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Walls of Air maps the myriad divisions that mark contemporary Brazil

Walls of Data

Walls of Air maps the myriad divisions that mark contemporary Brazil

Fluid Landscape: encounter between human and natural ecosystems 2018 maps deforestation across South America and the sweeping environmental consequences that transcend national borders. (Sol Camacho, Laura González Fierro, Marcello Maia Rosa, and Gabriel Kozlowski)

In the post-truth age, the effective and public display of meticulously researched data is a welcome change. The Americas Society’s Walls of Air exhibition is an instructive and concise mapping of the trends of urbanism, environmentalism, and economic relations, amongst many other subjects. Four Brazilian and Mexican architects curated the exhibition: Sol Camacho, Laura González Fierro, Marcello Maia Rosa, and Gabriel Kozlowski.

The Americas Society’s gallery is located on the ground floor of McKim, Mead & White’s Neo-Federal 680 Park Avenue on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The gallery, in contrast to the grandeur of the turn-of-the-century mansion, is relatively stark and divided into three rectilinear spaces. The show’s curatorial medium du jour are large format, ten-foot-by-ten-foot UV prints on aluminum composite material, mounted on aluminum frames. The panels are supplemented with video interviews with project researchers.

The exhibition was originally displayed in 2018 at the Brazilian Pavilion at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale and began as a research project to examine and discuss the visible and non-visible walls or barriers that make up contemporary Brazil.

 

A diagram displaying immigration flows in Brazil, in a circle depicting how peoples move
Human Flows: the dilution of barriers through cultural assimilation, 2018 displays the number and origin of Brazil’s immigrant population. (Sol Camacho, Laura González Fierro, Marcello Maia Rosa, and Gabriel Kozlowski)

It is immediately apparent from viewing the cartographic drawings the exhaustive level of research undertaken to produce them. The curators partnered with a multidisciplinary team with particular expertise on the subject matter for each panel. In total, over 200 professionals, ranging from the fields of social sciences to the visual arts, aided in the project’s collaborative research. This data, in some circumstances Excel sheets with over a million entries, was then visualized with a broad toolbox of software including GIS, Rhino, and Illustrator.

Visually, the Brazil displayed throughout the exhibition is not bounded by national frontiers, but placed amid a fluid web of global and regional forces. Deforestation, a trend reshaping the Amazon basin, is presented as a continental issue stretching from the Andes to the river deltas on the coast of the Atlantic. Land stripped bare to the west effectively reduces the level of humidity and rainfall in other places, such as northeastern Brazil—in effect, the policies of one locality catastrophically spin outwards across the ecosystem and impact the surrounding region.

A particularly well-documented aspect in Walls of Air is the mapping of commodity flows, immigrant migration, and the geography of the country’s real estate market. Lines of increasing width are color-coded to specify the material harvested—bearing a fair resemblance to Charles Minard’s map of Napoleon’s Russian Campaign—and drive from the Brazilian hinterland to the primary trade ports in the country’s southeast. The destination of each type of commodity, its monetary value, and the nation’s imports are neatly placed on the side margins of the print. When juxtaposed with the concentration of real estate value in the country’s southeast and the destination of immigrant groups within the primary economic centers, one can tease out the prevailing socioeconomic contours of Brazil and the geographic inequalities therein.

A map displaying the flow of commodities across Brazil
Material Flows: physical imprint of commodities exchange, 2018 maps the movement of commodities across Brazil. (Sol Camacho, Laura González Fierro, Marcello Maia Rosa, and Gabriel Kozlowski)

Walls of Air concludes with an analysis of the Brazilian city in history and the present day. Beginning with Portuguese colonization in the 16th century, the curators mark every single city founded within the country since and the maritime routes that fed them. The subject is expanded upon further with the analysis of post-war urban planning, maps of manmade modifications to metropolitan topography, and data focused on acts of insurrection.

Walls of Air: The Brazilian Pavilion at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale
Americas Society
680 Park Avenue
New York, New York
Through August 3, 2019

 

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