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Contaminating by Example - an interview with Fernando and Humberto Campana
By Le Vin Chin
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With a massive exhibition covering the past twenty years (up until the very last second, as you’ll see), the Vitra Design Museum is staging a definitive review of the work of Brazilian designers the Campana brothers. Entitled ANTIBODIES – The Works of Fernando & Humberto Campana 1989 – 2009, the show will be on display at the museum in Weil am Rhein from May 16, 2009 to February 28, 2010.
Fragments & Flexed Planes
You may know the Campana brothers’ individual works but the scale of the exhibition reveals broader themes and preoccupations in their œuvre. Curator Mathias Schwartz-Clauss, a long-time associate of the brothers’, has uncovered influences and themes which build into a fascinating portrait of their design philosophy and the evolution of their design process. As befit their entry into design via sculpture (Humberto) and architecture (Fernando), the influences of Surrealism, Dadaism and Cubism become readily apparent among the plethora of knots and sticks, organic forms and “shocking” combinations of materials on show (and, indeed, their straddling the worlds of art and design is a key point of the exhibition).
Still, what’s most attractively timely about their work is the concentration on re-used materials.
| While there is a “tradition” of re-using and recycling materials in Brazil (see our report on the work of espírito brasilis from last year), the brothers’ use of found materials is as much to do with formal and rigorous design thinking as it is to do with necessity and ecological considerations. |  The Vitra Design Museum |
Making full use of the Frank-O.-Gehry-designed building’s unsettling spaces, the exhibition provides a marvelous setting for the Campana brothers’ work. The display also seems deeply personal: the brothers worked closely on it in collaboration with the Vitra Design Museum – to the extent that the “auteur designers”, as Schwartz-Clauss describes them, were finishing off installations specially created for the exhibition up until twenty minutes before the opening press event.
I was very impressed by your show and by the fact that you both seemed to do a lot of work for it, all the bottles, all the collages ... Why did you get so involved?
Fernando: The passion that we had for this exhibition …
Fernando Campana
Humberto: Yes, because it had been planned [for so long]; we had four years to prepare this exhibition. We saw the care that Mathias took; he went to Brazil twice in order to see our universe. So we started to contaminate each other …
Fernando: We knew that this exhibition would give a better comprehension of our work. Sometimes people think we do just one kind of thing, that we don't do industrial, or that we just do very handcrafty things ... The exhibition gives an overall vision of our work.
I think that was what I really got out of it: to understand the process and the background of your work. Is that also very important to you, that people can actually understand where you come from and which processes you go through?
Fernando: Oh, yes! Since our name is projected all over the world nowadays, it's good to show that the base is Brazil. It's not to be nationalistic, not at all, but to show our vision, including the defects of our country, which we don't hide. We try to show everything, which can potentially be good or bad.
Humberto Campana
Famously, you have a video to explain how to make the Vermelha rope chair. Was it important for you from the very beginning to document or to explain?
Humberto: The Vermelha chair video was documented accidentally. I used to make those Vermelha chairs, the rope chairs, myself. When Massimo Morozzi of Edra was interested in manufacturing it, he asked us to send him a project. But how can you send a project of 400 meters of cord rope?
Fernando: Connect-the-dots ...?
Explaining the design process behind the Vermelha chair
Humberto: So we sent a video of myself weaving it, step-by-step, explaining how to manufacture it.
Fernando: From that we learned what was “Making Of” ... And all the projects from then on we started making pictures of; and this is very important because it attracts you to details that you may forget in the future, how to translate a process to a manufacturer. Since our work is very elaborate, you have to pay a lot of attention to the movements …
Is it also that because you have documented it, you can go back to it again after, say, five years, when you have new ideas about it?
Fernando: Our best documentation is in 3-D, we keep everything as models, or in real-scale. We don't live only in the bi-dimensional ... We do furniture, so I prefer to see it in real scale. In Brazil we have a facility of working hands; it's not expensive. So we can invest and finance our own prototyping.
Humberto Campana, with his special installation for the exhibition, made from PET water bottles
Materials are very closely associated with everything you do. In each piece, the materials are very specific, very exciting, very interesting. How do you find your materials? Do you start from the material – seeing what it does and then working out something to do with it – or do you start from a project?
Fernando: The material’s going to tell what it wants to be when it grows up. We are inspired by things we see on the streets, not only in Sao Paulo, but in Brazil, in the whole outside world. Like we saw the bottles here and we made a thing that was inspired in Basel, not in Brazil anymore. But materials are always catching our attention.
Humberto: And they help us to project the furniture, I guess they teach us how to be designers. The feeling is there, the DNA, and it’s a great challenge to transform them into another molecular universe.
Hot off the press: the Campanas' Cipria chair, designed for Edra and launched at the recent Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan.
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