Short Bio
Mariana Simoni is an Assistant Professor for Latin American Literatures and Cultures with emphasis on Brazilian Literature at Freie Universität Berlin. She is Co-Head of the Project Post-autonomous Artistic Interventions in Brazil and Argentina (Collaborative Research Centre Intervening Arts) and is Associated Researcher at Centre Marc Bloch Berlin. She holds a PhD in Literary Studies from Pontificia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro and has several publications on performativity and intermedial relations between literature and theatre. Her actual research interests include ecological perspectives in literary studies, Amerindian perspectivism; Animality; and aesthetical-political resistance in Latin America.
Project for the Network
Lina Bo Bardi’s Nature Imaginations in Italy
Mariana’s BRICC research focus on the work of Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992), who lived in Brazil from 1946 until the end of her life, in 1992. More specifically with regard to the possible continuities in the relations between human-more-than-human in her early work in Italy and her after-work in Brazil. Recent research in the field of architecture points to the fact that the presence of nature was already noticeable in Bo Bardi’s early projects during the Italian years. In order to better understand the temporal-spatial displacements and superpositions of a relationship with nature in Italy during the II War and Brazil during the authoritarian regime, the project intends to focus on Bo Bardi’s Italian years emphasising her participation in a network of Italian avant-garde intellectuals and artists. The objective is to mapping possible encounters, which could have aesthetic and affective impacted Bo Bardi’s conception of nature before her arrival in Brazil, where during the dictatorship humanism became a value of resistance.