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Sumit Singhal
Sumit Singhal loves modern architecture. He comes from a family of builders who have built more than 20 projects in the last ten years near Delhi in India. He has recently started writing about the architectural projects that catch his imagination. X IS NOT A SMALL COUNTRY – Unravelling the Post-Global Era in Lisbon, Portugal by BUREAUJune 23rd, 2021 by Sumit Singhal
Article source: BUREAU The grid has a particular power that extends way beyond its graphical presence. In art, it appeared as an optical device for visual explorations on perspective, particularly intense in the times of Paolo Uccello. In cartography, Cartesian coordinates have occupied extensively the world of maps as a reference system since the 17th century. The particularity of the grid, as Rosalind Krauss has expressed in her 1980 article “Grids” published in the magazine October, is its capacity to mask and reveal, setting a seemingly ordered play of appearance and disappearance. What it reveals is what might appear over the grid once it is laid out. What it masks or occults is a pre-existing condition that its own laying out has covered, as an erasing action over a prevailing context.  X is Not a Small Country – Unravelling the Post-Global Era, exhibition view. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021, Image Courtesy © Francisco Nogueira
 X is Not a Small Country – Unravelling the Post-Global Era, installation view: Bricklab, Tactile Cinema, 2021. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021, Image Courtesy © Francisco Nogueira The discussion about the validity of the grid as a referential system is thus naturally complex, even more so in an exhibition dealing with post-globalism conditions that has placed its pivotal line of thought on a map (Henrique Galvão’s 1934 Portugal não é um pais pequeno – Portugal is not a small country), opening the door to cartography as a colonization tool. The maps presented specific views of the world with its Cartesian grid, and these views were informed by the martial will of conquering parts the world presented in those same maps. X IS NOT A SMALL COUNTRY design exhibition modestly addresses this complex and long history, bringing the grid to a three-dimensional level to address the contemporary issues of mapping the world and its transformation in data-based realities. And it confesses a certain degree of convoluted confusion in referencing the world. Once the power game of north-south or east-west classifications has been blurred, as the geopolitical state of the world obviously indicates currently, what grid system could faithfully order or re-order the geolocation of physical and virtual presences? Is the Cartesian coordinates grid still politically acceptable? Was it ever? Indirectly, the endless nature of the grid opens a discussion as well on borders, frontiers, and domination agendas.  X is Not a Small Country – Unravelling the Post-Global Era, exhibition view. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021, Image Courtesy © Francisco Nogueira  X is Not a Small Country – Unravelling the Post-Global Era, installation view: Paulo Moreira, Jamaika Model, 2021. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021, Image Courtesy © Francisco Nogueira The particular oval space of the MAAT offers an interesting background to host such hypothesis of post-global presences. For X IS NOT A SMALL COUNTRY a division has been traced for the visitors to somehow confront them with an itinerary choice. The design and art pieces tackle quite openly this sense of dis-belonging following the conventional or the other of a physical and fictional line: a border wall. They appear and disappear in relation to each other, the museum’s architecture, and exhibition design. The variety of media, physical and virtual is also organized to provide indications about the impossibility to classify. It is the choice of the visitor to re-arrange north-south-east-west logics and to recompose them in a contemporary condition, a renewed historical fiction. BUREAU is the project of Daniel Zamarbide, Carine Pimenta and Galliane Zamarbide. The practice hides under its generic name a variety of research activities. BUREAU makes things as an urge to react to the surrounding physical, cultural and social environment with a critical standpoint and with an inclusive attitude. BUREAU is a furniture series, an editorial project, a design team. We are architects.  X is Not a Small Country – Unravelling the Post-Global Era, exhibition view. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021, Image Courtesy © Francisco Nogueira  X is Not a Small Country – Unravelling the Post-Global Era, exhibition view. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021, Image Courtesy © Francisco Nogueira  X is Not a Small Country – Unravelling the Post-Global Era, exhibition view. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021, Image Courtesy © Francisco Nogueira  X is Not a Small Country – Unravelling the Post-Global Era, installation view: Liam Young, Planet City, 2020. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021, Image Courtesy © Francisco Nogueira  X is Not a Small Country – Unravelling the Post-Global Era, installation view: Revital Cohen & Tuur van Balen, Performance Mock-ups, 2020. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021, Image Courtesy © Francisco Nogueira  X is Not a Small Country – Unravelling the Post-Global Era, exhibition detail. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021, Image Courtesy © Francisco Nogueira  X is Not a Small Country – Unravelling the Post-Global Era, exhibition view. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021, Image Courtesy © Francisco Nogueira  X is Not a Small Country – Unravelling the Post-Global Era, exhibition view. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021, Image Courtesy © Francisco Nogueira  X is Not a Small Country – Unravelling the Post-Global Era, installation view: Liam Young, Planet City, 2020. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021, Image Courtesy © Francisco Nogueira  X is Not a Small Country – Unravelling the Post-Global Era, installation view: Liam Young, Planet City, 2020. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021, Image Courtesy © Francisco Nogueira  X is Not a Small Country – Unravelling the Post-Global Era, exhibition view. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021, Image Courtesy © Francisco Nogueira  X is Not a Small Country – Unravelling the Post-Global Era, installation view: Rael San Fratello, Teeter-Totter Wall, 2019 – 2021. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021, Image Courtesy © Francisco Nogueira  X is Not a Small Country – Unravelling the Post-Global Era, installation view: Wolfgang Tillmans, Anti-Brexit Campaign, 2016 – Protect the European Union, 2017. maat – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (Lisbon), 2021, Image Courtesy © Francisco Nogueira  Image Courtesy © BUREAU  Image Courtesy © BUREAU  Image Courtesy © BUREAU  Image Courtesy © BUREAU  Image Courtesy © BUREAU
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