The Box - 2nd post

In one of my first weeks here I had the chance to participate in someone else's world, or should I say box? Have a look…

For who doesn’t know, this is a pavilion designed by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. It’s a project from the Serpentine Gallery. Every year, during the summer this gallery invites an important architect to build up something in the provided space at Hyde Park, London. This year, I had the chance to visit it. But what should one expect from a black big box in the middle of the green field? I was curious to find out what waited for me in the inside. When I got there, the surprise…

Inside the black box, he placed a garden. Around the garden, some tables and chairs where people could sit and observe… observe the garden! At the top of the box there was a rectangular big hole where one could se the sky. Not as big as the whole surface of the pavilion but big enough to see a great part of the sky.

At first, I thought it was ironic, why to come inside to appreciate a garden if we could go outside and have the whole Hyde Park? But this did not seem to bother other people. Actually, they were pretty concentrated in talking and looking the green.  But then I realised, how often, when going to a park, we REALLY stop and look into the flowers, the leaves, the details, or even the sky? Did you look the sky today?

And this is not a romantic appeal for you to leave the building and see the sky, you probably had something more important to do. The issue here is how the architect made tangible and concrete something that is so familiar and so not known about the human being: we need frames! You can be an anthropologist and call it culture, a businessman and call it career plan, a mom and call it education… you can choose whatever you prefer… But can you recognise the box? I am not asking you to leave it. I am not even saying that you could (where to start without the frames?). I am just asking, can you see it?

4nabisworld

This is a Brazilian, actually a carioca, writing from a very cold land called London. As most of you probably know, it’s not surprising that they talk so much about the weather over here, sun is a really BIG happening. So, why did I leave the lovely beaches from my hometown to come over here? Well... to pursue this crazy dream of becoming an anthropologist. You are probably wondering if by that I mean those people who study the evolution of the human being, well... not quite that. I won’t dare to try to define anthropology here (I already have a hard time doing that at my PhD), but there is something pretty common about all the definitions... anthropology is about understanding people. That’s what I love... people! Anthropology is just a way that I found to understand people, to connect to people, to learn with people, to communicate...

And that’s what I am here for, to communicate. To share with you the things that capture my attention during this journey, hopping that through my eyes, you can also get amazed with those strange people that I have been meeting. I might talk about people that I already knew, about people that I just met, about goods that people produce to express themselves, about exhibitions that portrait people, about well-known people or people just famous to me. And by sharing my interaction with the world, I hope to reach you... meet you... be with you! Even from far away...

The name of the blog tells a lot about it’s purpose. A story deserves to be told... I have this friend who shared with me a habit that she use to have when she was a child. When discovering a word that she did not like, she would change it’s pronunciation. So, for example, if she didn’t like the word bottle, she would pronounce it pottle, if it sounded better. Why? Because she liked it better. And so, some friends and I use to mock her about creating her own world... what we called Nabi’s world (Nabi being a distortion of her real name, Nati). And here I am, making a manifest for the Nabi’s world. For all those amazing people that through the smallest and unpretentious things dare to challenge the common perspective and create their own words to describe the world they see.

At last, by meeting worlds like Nabi’s, through me, I hope you can also find yourself... and create your own words to communicate...

Hello there!