a new work.

Luisa Duarte: Why did you choose to work on the newspaper

Nicolás Robbio: I chose to use the simplest system to do my work. I don’t want to negotiate anything right now. All the negotiation of space, budget, and to-ing and fro-ing wears me out. My work revolves around what is there. I don’t like working with things that are there today, gone the next. It doesn’t need to be very big, or cost a lot, but I need to know what I have. If it’s two rolls of toilet paper and a pen, fine, let’s do it. It could be a Boeing 737 or a paper plane. I can adapt to any condition, except when one day something is one way, and the next day, it’s different. I just can’t.

Luisa Duarte: So, is the newspaper an attempt to get away from the machine and attain greater autonomy? 

Nicolás Robbio: Exactly. And in it, my idea is to work with structures. Existing structures that have particular purposes, from which you can create many others. Create different systems with the same drawing structures. A drawing such as of a soccer field is created by joining dots where the lines intersect. Using this same structure, I can create a bench. I’ve been working with this idea for some time.

I create an initial structure, a point of departure, which gives me a chance to create several other systems with the same structure. The structural element connects very different systems. That’s how it works; I create a structure, and then I can go wherever I want. I can forge many paths from the same point of departure.

Luisa Duarte: It occurs to me that this way of thinking is valid for life in general, in the sense that we can avoid existing structures in favor of others, freer ones. A single structure, which may at times seem very rigid, contains other possible conformations that one would never have imagined.

Nicolás Robbio: Absolutely. We can apply this thinking to life – mine, yours, anyone’s.

This issue of a point of departure started in a work I did in Cuba some years ago. There is always a point of departure occurring in a city you’ve never been to. It didn’t exist before, or after. There is a point of departure. Of course I am the same person, with my own history, but the question is how I face, with this same structure, a new system. You don’t have the same climate, the same locations, the same language. You find yourself impelled to build a new system with the same structure. You are obliged to reformulate the system. The idea of working on the 28th Bienal’s newspaper allows me to make these equations. They are very simple equations that share points of departure. I can, for example, create a structure with which the public can create its own systems in another space outside of the newspaper.

Luisa Duarte: There is something hopeful in this thought, isn’t there?

Nicolás Robbio: Yes. We often discard a structure because we don’t think it has worked. And then we go and make everything again, from scratch. But wait, maybe we can make other things with the structures we have. The Bienal is a structure that works, it serves its purpose; but we can think of another system for the Bienal, different from the one we currently know. How to change structures shouldn’t be the main goal, but how to change the systems for using these structures. We should try to create alternative systems for the use of these structures. They all have certain static structures. Gravity – we are not all going to fly out of this room. But we can all create new systems, in our daily lives, to inhabit these same structures.


Luisa Duarte is an art critic, independent curator and professor of the Visual Arts course of the Faculdade Santa Marcelina in São Paulo. She lives in São Paulo.

PROJECTS - 28TH SAO PAULO BIENAL

Projects with updated content