Roberto Behar & Rosario Marquardt seated at the Dreaming Room
Courtesy Princeton University Art Museum. Photograph by Kristina Giasi
A CONVERSATION WITH ROBERTO & ROSARIO
Mitra Abbaspour, Houghton Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Head of the Division of Modern and Contemporary Art Harvard Art Museums
In the summer of 2022, Princeton University inaugurated two new residential colleges—Yeh College and New College West—and introduced an addition to its extensive collection of site-responsive campus art installations. The Home We Share, a series of three sculptural settings by the artist team R&R STUDIOS, is nestled into the landscape surrounding these interconnected colleges, offering spaces for gathering, relaxation, and play to generations of students who call this place home.
The following is an edited version of the conversation between Roberto & Rosario and Mitra Abbaspour, formerly the Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Princeton University Art Museum, and now the Houghton Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Head of the Division of Modern and Contemporary Art at Harvard Art Museums, held as part of the inaugural ceremonies.
Mitra: We’ve discussed aspects of Dreaming Room and Forget Me Not, which are both interior spaces set into the landscape. With Flower Fields Forever the same qualities of the familiar and fantastical are essential; yet, in this social sculpture are flowers in a landscape. How have you invested this natural scene with your commitment to the ideas of gathering, memory, and community?
Rosario: The third social sculpture, Flower Fields Forever, is a dreamscape to celebrate friendship and togetherness. We are interested in the gentle power of flowers and in flower power as a utopian desire for a better world. For some time now, flowers have been a recurrent and dear motif in our work. The Living Room in Miami and
Besame Mucho at Coachella Music and Art Festival in California are good examples in this regard. Flower Fields Forever is inspired in popular culture and perhaps childhood readings of Alice in Wonderland changing scales to alter her perception of reality.
INTERDISCIPLINARITY
Mitra: Returning to your foundations, you were trained as architects and as artists, and you’ve worked consistently in both disciplines. These social sculptures exist in-between those two fields; additionally, an approach that bridges disciplines and methodologies is resonant at a liberal arts university where one specializes in a discipline but studies many related fields. Would you speak to your experience of working as both architects and artists and how those two practices inform one another?
Rosario: We are interested in architecture as the most public of the arts. Not too long ago architecture was considered to be an artistic discipline, and often the site where different artistic expressions found a place in common. This is not a new idea but rather an idea that returns to the center of the discipline over and over again. We were lucky to have a few exceptional teachers and mentors that encouraged an understanding of architecture as a cultural endeavor closely aligned not only with disciplines such as painting, design, and sculpture but also with theater, cinema, anthropology, and geography.
Roberto: It was a radical architectural education where books like Architecture Without
Architects and the work of Bernard Rudofsky and Gio Ponti combined an interest in vernacular and refined architecture. And discussions on the “synthesis of the arts” and a reassessment of the social role of art and architecture culminated in a reconsideration of the city as theater of everyday life.
Robert Venturi and Aldo Rossi texts on architecture and the city became complementary lessons that expanded our education. In those years, studying art and architecture was also a refuge from the repressive environment that successive military dictatorships imposed throughout South America. Artists like Antonio Berni, and the Brazilian “Tropicalia” artistic movement that included artist Helio Oiticica, musicians like Maria Bethania and Caetano Veloso, the exceptional film maker Glauber Rocha and architect Lina Bo Bardi became important examples of how the poetical and political could become one. They all conveyed a sense of freedom and adventure that we couldn’t resist.
Forget Me Not (The Home We Share)
Courtesy Princeton University Art Museum. Photograph by Kristina Giasi
Model, Dreaming Room
Flower Fields Forever (The Home We Share)
Courtesy Princeton University Art Museum. Photograph by Kristina Giasi
Model, Flower Fields Forever (The Home We Share)
