“Lina, go make a coffee!”

[Café extra-forte/ Extra-strong coffee – Lucia Koch, 2011 -- Lambda Print -- 270 x 456 cm]

“Lina, go make a coffee!” Pietro Maria Bardi used to bark at his wife, Lina Bo Bardi, whenever the subject of politics came up. She was a leftist; he was, I hear, vaguely fascist. Like the Mary Matalin and James Carville of midcentury São Paulo. The artist Cildo Meireles made a recording of the line and piped it over and over into Bo Bardi’s old Casa de Vidro on Wednesday, during the brunch opening of Hans Ulrich Obrists’s (unrelated to the biennial) “the insides are on the outside.”