The MAXXI in Rome presents Lina Bo Bardi — A Marvellous Entanglement, curated by Luigia Lonardelli, an exhibition that recounts the scope of the ideas of the Italian-Brazilian architect and the influence she had on the work of designers and artists. During a trip to Brazil, in fact, the British artist Isaac Julien is struck by the power of the architecture designed by Bo Bardi and sets an artistic path in dialogue with his works.

The exhibition is the result of six years of work, which led Julien to build an immersive installation. On nine screens, images of artistic performances, dances, and cultural initiatives run simultaneously and alternately, hosted in buildings designed by Lina in São Paulo and Salvador. The work involves a narration on multiple levels, where the linearity of the chronological path is lost and blurred, in a design approach dear to Lina, convinced that “Linear time is a Western invention. Time is not linear, it is a wonderful tangle in which, at any moment, you can choose points and invent solutions, without beginning or end”.


A series of photographic collages and a selection of archive materials related to Lina Bo Bardi complete the exhibition. Domus has also contributed to narrating the architect’s brilliant activity, with the loan of some original magazines that testify to Lina’s work’s versatility and topicality. In the 1940s, she collaborated with Gio Ponti’s Domus and edited, with Carlo Pagani, the beautiful Quaderni di Domus, a monothematic publication dedicated to the furnishing of domestic environments – the lamps, the kitchen, the studio – on loan to MAAXI for the occasion.