Spatial Mediation : Buildings as commodities for exhibitions discourses – the case of the Bienal de São Paulo (1957-2018)

Abstract

This thesis proposes the concept of spatial mediation as a configurational strategy for the exchange between people and things, which is particularly evident in exhibition spaces – whose main function is precisely to foster these exchanges. In contrast to other types of mediation, spatial mediation occurs not through educators or technological devices, but through the system that structures the interaction between displayed contents and its visitors. This concept is characterized by a double-faceted logic that concerns the very definition of exhibition spaces – settings for exchange that operate through the display of artifacts, for cultural and economic purposes. These two facets are made up of pairs of concepts that address the following issues: 1) discourse and narrative – which describe how things are arranged in space and how the messages embedded in this arrangement can be interpreted through spatial navigation; 2) commodity and capital – which represent the syntactic and semantic role of the building in defining a system of material and symbolic exchanges. These two facets are objectively represented by the short-term layout of the exhibitions and the long-term layout of the building that houses it. This phenomenon is investigated at the Bienal de São Paulo (BSP), an expression that designates both a building (designed by Oscar Niemeyer in 1954), and a set of exhibitions (with 34 editions, 31 of which held in the same pavilion). This long overlap between building and exhibitions provides robust evidence for the proposed discussion, which was obtained through exploratory diachronic studies (on 30 BSP, from 1957 to 2018) and through specific case studies (on 9 BSP). These studies allowed us to delimit: a) the territory in which spatial mediation takes place – a spatial system open enough to support a multiplicity of occupations, but closed enough to minimally structure the movement; b) how it works – by transforming a spatial system that is simultaneously complex and generic into a system that is highly specific. The first aspect required the development of three representation models – complex, generic, and specific, to describe the spatial systems of buildings and exhibitions based on different criteria, thus generating different levels of network descriptions. And the latter enabled the characterization of two types of spatial mediation, mediation as a means and mediation as an end, whose characteristics describe how the attributes and elements of the exhibition layout are situated in relation to those of the building layout, whether within its limits or beyond them – the former related to the notion of commodity and the latter to a process of commodification. This approach, which is essentially based on the distinction between perennial and ephemeral layouts, can provide new perspectives of morphological thinking for the design and study of uses and internal arrangements of other types of buildings and spaces.