Fernando and Humberto Campana, Transplastic Exhibition, 2007. Albion Gallery, London. Installation view. Photo: Ed Reeve.

A few years ago, while working on a project in India, I watched a sitcom in which a man tried to hang a picture of his beloved fiancée. Not having a hammer at hand, he attempted to drive the nail by banging it with his shoe, a small chair, and a frying pan, to no avail. He finally succeeded by using the frame itself as a hammer. I was so touched by the scene that I could not help wondering if it captured the particular poetics of my third world culture.

In Brazil, the term gambiarra applies to a spontaneous and makeshift style of problem-solving that is very present in our tool-depleted yet resourceful tradition. Gambiarra refers to an unlikely mend, an unthinkable coupling, a solution so raw and transparent that it illustrates the problem at hand instead of eliminating it. Brazilians pride themselves on repairing airplanes with paperclips, catching fish with prescription drugs as bait, or using saliva as a building material. Consequently, cities, the government, and belief systems have become gambiarras themselves: the survivalist ingenuity of a people who live for the present alone compensates for the lack of material and psychological security.

I encountered the work of Fernando and Humberto Campana when they shared a MoMA Projects exhibition with Ingo Maurer in 1998. I felt an amazing bond with their irreverent juxtapositions of form and material, their gift for precariousness and absurdity, their gambiarra aesthetics. I was almost disappointed when I learned that we had the same origin: this so easily explained why we had so much in common. Born in the same state, sharing an upbringing as public school-educated sons of the military dictatorship, the three of us are seriously funny and deep about being superficial.

Since that exhibition at MoMA, the Brazilian brothers have been catapulted into the center stage of international contemporary design. Their production has been popular, consistent, and thoughtful. Their success has helped develop a new identity for Brazilian design and fostered a sense of hope for Brazil’s young designers, a sense of possibility of attaining international recognition without relinquishing their local culture and habits, and especially, the beautiful, chaotic subtlety of the Brazilian spirit.

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Issue 102 Winter 2008