A collection of works in research, curating, writing, and exhibition.
Fernanda Carlovich
I am an architect born in Sao Paulo, who has dedicated her professional and academic experience to cultural practices in the form of buildings, exhibitions, writing, and research. Recently graduated with a master’s degree in curatorial practices at Columbia’s GSAPP, I work at the intersection of design and research of exhibitions.
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Body Against Body IMS Paulista - Sao Paulo, 2017.
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Interim Urbanism NHDM at Seoul Architecture Biennial - Seoul, 2019.
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CCCP Gift Shop Columbia GSAPP End of Year Show - New York, 2019.
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Curricular Exchange Sharjah Architecture Triennial - Sharjah, 2019.
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I Can Drink the Distance Torkwase Dyson at PACE Gallery - New York, 2019.
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The Americans Robert Frank at IMS Paulista - Sao Paulo, 2017.
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1919: Black Water Torkwase Dyson at Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery - New York, 2019.
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The Imminence of an Event PLAT Magazine - Rice University, Fall 2018.
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Guignard Museum of Modern Art MAM - Sao Paulo, 2015.
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Traveling Dome Master Thesis - Columbia University, 2020.
Body against body: The battle of images, from photography to live streaming was a panorama of contemporary Brazilian photography, film, and video through the work of six young Brazilian artists who discussed how the body could be used as an element of social
My role: Exhibition Designer at Andrade Morettin Architects
September 2017 IMS Paulista Sao Paulo - Brazil
Corpo a Corpo curator: Thyago Nogueira photographer: Pedro Vannuchi
representation, political action, religiosity and cultural expression.
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Body Against Body
My role: Assistance with research, fabrication, and exhibition design.
2019 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, Cities Exhibit
NHDM Architects September 2019
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Interim Urbanism Youth, Dwelling, City
Renderings for density tests.
Interim Urbanism: Youth, Dwelling, City presents selected critical instances and projections set forth around the historical and contemporary conditions of youth dwelling in New York City, U.S.A. Aiming to provoke the conversations around the possibilities of alternative dwelling frameworks, and engaging rich socio-political and demographic complexities of the metropolis of New York, the exhibition presents four sets of artifacts - Interim City, New York (120 cm x 150 cm, a composite drawing of historic and contemporary instances of the interim domestic spaces of youth), Architecture of Home (For Now) (100 cm x 200 cm, a taxonomic model of typological and formal excerpts from the existing spaces of youth), Five Proposals for Youth, Dwelling, City (135 cm x 57 cm, a pentaptych of five new youth housing proposals located across New York City), and Interim Stories (a collection of video vignettes of research documents) - that tie together the past, the present, and the possible futures of youth, dwelling, and the city.
My role: coordinator of instalation, mediating the group’s ideas with the GSAPP Exhibition’s office.
Jumanah Abbas, Fernanda Carlovich, Axelle Dechelette, Francesca Johanson, Zoe Kauder Nalebuff, Emma Macdonald, Isabelle Tan, Alexandra Tell, Jose Luis Villanueva, Chenchen Yan.
May 2019 Columbia GSAPP End of Year Show
The M.S. CCCP in architecture is a program that extends beyond traditional modes of professional practice and academic scholarship. It recognizes that architectural production is multifaceted and diverse. Here in the microcosm of this contemporary, this work reimagines the program production in the setting of a museum gift shop. What are the economies of these projects today? As we attempt to push the boundaries of architectural practice, can we simultaneously poke fun at and poke holes in the ever-commodification of work?
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CCCP Gift Shop
My role: Participated collectively in research, curation, exhibition design, and fabrication.
Jumanah Abbas, Fernanda Carlovich, Axelle Dechelette, Francesca Johanson, Zoe Kauder Nalebuff, Emma Macdonald, Isabelle Tan, Alexandra Tell, Jose Luis Villanueva, Chenchen Yan.
November 2019 Sharjah Architecture Triennial Rights of Future Generations
Curricular Exchange
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The course syllabus is a powerful pedagogical tool — a document that maps a certain terrain of research. It aggregates texts and authors and can make theorical and political claims, all in order to pass knowledge from one person to another. Syllabi represent the process of circulating material that is ofter trapped behind institutional walls or paywalls, and that moves unevenly across national, cultural, and geographic boudaries. The syllabus thus poses questions about access to education, knowledge circulation, and intellectual property and copyright. Curricular Exchange looks at the Triennial as a critical node in the production of architectural knowledge. The installation is an experimental space for the free exchange of syllabi. Visitors are invited to print a syllabus, leave a syllabus, and consider the stakes as they make the exchange.
My role: Design and fabrication of sculptures and space.
Pace Gallery 2019 Performa New York - NY
Torkwase Dyson November 2019
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Torkwase Dyson, Can Drink the Distance
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Drawing on her theory of “black compositional thought,” Torkwase Dyson’s two-act performance and sculptural installation I Can Drink the Distance creates a platform through which contemporary artists, writers, and musicians can consider black spatial and ecological relations in our current times.
My role: Exhibition Designer at Andrade Morettin Architects
September 2017 IMS Paulista Sao Paulo - Brazil
Robert Frank curator: Sérgio Burgi photographer: Pedro Vannuchi
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Robert Frank: The Americans
The exhibition combined two crucial moments of Robert Frank’s work: the famous series The Americans, with 83 photographs in copies from the 1980s, and the Books and Films project, developed by Robert Frank in partnership with the renowned publisher and printer Gerhard Steidl. Our challenge was to create a harmony between those different exhibitions since the first one requires care of conservation, lighting, and flow and the second has informality as its main pretext.
My role: Assistance during studio residence. Design and fabrication of sculptures and space.
Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery Columbia GSAPP
Torkwase Dyson curator: Irene Sunwoo August 2019
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Torkwase Dyson: 1919 Black Water
In 1919: Black Water Dyson responds to the 100th anniversary of the “Red Summer” of 1919, a period of heightened racial violence across the United States. Her point of entry is a tragic episode that unfolded in the segregated waters of Chicago’s South Side beaches. On July 27, 1919 five black teenagers went swimming in Lake Michigan alongside a homemade raft and drifted near the unmarked boundary that extended from the black and white beaches. As tensions between black and white beachgoers erupted on the shore, a white Chicagoan in the water assaulted the boys, throwing stones at them. One of the boys, Eugene Williams, was struck in the head and drowned. Upon news of his death, violence escalated on the beach and intensified even further when a white police officer refused to arrest the man responsible for the boy’s death, yet arrested a black man upon complaints from a white man at the scene. Over the next five days rioting and racial attacks spread throughout Chicago. While historical accounts often cite the murder of Eugene Williams as the catalyst for the violence and destruction that swept Chicago that summer, details of the incident have been overlooked. Dyson reexamines this story, which provides a historical framework to think through the contested geography of water and the relationships between race, climate migration, and the architectural imagination. In particular, she considers the industrial waste that flowed into the water where the boys swam, which both warmed and cooled the lake, and the raft that they built from infrastructural debris to navigate its “hot” and “cold” zones. For Dyson, the raft—an ordinary object designed and built by the teenage boys, yet often omitted from historical narratives—is an architectural structure of extraordinary significance: a constructed space of refuge, but also a space of liberation. Extracted from press release by Irene Sunwoo
My role: Research, interview, and writing.
Fall 2019
PLAT 8.0 Simplicity Rive University
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My role: Exhibition Designer at Andrade Morettin Architects.
MAM Sao Paulo Museum of Modern Art July 2015
curator: Paulo Sérgio Duarte photographer: Nelson Kon
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GUIGNARD A visual memory of Modern Brazil
“Portraits, landscapes and still-lifes are three of the genres represented in Guignard – The Visual Memory of Modern Brazil, an exhibition of the work of Alberto da Veiga Guignard, one of Brazil’s leading 20th-century painters, to be held in the Great Room of the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM) between July 7 and September 11. Curated by Paulo Sérgio Duarte, the exhibition aims to give the general public a didactic introduction to this painter and draftsman, best-known for his landscape paintings, and to underscore his legacy and contribution to Brazilian modern art. In addition to the 80 or so works by Guignard himself, also presented are some paintings by his contemporaries Ismael Nery, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti and José Pancetti.” (MAM Press Release) The curatorial proposal for the exhibition of Alberto da Veiga Guignard, a Minas Gerais painter from the first half of the 20th century, led us to consider the formation of thematic cells, arranged in a hierarchical way within the exhibition space. The spatial arrangement of these cells was thought above all to value the interstitial spaces, not only as a place of circulation, but as a place to be and, mainly, to contemplate the landscape of Ibirapuera's Park.
Master Thesis advisor: Felicity D. Scott M.S. CCCP GSAPP Columbia University
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Traveling Dome ABSTRACT This thesis draws inspiration from a woman walking over a concrete dome. Alia Farid’s work for the 32nd Sao Paulo Art Biennial was recorded on the Rashid Karami International Fairgrounds, in Tripoli. Those watching the video on the occasion of the Biennial have experienced the feeling of an estranged familiarity, for the dome in Tripoli is in direct tension with an important form of the Brazilian architecture imaginary—one that not by accident also appears instantiated right outside the same Biennial pavilion. Farid’s video explores the semiotic resonance of those two sites through closeups and carefully positioned shots that make one question whether that scenery is familiar or not. The walking over the dome incites a familiarity to those who already know by heart the curvature of that architecture. Farid’s video returns to Brazil a form that traveled to Lebanon in 1962 together with the architect Oscar Niemeyer. Between temples, museums, theaters, and political stages, the spaces created by these domes are endowed with an uncanniness from their form. This semiotic resonances establish a connection between them—a horizontal dialogue that arises from architecture and surpasses it. The dome’s travel, I want to argue, can be read as a symptomatic episode of the post-war developmentalist agenda in the Global South. Taking the Experimental Theater in Tripoli in conversation with the Palace of Expositions in Sao Paulo and the National Congress building in Brasília, this thesis understands travel as the repetition of a formal solution and its mediatic dissemination, which allowed this architecture to reach territories beyond its original locations. Niemeyer’s Brazilian and Lebanese domes are, therefore, interconnected by ideas of progress, modernity, nation-building, and failure. While in Brazil, the fiction of democratic consolidation with the inauguration of Brasília in 1960 was postponed by the 1964 Military Coup, in Lebanon, the national sovereignty and cultural emancipation represented by the Fairgrounds was suspended by the Civil War in 1975. In the promise of infrastructure as a guarantor of development, architecture has been entrusted with a central function, closely tied to a powerful state constitution. States change faster than constructions, and the gap between the fluidity of ideologies and permanence of buildings allows that certain spaces produced through specific claims ended up being occupied with conflicting goals.