Showing posts with label Buenos Aires. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Buenos Aires. Show all posts

Monday, 1 June 2009

Viñetas Sueltas, Buenos Aires

Viñetas Sueltas, BsAs

Inspite of the cold and rainy weather - Winter is here! - we decided to "venture out" during the weekend to visit one of our favourite Buenos Aires restaurants, Osaka, and then to visit the second edition of the local international comic festival. We didn´t attend any of the talks but the exhibition itself was quite inviting, with quite a wide range of artists on display. It was good to see our favourite artists again, as well as to get to know new ones. The fanzine factory and the fanzine market were two of my favourite corners of the whole exhibition, though I have no pictures from it.

And the best part of having such cold weather?

a minha camisola nas Viñetas Sueltas, BsAs

Getting to wear my hand-knits!

Thursday, 12 March 2009

Last days of summer

Rosedal de Palermo

Lago dos Bosques de Palermo
Though you can´t really tell by my last posts, I have been working. Not as much as I would like as my recent eye laser surgeries have forced me to take it easy with the computer and any detailed work (read "papercut") I have to do. I´ve been knitting a bit but mostly enjoying looking to those buildings and numbers and letters far away down the road and actually seeing them.

German classes have started for the new school year, I´ll be back to painting classes as well (had to interrupt because of the surgeries), and I just joined a new knitting group, which means that the regular year´s activities will now leave the summer memories behind. And it is fine, though nice weather is always welcome.

Last weekend was dedicated to some home improvement, what with hanging frames on the walls and preparing some new canvases for future paintings. But as the weather was so fine and not too hot, we made a detour to the Rosedal de Palermo, a beautiful, luscious rose garden in the heart of the city, complete with a lake and two bridges. Close by it´s the elected porteño spot for jogging and roller blading, as well as just sun bathing and mate drinking. I love how people here in Buenos Aires take advantage of the beautiful gardens, something you don´t see as often back in Lisbon. Public gardens there are beautiful and well-kept, but for some reason there´s a prejudice that mostly elderly folks and kindergarten kids visit them. I hope the efforts against this prejudice prove to be efficient, because visiting gardens is probably one of the activities I love the most.

Thursday, 5 March 2009

Pre-colombian knitting

This is a fabric from pre-colombian times. It´s on dispçay here at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. I´m not sure it is actually knitted - not the way we´re used to think about knitting, at least - but it definitely looks like the finest of lace shawls. And it´s several centuries old. Isn´t it amazing?

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Este é um tecido que se encontra exposto no Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes daqui de Buenos Aires. É de antes da chegada dos espanhóis, o que significa que tem vários séculos de idade. Apesar de não dever ser tricotado da maneira como hoje tricotamos, a verdade é que parece um intricado desenho em lace. Espectacular, não é?

Monday, 16 February 2009

Pure inspiration | Inspiração







"Buenos Aires
Art Déco y Racionalismo"

de Mimi Böhm, Fabio Grementieri (texts | textos), Xavier Verstraeten (photography | fotografia)


This is a book I received as a gift on my birthday and proved not only to be a seemingly endless source of inspiration but also a tool to reinforce my (already strong) love for Buenos Aires.

While I was studying I did this research project on modernism both in Portugal and its influences in Macau, where I lived during my teenage years. This project was one of the milestones on my training as a graphic designer, basically because of the methodology used on this kind of architecture (a rational one, as this book´s title says) and the visual translation it has in its shape.

This book documents this period here in Buenos Aires and shows images of varied buildings, of pottery, ads, clothes and many, many other things.

And it feels great to recognize those buildings and actually strengthening this belonging-kind-of-relationship that I now have to my host city.

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Recebi este livro como presente de aniversário e, desde que o abri pela primeira vez, não o consegui largar durante muito tempo.

A minha paixão pelo modernismo já vem dos tempos da faculdade, onde fiz um trabalho sobre o tema em Portugal e a sua influência no ultramar, especificamente na ex-colónia de Macau, cidade onde vivi. Com este trabalho, fiquei a conhecer melhor a metodologia projectual do modernismo e essa foi uma influência marcante na minha forma de trabalhar e de encarar os meus próprios projectos.

Este livro vem agora mostrar-me inúmeros exemplos desta cidade que agora me acolhe, Buenos Aires. Esta sensação de ir reforçando a minha relação com as esquinas, os pormenores e os pormaiores desta cidade é boa e faz-me sentir em casa. Além disso, este livro é uma constante fonte de inspiração (e de informação), pois também mostra exemplos de outras áreas da produção artística: temos cartazes publicitários, entradas de prédios, peças de louça e muitas outras coisas. Que maravilha!

Tuesday, 9 September 2008

Buenos Aires by night


A three week vacation is perfect not only to forget about work but also to charge your batteries and start thinking about work again.

One of the projects I had in mind was to make a series of photographs under the theme "Buenos Aires by night". This series will be available on my personal blog. Although I post in portuguese only, photos are images and images are worth a thousand words, they say.

The idea of a series of photographs is not an original one. I can think of SouleMama and FotoBen, to name just two bloggers.

I love photography and haven´t been much involved with it during the last few years. I think that for some reason my interest sailed a bit away, but it is definitely a port I want to go back to. Night photography is so difficult but it can be so rewarding: what I like the most is how those "mistakes" that blurry images are can be so beautiful. And that´s what I want to explore. And the city, too, as it is the city where I live now and the one that has adopted me for the time to come.

I hope you like the series too. There´s a button on the right hand side corner to give you easy access to it.


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Uma das ideias que trago para pôr em prática na minha pequena "rentrée" é a de captar e publicar aqui uma série de trinta imagens da cidade de Buenos Aires à noite.

A minha ideia não é original. Outros bloggers fazem séries semelhantes (lembro-me particularmente da SouleMama e do FotoBen) e a ideia parece-me tão interessante que a vou usar aqui com a expressão empregue pelo homem do marketing cá de casa: "share and reapply". Gosto da ideia, gosto do compromisso, gosto de procurar imagens bonitas, gosto do efeito inesperado do erro na fotografia nocturna e quero partilhar tudo isso.

Espero que também gostem.

Thursday, 18 October 2007

Pecha Kucha Night - the images

Centro Cultural Ciudad Konex





Everyone was invited to draw or write something to put pressure on world politicians for the accomplishment of the Millenium Development Goals

José Maria Muscari

Jimena Nahon and her "Catalogue"

Dick el Demasiado

Wednesday, 17 October 2007

Pecha Kucha Night - something like a report

Las Tuesday was Pecha Kucha Night here in Buenos Aires. It was in Ciudad Cultural Konex, a venue I had never been to before but is very appropriate to events like this one. Inside there´s a big patio with a bar and a shop. There were some exhibitions by different artists, some of then were also speakers. I was a bit scared that it would be a succession of designers promoting their work but it really wasn´t that way.

Well, I´m not the best person for remembering names, so for those of you who may want to know more about the artists, I´ll redirect you to the Pecha Kucha website, where more accurate info is available.

What follows is a small review of the presenters that somehow impacted me. Any lack of accuracy is due to my unjournalistic eyes and purposes.

The first presentation that really called my attention was by José Maria Muscari. It was about loneliness and love. His images captured an evening in Buenos Aires, a well-known city for its "movida", where people seemed to be at the loneliest ever, even if they had company. I really liked that someone actually took the time to be curious enough to work about being lonenly. He certainly isn´t the first one in art, nor the last one, for that matter, but it did appeal to me in a way other works haven´t. Maybe I just identified myself with it at this speciic point in time, but then again isn´t it always like this? Doesn´t someone enjoy something and sometime later realise it wasn´t exactly that good and vice-versa? Well, I did like it. I liked the images and I liked his presentation, which, on a second moment got connected with love.

Lateral Media Lab were also there. Their presentation was less interesting than the content itself. In that line of thought, they had a really fun device on the patio that everyone could try: with a little pointing devide, one could digitally paint grafitti on the wall. It even had the effect of the excess ink running down! Their work had a really interesting concept underneath, mixing technology, media and communication to have users interact with digital instruments.

One presentation that I really enjoyed was the one by Ants.tv. They showed some of their work in motions graphics for TV. They do the kind of animations that appear before ads on a given channel. I liked it so much, I admired them so much. I wonder how they do it. I really like the fact that their wonderful illustrations were moving. It´s a totally new dimension but they certainly deal with it well. I just wondered how they do it, it´s amazing. (Or so I think.)

There was a serial entrepreneur called Santiano Bilinkis. His stories were fun and inspiring, though I don´t have the entrepreneurship blood running in my veins.

Don´t be fooled by the lack of information Jimena Nahon´s website displays. I visited it and was a bit disappointed. So then, when I heard her presentation, I had low expectations and came out pleasantly surprised. She presented her work, a catalog of things. So she developed a catalog of things, basically clothing, shoes and beauty care. They make their own photographic productions for the products displayed, which adds up to the level of interest. The best part is that it ends up working like a source book for me, when I need ideas or images to start working on some idea. And I really liked the concept of making a catalog of everything.

There was Fernanda Laguna, who presented in the category "woman". I wonder why she was there, but her presentation turned out to be fun. I thought that suddenly 6´40´´ would be way too long and probably tedious, but although she didn´t present anything special, she made us all laugh. It was a good opportunity to learn some slang.

I just couldn´t finish this pseudo-report without mentioning Diego Golombek, a biologist and scientist. His presentation was fun and informing, full of great and intelligent jokes and references. I actually learnt something from it: he studies the mechanisms of time inside the living being (I hope I´m not saying anything wrong here, so if I am, Diego please forgive me). He mentioned that somehow people living in the poles did have a sense of night and day, even having 6 months of sunshine and 6 months of night. Somehow, the sense of time is embedded in our brains and our bodies. That´s what he talked about. This was one of the presenttations I wish were longer.

There´s still no date for Pecha Kucha Night in Buenos Aires vol.8, but I´ll definitely return.

Tuesday, 16 October 2007

Pecha Kucha Night - Buenos Aires

In the words of its creator,

Pecha Kucha Night, devised by Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham (Klein Dytham architecture), was conceived in 2003 as a place for young designers to meet, network, and show their work in public.


Tonight it´s Pecha Kucha Night here in Buenos Aires. It´s my first PKN ever, so I´ll write about my impressions soon.


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Esta noite é Pecha Kucha Night aqui em Buenos Aires. Este evento foi criado por Astrid Klein e Mark Dytham para servir como um ponto de encontro entre designers, arquitectos e artistas plásticos. Uma das regras principais é que as exposições feitas pelos participantes têm um limite de duração: cada orador apresenta 20 imagens e, para cada uma delas, tem 20 segundos para a exposição oral.

Vou lá hoje e depois conto como foi.