Sola andata. Lina Bo Bardi in Brasile (1946-)

When Pietro Maria and Lina Bo Bardi crossed the Atlantic Ocean aboard the liner Almirante Jaceguay, in 1946, they intended to embark on a long trip to Brazil. However, they ended up moving there altogether. Therefore, their journey became something so different from what was expected that one can barely call it a “journey”. Nevertheless, if a journey is also and above all the daily experience of “otherness”, of seeing things from a decentralized point of view, maybe we should indeed consider the years Lina Bo Bardi spent in Brazil as such. This paper aims to show that Bo Bardi’s uncomfortable but favorable position – as a traveler in a country she loved, where she felt she belonged but was also compelled to see from the outside, through a sort of “anthropological gaze” – is one of the main conditions of her most original ideas and works.