Pauline Bachmann: Constructivism as Construction
Constructivism as Construction: Brazilian Neoconcretism between Language and Object
Bachmanns research project focuses on Brazilian Neoconcretism at the end of the 1950s and particularly on the movement’s interdisciplinarity. It consists of poets and visual artists alike that even realized works together such as the Balés Neoconcretos (1958/59). Instead of recurring to the already well studied figures Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, this research project rather concentrates on the intersections of visual art and poetry in the Neoconcrete movement and asks how the constructivist/the concrete turns into a reversible figure so that participatory and embodiment art practices become a possibility within this framework. The project aims at tracing the constructivist/concrete in the connection between text and object and its mediation through embodiment focusing on artists/poets like Lygia Pape and Ferreira Gullar. It also dismantles its transcultural references that are based on the poet’s exchange with German philosopher Max Bense und Eugen Gomringer.
Pauline Bachmann is currently (since 2011) a research fellow of the DFG-funded Research Group “Transcultural Negotiations in the Ambits of Art” at Freie Universität Berlin. Since 2015 she has been a doctoral candidate at the University of Zurich. Her ongoing project focuses on Brazilian Neoconcretism’s intersection of text and object (1950s and 1960s) and its reception in Europe and the USA from a transcultural perspective. Her research is rooted in both art history and literary studies. In 2010 she received her Master’s degree in Latin American Studies, Art History and History at Freie Universität Berlin. Pauline Bachmann also studied in Costa Rica (UNA), Mexico (COLMEX) and France (Université de Nantes).