Condominium

“I was invited to prepare an installation for a space on the first floor of the kitchens at the former Umberto I Hospital, later known as Matarazzo Hospital. Coincidentally, this space was where, many years earlier, a Portuguese man had run a small diner for the hospital staff. I decided to use this reference to speak of the relationship between this immigrant’s livelihood, the idea of a desired place, and the preservation of foodstuffs and memory. I say memory, as the locale hasn’t been touched by anything but the wear of time for the last twenty years. I built an installation around an old fridge, which I transformed into the maquette of a building. I inserted differently-coloured acrylic boxes into the fridge, which served as ‘apartments’, and filled them with little model household appliances. The whole fridge-building stands on a metal rig that keeps it at a safe height off the floor; a separation that reflects an unassailable reality of life in São Paulo that really struck me: the private condos are like high-security compounds cut off from the rest of the town.”
Miguel Palma works with such issues as technological development, ecology, the belief in images, the world of childhood and an obsession with machines and notions of power.