Bairro

Trained as an engineer in Buenos Aires, León Ferrari lived in exile in São Paulo, Brazil, during Argentina’s military dictatorship. There, he began making blueprints that combined sketches with rubber stamps and Letraset icons. Using heliography, a technique traditionally employed by architects to reproduce technical drawings, Ferrari made “editions of infinity” and sent them in the mail to friends. From a distance, his plans seem to exemplify order and efficiency. Upon closer inspection, we see that things are not quite right: rooms are not enclosed, highways tangle and dead-end, some figures line up to enter empty spaces or sit at desks that surround an unmade bed. A mix of the tragic and the absurd, Ferrari’s orderly society follows no logic and its members are lost.