SXSW this past week featured a pavilion touting the allure of Sao Paulo in Brazil. In addition to the good vibes, there was something for the modern art lover too, inspired by coffee.
The Coffee Museum in the state of Sao Paulo is located in the coastal city of Santos, about 100 miles southeast of the city of Sao Paulo. It attracts 400,000 visitors a year, and was established to preserve and disseminate the history of coffee in Brazil. Formerly home to the Coffee Exchange, which was built in 1922, the museum began in 1998.
According to the description given at the pavilion, the museum is “alive, human, welcoming, close, affective, current and dynamic. These are the new attributes of a museum with international reach.” In a word, it’s not stuffy.
The exhibit, by Raquel Fayad, consists of a pile of white and off-white coffee cups. “The empty white cups,” in the explanatory description, “are associated with lack or clarity and serve as a space for the sound that fills them. The emptiness is occupied by another abstract sense, the sound of the tinkling connecting the simplicity of the porcelain to sensors other than those we usually expect, such as touch.
“This produces an effect that is a clue left by the artist for us to think about what guides our memories. Through this encounter, it will be possible to remember the smell of coffee, a place, someone, a single or multiple recurring events. Fayad extrapolates the senses by connecting to the coffee’s ‘flower,’ known for the ‘desire’ that radiates its scent during flowering.
“The new context of these cups – as a work of art manipulated by the artist – as well as the physical accumulation, the stacking of senses is a fictional process. What we see is an invented reality, made up of a bit of ourselves. The installation is also a fiction in which desire is an immediately retrospective utopian madness.”
Whether you have the sensibility to grasp all this upon viewing the installation, or whether it just looks like a pile of coffee cups, it was a welcome artistic touch that was notably lacking in some other national venues set up for SXSW.
Photo by C. Cunningham
Images of Fayad posing with this installation can be found on her Instagram site: https://www.instagram.com/raquelfayad/?hl=en