MUSEUM OF EVERYTHING | Matheus Nunes
This museum of everything is a museum
like any other gathered;
as a museum, it can either be
a waste coffin or an archive.
Therefore, it does not enclose the vertebrate
that should be part of any book:
it is a deposit of what is there,
built without threads or threats.
João Cabral de Melo Neto, Museum of everything, 1946-1974
Birds popping up of kitchen skimmers, snakes from folding wooden rulers, anteaters embodied in coffee roasters. Entering a house where these animals hang from the ceiling and rest on the furniture, knowing that its owner designed – in addition to the house itself – giraffe-chairs and exhibitions dedicated to children’s imagination [1], does not seem surprising. These toy-sculptures, made by two hands that wonder whether they are Brazilian or French, illustrate that “the toy is essentially an adult microcosm; that the French adult sees the child as nothing but a smaller man, a homunculus to whom must be supplied objects of his own size” [2]. This is the merry-go-round in which Julio Villani (1956, Marília, SP) presents his Museum of everything in Lina Bo Bardi’s Glass House.
The artist proposes the use of everyday objects with slight changes in function, in an “almost ready-made” operation, as Villani refers to one of the central axes of his practice. The changes are lithe because they are quick, but also because they are assertive: the juxtaposition of metal flaps and wooden stubs in a cylindrical pasta opener makes it, by the turn of a crank handle, into a docile animal that can no longer be ignored. The tool that once helped prepare lunch is now an alert companion.
Unlike the animal genealogy in contemporary Brazilian art, Villani does not aim for his creatures to mimic, geometrize or anthropomorphize living beings. On the contrary, he is interested in a delicate construction much like a poet who welds prepositions and nouns, adjectives and onomatopoeia, in different languages and inventive assemblages. He is fascinated rather by the word (fragment) than by literature (the whole). His animals are endowed with good humor; they are childish not because of amateurism, but because they inhabit an unrestricted field of thought.
This wider epistemological horizon, in which large embroidered bedsheets can be extended infinitely, allows siding his work with Dadaism and Surrealism, protective ghosts that Paris placed on Villani’s shoulders, much like pirate parrots who insistently ask him questions such as: “How many kilometers of line can fit in a flask of Indian ink?” With Museum of everything, the Glass House welcomes the dream that resides on the margins of reality: at night, emptied from its visitors, it must see Villani’s animals waking up and singing their ever-first songs. They float like beings levitated by the breath of an almost-life bestowed by the hand of Geppetto, ready to fly, or dismantle themselves and become others, in new mosaics of spirits or hopscotch poems.
Villani’s connection with different languages is not due to polyglotism, but to the fascination for their plastic possibilities and jeux de mots. Etymologies and cross-translations demonstrate the traveling cultural flows, permeating not only in his autobiography, but in his zeal for migratory hybridisms. Linguistic devices here become mechanisms of formal and narrative composition. Born in Marília, in the inlands of São Paulo, but having lived in Denmark, Spain and England in the 1970s, and established in Paris for over 40 years, Villani clings to cultural idiosyncrasies when these places intersect: one of the sculptures uses a tostex, a common utensil in Brazilian homes for toasting what is known as French bread – which, ironically, does not exist in France. It reaffirms Brazilian inventiveness for solving problems with unlikely objects placed in optimized dynamics, joined by welding, articulated by thin wire.
There is a purposeful shuffling of nationalities that affirms and dissipates them. Much of the works are presented in pairs: one French and one Brazilian, distinguishable only by the attentive eye. They are like lullabies that only work in the mother tongue, or national anthems — not the official ones, as they carry an artificial decorum that Villani does not care about, but the traditional songs sung spontaneously in unison in emotional gatherings. Just like Lina Bo Bardi, who had Italy as birthplace and made Brazil her home, Villani sews transatlantic paths, in tense or relaxed lines, in zigzags or straight ones.
Through a counterproductive political act, in response to the exacerbated disposal of consumption systems, the artist collects materials for the construction of a new nature, unwilling to abandon such precious goods. It definitely relates to the wonder felt by Lina Bo Bardi, as a child, when presented by her mother with pebbles of different colors found in the entrails of a chicken, very first pieces of her collection – which would also include tilted wires, screws and a small powder puff case made from the blue steel of German cannons after France’s victory in the First World War [3]. Manoel de Barros’ poetry could crown this thought : “What is good for the dustbin is good for poetry. […] Things thrown away are of great importance.” [4]
Being a poet is a political position, but poetry alone is no longer enough: action, contestation and gestuality when facing the abyss are required. The shift in function dear to Villani acts as a combative gesture against political regimes that point towards totalitarianism, determining strict meanings for everything, including writing and reading. Shifts in function that are also the kernel of museums: founding a museum is bringing in something from the outside and making it an object of contemplation. Creating a museum of everything means making valuable everything that is not in the museum, encouraging attentive observation of the objects full of life that surround us, in a world of everything, always hybrid and metamorphosing.