Spatial Mediation : Buildings as commodities for exhibitions discourses – the case of the Bienal de São Paulo (1957-2018)

This thesis proposes the concept of spatial mediation as a configurational strategy for the exchange between people and things, which is particularly evident in exhibition spaces – whose main function is precisely to foster these exchanges. In contrast to other types of mediation, spatial mediation occurs not through educators or technological devices, but through the system that structures the interaction between displayed contents and its visitors. This concept is characterized by a double-faceted logic that concerns the very definition of exhibition spaces – settings for exchange that operate through the display of artifacts, for cultural and economic purposes. These two facets are made up of pairs of concepts that address the following issues: 1) discourse and narrative – which describe how things are arranged in space and how the messages embedded in this arrangement can be interpreted through spatial navigation; 2) commodity and capital – which represent the syntactic and semantic role of the building in defining a system of material and symbolic exchanges. These two facets are objectively represented by the short-term layout of the exhibitions and the long-term layout of the building that houses it. This phenomenon is investigated at the Bienal de São Paulo (BSP), an expression that designates both a building (designed by Oscar Niemeyer in 1954), and a set of exhibitions (with 34 editions, 31 of which held in the same pavilion). This long overlap between building and exhibitions provides robust evidence for the proposed discussion, which was obtained through exploratory diachronic studies (on 30 BSP, from 1957 to 2018) and through specific case studies (on 9 BSP). These studies allowed us to delimit: a) the territory in which spatial mediation takes place – a spatial system open enough to support a multiplicity of occupations, but closed enough to minimally structure the movement; b) how it works – by transforming a spatial system that is simultaneously complex and generic into a system that is highly ...