Lucas de Mello Reitz
website
Soft Storm (2023)
Tutor Winter School’s one week Workshop at International Design Week 2023 of University of Antwerp and Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp + Alexander Auris By revision of the history of queerness in Antwerp, we approach supposedly banal spaces in the city to recuperate its memory, commemorate them and retell a story of a community. We replaced the roughness, tallness, highlight, and heroism of existing monuments with the softness, touchiness, fragility, and disruptiveness of the queer monument. During the workshop, we conducted students throughout the reflection on how classic monuments are conceived, patrimony politics held, and how critically think about the design of new, soft monuments based on queer theory in architecture. We mapped historical queer places in the city and installed ephemeral soft monuments, conceived as a assembly of balloons, to remember Antwerp’s erased queer memories and as possibility to question traditional monuments’ qualities of stability and roughness. During the week, students conceptualized, designed, crafted and prototype soft monuments for Antwerp that questioned the creation of queer memory and other interpretation of memories to be celebrated. Link to video
Festive Memories (2023)
Creative Director, Lead Designer (muq) Field Office Workshop 01 - Royal College of Art, Bartlett School UCL, University of Greenwich, Architectural Association London + Luis Eduardo Candeia and Leonardo Schreiber Schneider Research and conceptual project developed for the Field Office Workshop 01, by muq team. Understanfing of Sayes Court, Convoys Wharf and, by extent, London’s landscape intricacies and to speculate both theoretically and by design on decolonization and the possible contributions of a queer museum practice from the global south on this complex landscape and how to understand the site as a counter-archive. Our proposal is based in two small-powerful gestures: radically fill all the site’s free land with trees planted by marginalised communities - tackling both ecology and economy; and creating a replicable symbol for festive memories, that could enable the transgression colonialism signs.
Link to video
Arquitetura Bicha website (2023) Graphic Designer Graham Foundation funding entry, 2023
Website layout and map design Digital archive for queer architectrure from a latin american perspective
B612architectes Visual Identity (2023) Design leader Bruxelles, Belgium
New visual identity comprising logo, graphic charter for visual and technical use, concept for new website and social media. Development and design of the “constellation of projects” concept an identity that reunites all of the office’s projects, connecting them in space and time. B612 is located as a celestial body among the constellation of projects.
New visual identity
Instagram feed management
Conceptual chart
Jean XXIII Competition (2023) Winner Woluwe-Saint-Pierre, Brussels
Copywriter for tendering documents and conceptual argument reviewer Graphic design manager (InDesign + VectorWorks) Post-production assistent artist (Photoshop + Lumion) School complex project, located in the commune of Woluwe-SaintPierre, Brussels. Graphic design consisted in arranging all presentation presets and layouts, from the pages and sheets newly developed set-up to presetted Photoshop views and Lumion files. Copywriting consisted in developing a 200-pagesl ong administrative and technical document together with Energy, Structure and Acoustics and the review and conception of the office’s note of intent and projects portfolio.
ufvab Profile Illustration Illustration
Illustration created to represent B612architectes founder-partner Li Mei Tsien profile and projects for the exhibition of the Union of Women Architects in Belgium (ufvab) The illustration represents eight completed and under construction projects across Brussels region and Wollonie:
Trend Landscape (2021-23) Research in architecture and mixed media; short movie Public Screenings in Brazil at Cinerama BC (Balneário Camboriú) and Cine Mussi (Laguna) Elisabete Anderle Prize 2021 (Brazil) + Camilla Alba, Gabriel Villas and Juliano Ventura The Trend Landscape project approaches, investigates and records the transformation processes of the territories of Balneário Camboriú, Itapema and Porto Belo, on the coast of Santa Catarina, which make up a common landscape strongly regulated by speculative real estate expansion and summer tourism. In the period of research, we carried out documentary research and field visits that gave rise to different media proposals, record of historical archives of the present time and the video Landscape Trend: a collage of photographs and audiovisual fragments and proposes a route through the changing cities of the northern coast of Santa Catarina, Brazil.
I realised that they call it a dream
All products will be sold
Guaiuba Garden (2022-to be completed) Private Garden Landscape Architect
+ COR Arquitetura and José Tabacow Imbituba, Brazil Masterplan and landscape design for a large residential property. The plan comprised the definition of accesses, paths and facilities, connected by a rhombus grid and hexagonal floors of 1m x 1m and 90cm x 90cm. The soft layout dissolves between the clearings, large vegetation masses and the Imaruí Lagoon landscape, generating an interaction between the new and the existing building (chalet), and the placement of stables, leisure and prayer facilities. The grid and the variation between the hexagonal pieces and natural stone enclosures, enable asymmetric axes, soft transitions and low hierarchy between the paths. The vegetation is distributed irregularly on the natural ground level, and in a geometric, rigid compositions, in large gardens elevated from 15 to 60 cm from the ground, depending
muq museum of what we have left Instructions for a queer counter-archive (2022) Independent Curatorial Project Curator and Creative Director Florianópolis, Brazil Premiered as an audio-visual exhibition and public talk at the Catarinense School Museum during the Post-pandemic Exhibition Program by both de State and the Federal University of Santa Catarina. It continues as an open archive for ongoing contributions and other possible unfolds. As a second action of the independent project, the Museum proposes the construction of instructions for a queer counter-archive in Florianópolis. Unlike the traditional, methodical, and hierarchical archive, a queer counter-archive, as defined by Ann Cvetkovich, comes out of the closet into the world to act as a public intervention and as a tool for alliance and historical inscription of narratives disregarded by cis-heteronomy. In this way, a queer counter archive seeks to gather records of affection and pain, creating spaces of multiple possibilities in which LGBTQIA+ bodies are protagonists of the archival construction. Our archival action started from the construction of an archive of questions about queer experiences that unfolds into two instructions: (1) the collection of testimonials and audio files exchanged between LGBTQIA+ people; and (2) the materialization of these questions in adhesive materials, pasted in places of LGBTQIA+ sociability as a form of subjective expansion of the counter archive - coming out of the closet to the world. The aim is to capture LGBTQIA+ experiences that are not only about violence but approach special moments, whether they are joyful or sad, banal or profound. The idea is to create a reliquary, a time capsule, that keeps fragments of what remains of our history alive and resonant, as it is constantly neutralized.
Exception Tectonique (2021-22) Mixed media installation
Université Laval à Québec, Canada 1er Congrès de l’ÉDIQ Artist Scholarship Experimental short film played in a loop and four small-format photographs derived from its video frames in superimposed collages. The video follows the anonymous movement between ephemeral barriers and residences on both sides of General Sampaio Avenue in Boa Vista, Roraima, as part of its transformation by Operation Acolhida mounted by the Brazilian federal government and humanitarian agencies in support of Venezuelan immigrants and refugees in Brazil, since 2018. It transits, through two lines of displacement, between the city walled by extensive and precarious coverings, created to shelter and delimit the coming and going of Venezuelan immigrants and the “official” city, which is being transformed to welcome them. The four images complete the understanding of the precariousness and layering of the immigrants’ narratives, lives and practices as they mix with those of the city, assuming complex identities. They create a relationship of remixing and phantasmagoria with the linear displacement of General Sampaio Avenue, superimposing scenes of everyday life, spontaneous appropriations, the emptiness of the streets and the contrast between colours, movement, shapes and textures. The images, sounds and collages of the work seek to characterise both a zone of non-being, impossibility and displacement of the self, as Fanon said, and also a search for an impression - literal here - of reconstruction of identities and territories. Both derive from urban cartography by exploring ephemeral barriers as an aesthetic object and urban and architectural device that promote segregation. The work centralises the theme of the Venezuelan migratory crisis in Brazil in images and audiovisual narratives that dramatise the contrasts between Venezuelan immigrants’ efforts to appropriate and occupy Brazilian cities and the devices of precarity and segregation created by the state and international agencies. Link to video
Anastilosys (2022)
Architectural installation/intervention and photographic series of ready-made and found construction materials. Itapema e Portobello, Brazil Anastilosys is the archaeological concept of rearrangement, assemblage, and reconstruction of ruined objects and sites. My main interest in this topic is giving found objects, demolition traces and trash new narratives and forms of comprehension. The installation series was developed on the context of 2021 Elisabete Anderle Prize for Artistic Research.
Lime, Straw, Bricks (2021) Curatorship and investigation + Marola Coletiva (Gloria Cabral, Katia Véras, Carolina Stolf and Luiza Ferraro) Florianópolis, Urussanga, Laguna and Jaguaruna, Brazil The curatorial project consisted of a three-day architectural immersion in the landscape of the southern coast of Santa Catarina, Brazil. The immersion centred on the sensitive and technical exploration of lime, straw, and brick materials and their derivatives. The name Lime Straw Brick follows a logic of non-hierarchical knowledge of traditional and indigenous materials used in Brazilian construction, making direct reference to the work of art ‘Two weights, two measures’ (Original: Dois pesos, duas medidas) by Brazilian artist Laís Myrrha. The curatorial project comprised a series of instructions for the participants, and was developed as a travelling short-residency. It used Yona Friedman’s concepts of ‘creating museums without buildings’ as a starting point for the instructions. The assemble of short instructions varied from exercises for collecting materials and memories, confronting the surrounded landscape, and a sum of awareness-building activities. These exercises included contacting traditional materials, conversations with local agents - small producers and cooperatives, and active observation of the landscape, such as the ocean movements and archaeological remains of neolithic shell deposits - the raw material of lime in the region. The awarenessbuilding exercise led to a final group proposal, where the group exchanged their knowledge and experimentation results with the materials collected along the way as they manipulated them. Incursion into the dunes
1 Toilet Room (2021) Exhibition proposal Conceptual Designer and Researcher 13th São Paulo Architecture Biennale Entry + Arquitetura Bicha Collective (queer architecture) Florianópolis, São Paulo, Fortaleza and Campinas, Brazil / New York, US The project aims to promote a discussion about architectural space and the technologies of gender based on previous international studies. As an exhibition space in a bathroom format, it is part of an exercise of reinterpretation of the bathroom module of CCSP. The internal space will present setting and furniture items (toilets, support bars, counter tops, etc.) as referential objects. The proposal includes exhibition of mages and captions, the presentation text of Arquitetura Bicha, the curatorial text of the 1 Toilet Room proposal, the Atlas of Multigender bathrooms and other presentation.
Torporgraphic Atlas (2021)
Collection of interventions in objects, texts, visual notes and elaborations and register of memories marked by sexuality and trauma. The collection is organized as an atlas by the operation of a broad mapping of feelings. This atlas covers subjective geographies of the body, outlining and creating the concept of torporgraphy. Published at Contorno (2022) Cais Editora, Florianópolis, Brazil Final work for the Group for Artistic, Political and Curatorial Studies Photographic triptych followed by intervention on object and chemical formula. Both images and objects center the dialectic of pain and pleasure and signifiers of homosexuality and gay masculinity. The broken glass alludes to anger, the rupture of the self and, at the same time, to integrity. Its shards are used as microscopy slides to observe a drop of spit, sometimes whole, sometimes flattened. The spit is both a possible act of sexuality for some homosexual experiences and the substance of exchange and provocation of pain and pleasure. The ‘invasive’ intervention on a lubricant packet and the chemical formula of saliva complement the reading of the triptych.
muq museum of what we have left, grief (2021) Independent Curatorial Project at muq Curator and Creative Director Florianópolis and Itajaí, Brazil
In partnership with the University of Vale do Itajaí and the Federal University of Santa Catarina Museum of Portuguese Language, São Paulo The Wrong Biennale, 2021-22. Museum of what we have left, in its first edition, aimed to create an experience of collective elaboration of mourning through a virtual exhibition, presenting remains and traces of individual mourning processes in free association. In the Museum, fragments of the mourning process were gathered, to create a collection in constant growth and transition until its closing date. The museum here is also a tool, which positions mourning as a device for the recognition of transience based on psychoanalysis, unfolding also in material devices of memory: a vivid memory, an old photo, a commemorative video, or a story in resonance in the mind. Art as an act of resistance historically also engenders mourning, translating pain and loss into color, image and sensation. In this sense, by remembering and interpreting the traces of what remains, art also celebrates the transitory of and in life itself. The work consisted engaging the audience as ‘participators’, as in Helio Oiticica’s concept in which the public gains agency over the work. Participadors shared fragments of something that has gone for them. They submitted photos, video, music, and text, which were later archived and constituted a collective digital exhibition. The exhibition design was a materialization of the ‘free association’ concept in which audio-visual and text are stitched together in a vertical linear layout website and social network’s timeline. Over six months of functioning, the Museum received numerous contributions from all over the country, processed and organized in an open and unrestricted curatorship - all the material sent was exhibited, except for ethical or copyright issues. For archival matters, the contributions were organized in three axes. ‘What remains’ concentrates on memories, objects, and permanences of everyday life, understanding loss as a fragmentary category. In ‘Transitory Resistances’, we traced texts that turned a loss into words or linguistic affection. At last, in ‘Displacements’, we proposed looking at works that elaborate loss, understanding the work of art as a process of mourning, of libidinal displacement, in psychoanalytical terms.
The All Concrete Garden (2018) Florianópolis, Brazil
Small residential garden in reinforced concrete. The rigid concrete structure with the timber markings contrasts and complements the natural stone walls, serving as a bed for shade and humidity species and also as a structural complement for the high soil drainage area. The form seeks the unity of the ensemble, diversifying technical and functional resolutions. The result is a small but complex garden ranging from topographic design with the creation of levels to the conduction and barrier of natural water, parking area, and beds for small and medium-sized tropical plants.
Bed for shade species
Bed for tropical species
Concrete and stone detail
Paralela Architecture and Arts What Constitutes you? (2018)
Cultural Event and Architectural Exhibitions Circuit Curator and Creative Director (Head of Design) Elisabete Anderle Cultural Award (2017) National Counsil for Architecture and Urbanism Award (2018) + Bloco B Arquitetura, Giz de Terra, LOTO Arquitetura, Mariana D’Ávila Florianópolis, Brazil
he event was held weeks before the 2018 national elections, named T ‘What constitutes you?’ after the 30th anniversary of Brazil’s Democratic Constitution. The artistic and curatorial direction prioritized works of arts and architectural interventions that blurred the line between the concept of constitution, both the Magna-Carta of Brazilian laws and the subjective and bio-political constitution of bodies and society. he event endeavoured to debate democracy, sociability, and T minorities’ invisibility in the urban context by positioning works that directly engaged the target audience in key spots, such as transit hubs and public spaces of reference. Furthermore, we curated projects and visual manifestations of local architectural and urban art production, bringing them to light to social-vulnerable audiences. In a total, the event held 33 installations, artistic interventions, exhibitions, and public debates thought the city, impacting over 10,000 people.
Spectacle directed and played by Homeless people Association
s a curatorial drive, the team questioned architectural logic as a A product and object in current southern Brazilian creative market. Our actions were directed to claiming the architect position as a political actor and an urban change maker. Link to video
Exhibiton by Sandro Clemes
Kiss Club Memorial (2018) Memorial Project, Conceptual Designer and Landscape Architect IAB National Competition entry Santa Maria, Brazil + Bloco B, Giz de Terra, Gabriel Pedrott
Grief through interiority and relief. Kiss Memorial honors the life of the 242 people who died in the 2013 fire, the largest in Brazil’s recent history. The project materializes a spatial narrative beginning with a Garden as a memory of Gaucho’s prairie fields and guiding users through a water stream ending in an immersive clay dome, representing simultaneously silence and rebirth.
Sustainability House (2016) Conceptual Designer National Competition
+ Bloco B, Giz de Terra and Gabriel Pedrotti Campinas, Brazil Learning from space and environment, and extensive use of renewable and local materials. The building design focus on energy efficiency and water renovation. The central yard and the surrounding water streams conduct the user through the complex mixed-use building’s cultural and ecological learning experience.
Ribeirão House (2016) Single family house project Florianópolis, Brazil
The house foster a family in southern Brazil. The project aimed to aggregate the client’s desire for an inner orientated living space and the house readiness for future adaptability both for the children and the elderly.