- Project by Per Hüttner for 33e Panorama da arte brasileira, curated by Lisette Lagnado – Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo: MAM – October 5 – December 15, 2013.

The project for the 33e Panorama da arte brasileira is a research on Swedish artist, born in Sao Paulo, Öyvind Fahlström and Swiss born, Brazilian artist Mira Schendel’s work. Fahlström takes images apart and re-assembles them adding fragments of poems, facts, rumours and his own political values in new constellations.  He is famous for creating images on metal that is also made up of hundreds of parts that are mounted on magnets, so that the images can be re-organized in an infinity of ways. He also created installations that were made up of a multitude of small, often 2-dimensional parts. Fahlström’s work is logical outcome ofbeing born and brought up in world  coloured by indigenous multiperspectivism. Schendel, takes language apart (letters, phonemes, words and fragments) and puts it back together into new multi-layered universes. She often mixes multiple languages: German, Portuguese and Italian. She has said about her Monotipias that they represent “an attempt to immortalize the fleeting and to give meaning to the ephemeral.” Her world is made up of language’s infinitely small building blocks that make up our material world are forever changing and giving room for the creativity, development and motion that are the hallmarks of life on our planet.

In the project I bring together the work of Schendel and Fahlström that I consider to have aclose conceptual affinity and very different formal expressions. I also create a research center which uses the two artists names. In the installation I present a sketchbook by Fahlström from the collection of Moderna Museet in Stockholm together with some of the amazing work by Mira Schendel that is in the collection at MAM. Together they form an integral part of the work. By doing so, the work creates a bridge between two museums of modern art, who each has a very different history and that are located at two sides of our globe. The work of Schendel and Fahlström will be shown together with the first outcome of the research centre, which is 7-minute film shot in Trinidad in March 2013 with cinematographer and director Yang Tingting. The actors Jeremy Thomas and Leston Paul play the roles of the two unnamed protagonists who inhabit the same space and yet cannot see or hear each other. Through their research in their multilayered universes they find a way of communicating in spite of everything. This metaphysical breakthrough forms a parallel with the unlocking of the work of Schendel and Fahlström and the Museums in Brazil and Sweden. There is in other words a link between these three unexpected and yet natural meetings of parallel realities.

The structure for the presentation of the work was created by ‪Alvaro Razuk‬ Architects in Sao Paulo. The film was produced by Elisha Baptiste and was also part of the official selection of the 14th Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival in September 2014. A second Schendel-Fahlström Institute for Research was created in Mexico City in March 2014.