Bairro X/∞, 1980/2008
- Medium
- Heliograph
- Dimensions
- 42 15/16 × 94 1/8 in. (109 × 239 cm)
- Accession Number
- 2021.21
- Credit
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Purchase with funds provided by the Drawings and Photography Committee
When the Argentine military dictatorship came to power in 1976, Argentinian conceptual artist León Ferrari went into exile in São Paulo, Brazil, where he would remain until 1991. Displaced and grieving the death of his son at the hands of the regime, Ferrari made the maplike Heliografías (Heliographs)
to critique power.
In Bairro (“neighborhood” in Portuguese), Letraset rub-on typography and blueprint techniques evoke architectural order, while modern life is depicted as a series of labyrinths or traps full of dead ends and blind curves, and the conformity of people in queues recalls ant farms, mouse mazes, and rat races. Regarding this “architecture of madness,” Ferrari noted that he wished to “express the absurdity of contemporary society, that sort of daily madness necessary for everything to look normal.” Each work was folded and mailed to friends and colleagues worldwide, a covert message of grief, amidst terrifying repression, sent around the globe.
