The night before Bottega Veneta debuted the latest iteration of its cultural-exchange series, The Square São Paulo, creative director Matthieu Blazy took a break from the dance floor to talk. “I feel like a kid the night before a holiday,” he said. The setting was a house party chic enough to defy that description but charming enough to earn it: Behind him, a dining table heaved with traditional decadent Brazilian fare; around him, a crowd of local artists, collaborators, and friends clad in his designs spun and sang his praises; and in front of him, the famed Brazilian singer Mart’nália crooned, backed by her band. But the pleasure Blazy anticipated was atypical to those usually afforded the international fashion darling and certainly more abstract. Tomorrow he was going to align the world of his Bottega Veneta with that of the famed Brazilian modernist Lina Bo Bardi.
Earlier in the evening, Blazy addressed the crowd, recounting how, when he first took the reins as creative director at Bottega Veneta back in 2021, one of the members of his new team had asked: If Bottega Veneta was an architect, who would it be? “I answered immediately, ‘I wish it were Lina Bo Bardi,’” Blazy said. Specifically, the way the Italian-born, Brazilian-by-choice design icon had “brought people together, exploring new fields, never compromising on liberty, leaving the intellectual behind to let the emotional experience come first.” So when it came time to celebrate a decade of Bottega in Brazil for The Square São Paulo, Blazy proposed something aligned with both Bo Bardi’s principles and his own. “It’s not about a bag and not about fashion,” Blazy said. “It’s about something that is shared.”
The Square, a program Bottega premiered in 2022 in Dubai and then in Tokyo, brings the public together with different types of local artists in increasingly relevant retail metropolises for over a week of cultural programming. In prior cities, the Italian house built a space from the ground up—centered around a large, square, Bottega-green conversation pit—and hosted spoken-word poets, musicians, and visual artists inside it. This time the brand visited Bo Bardi’s iconic home, Casa de Vidro, a 1951 glass-sided hilltop construction. They discovered that it was not only beautiful but also already square, with near-perfect Bottega-green painted trim on the exterior already.
For the event, the Italian house looked to build specifically on Bo Bardi’s legacy—as the architect of the city’s top art museum, Museu de Arte de São Paulo, and the lauded cultural center SESC Pompéia but also as a designer (of furniture, sets, costumes, and jewelry) and moreover as an Italian who fully embraced and left a lasting effect on Brazil. “Brazil is the country I chose, and it is therefore twice my country,” she once said with the zeal of the newly converted. “I was not born here. I looked for this place and decided to live here. I chose my country.”
Bo Bardi was an equal appreciator of the high and the low in a way that feels distinctly modern today and difficult to conceive of in the 1950s. She created spaces unlike many modernists of her age: full of light, referencing the wattle-and-daub shelters and wooden floors and thatched roofs of rubber tappers as easily as the creations of Gio Ponti and Le Corbusier. Bo Bardi collected and displayed medieval and renaissance works alongside contemporary ones, pieces she made, and those brought over by famous artist friends and found on the streets or in marketplaces. She was a proponent of Brazil’s indigenous artworks when few collectors even classified them as such.
At MASP, Bo Bardi famously created crystal easels to display works that encouraged a new way of seeing, interacting with, and showing art. The effect, which is like standing in a forest of floating masterpieces, was revolutionary. Where else can you see the backside of a Matisse or a Renoir or a Goya as easily as the front? Where else would they be displayed in the same room as a Guerilla Girls poster?
She built Casa de Vidro for herself and her husband, the writer and curator Pietro Bardi, in 1951 on a former tea farm situated in what had once been a rainforest surrounding São Paulo. Until her death in 1992, Bo Bardi made Casa de Vidro both her home and a meeting point for artists, architects, and intellectuals. The day of The Square’s debut, the lush aerie was as alive as ever, filled with art and some artists who had made them. Works belonging to the Instituto Bardi hung alongside those selected by curator Mari Stockler. Blazy and Bottega took a back seat in the program’s proceedings to participate as attentive listeners, allowing the artists and their works to speak for themselves.
For The Square, “the idea is—what if Lina Bo Bardi had survived into modernity? What work would she have brought in here?” said Stockler. “What would that say about Brazil today?” Stockler went about combining the Instituto’s collection with contemporary pieces by Brazilian artists like Allan Weber, Mestre Guarany, Cristiano Lenhardt, Davi de Jesus do Nascimento, Gokula Stoffel, and Vivian Caccuri. On hand for the first day of The Square, the artists were eager to discuss the broader themes of their work. These ranged from racial profiling by police to climate justice and grasping for utopia. The program had been divided into four so-called paths to explore different aspects of Brazilian culture as related to Casa de Vidro and its former inhabitants, including tours of the interior (“The Glass House in Three Times”); the exterior and gardens (“Geometry and Spirituality”); the influence of various pivotal art movements, including neo-concrete, modernism, and Tropicália (“Tropical Roots”); and a sound tour focused on the main composers and performers in the emergence of bossa nova (“Soiree in Lina’s Hall”). Much like a crystal easel, these paths provoke multiple looks at any given angle or added dimensions to a given idea. “Time is a spiral,” said curator Keyna Eleison, who moderated the first panel discussion. “The future is influencing the past here.”
Bo Bardi “was a light for Brazil—she illuminated the values for Brazil,” the artist Raphael Cruz said. One of his beaded works, Marejo, 2021, hung on the veranda below the house as part of “Geometry and Spirituality.”
“Brazil is a difficult country to understand,” Cruz said. It’s full of influences and incongruities, at once reliant on nature and in denial of it, the way only a place centered around urban metropolises that have subsumed a rainforest can be. “We have to look at the details to understand the whole,” he said. Brazilians, he said, have a history of missing the forest for the trees. To elect to see Brazil’s natural value, as Bo Bardi did both figuratively and very literally—she replanted the jungle around Casa de Vidro by throwing seed bombs to mimic nature’s randomness—is to embrace life in all its messy complexity. “This way of living is cooperative,” Cruz said. “It has to do with love.”
It also had to do with the continual search for something more. Caccuri’s work lived in the hall on the way to Bo Bardi’s bedroom: It incorporated a speaker playing an audio track looping one sung word, “utopia,” accompanied by harmonies from a church organ, loosely covered by a gauzy veil. “It’s this specter of the past, still linked to the present,” Caccuri said. “This idea of utopia, of an ideal society, this coexistence, living together. We can all grasp with our hands the idea that it’s not tangible. This idea is what we desire.”
But brought together by The Square, suddenly it was an idea that maybe felt a little closer. “It’s a house that’s alive…. It gives us the possibility of having a conversation that no one has,” De Jesus do Nascimento said later. His work on paper, Derranhos, 2022, depicted drawings of carrancas, or spiritual guardians typically attached to the prows of boats to protect their inhabitants from evil river spirits. He had been inspired by recent environmental crimes by mining companies. “Look inside at your own monsters—what do you contain?” Eleison added: “Art is a part of our own wonderful monstrosity.”
That night at the after-party in an abandoned neoclassical building in downtown São Paulo, I ran into Blazy once again making his way off the dance floor, though this time the fête was larger and the banquet had been replaced by bottles of beer and trays of burgers, pao de queijo, and chocolate brigadeiros. This time he had an early flight later that morning to look forward to. “I hope people understand this project,” he said, by way of parting. “For me, there was no one like Bo Bardi. She was for us.”
The Square São Paulo will be open to the public from May 27 to June 3.