Located in 192 Avenida São Luís in central São Paulo, within the residential "Louvre condominium" designed by Artacho Jurado in the 1950’s, the museu do louvre pau-brazyl opened in 2016 conceived as a kind of imaginary –yet at the same time emplaced– museum; a Louvre complex in South America –built prior to the emergence of global museum branches– with a mona lisa, a pyramid and even a recorded robbery, but without the ever-expanding driving forces and demands of mass tourism and consumption. In his catalogue essay, Rafael Urano Frajndlich writes: «the power of the museu do louvre pau-brazyl is that it subverts the contemporaneous currents of a “house-museum” or “palace-museum” or their generalities: it is a museum-house, a place in which rooms are opened or closed to the world depending on convenience and occasion. It could be a house, a store, any space –except for a museum. For this, it is the most eloquent museum of São Paulo, a city in which the obsession for the private created a mythology of exhibition and of fending off what escapes from eighteenth-century notions, both domestic and foreign, of collecting and pillaging.»
Designed by Elisa Von Randow and Julia Masagão, the catalogue also includes essays by Ana Castro, Luisa Valentini, Guilherme Giufrida, Felipe Martinez, Martin Smit, Mirtes Marins de Oliveira, Pablo Lafuente and Jéssica Varrichio, and it documents the works and interventions of the opening exhibition, which took place between 09.09.16 and 15.10.16.