This notebook is an instrument for learning through ruins. Working in dialogue with Lina Bo Bardi’s ethic of reuse – her insistence on activating what already exists – I treat the generic book as a spatial site rather than a neutral support. Each page holds a solvent transfer of Luiza Proença’s “Saber-viver nas ruínas,” with the English version, “Know-How-to-Live in the Ruins” (translated by Marianela Díaz Cardozo), appearing when the book is flipped and read back-to-front. The transfer process renders the text simultaneously present and partial: legible, but streaked, ghosted, occasionally lost. Translation and transferral become parallel acts of making and unmaking, exposing knowledge as something that travels imperfectly across languages, pages, and bodies.
Interleaved are images that mark a chain of influence and reply – mentors, peers, and afterlives that extend into my work and other contemporary practices. Affixed with drafting dots, the images remain provisional and repositionable, echoing Bo Bardi’s reconfigurable structures across books, furniture, exhibitions, and buildings. The culminating gesture is twelve laser-cut apertures that pierce the entire book, tracing the outlines of SESC Pompéia’s windows. These cuts turn the notebook into a porous object: a ruin that insists on seeing through. When the book is in use, the reader is never isolated from the world beneath it – the table, the surface, the room – recalling Bo Bardi’s architectures of commons, where individual action is framed, not enclosed.
As a didactic device, the notebook proposes reading as spatial practice: a double-bound text that asks the reader to rotate, reorient, and negotiate gaps. It offers no single authority; instead, it stages a conversation among languages, images, and apertures. In honoring Bo Bardi’s ethic of radical hospitality, the work invites others to add, annotate, and rearrange, learning not despite the ruin, but through it.
Exhibition
"Homeroom: LA ESCUELA___"
MoMA PS1
Queens, New York
Exhibition Credits
Elena Ketelsen González, Associate Curator, with Jolene Fernandez, Homeroom Fellow, in collaboration with LA ESCUELA___ (Miguel Braceli and Madeline Murphy Turner).
Sponsors
Homeroom activations are supported by the Keith Haring Foundation.
Project and Photographs
José Ibarra
