Delfim Sardo
Frugal conversations with taxi drivers and intimate dialogues with artist Diego Velázquez; what’s the connection? They are all part of the professional travels of Delfim Sardo, Chief Curator of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale which starts in October.
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Some conversations last only as long as the journey; five minutes, half an hour at most. With the meter running, the driver turns into a weather forecaster, sports commentator, home affairs analyst, foreign policy critic and censor of morals. “I talk endlessly with taxi drivers around the world”, say Delfim Sardo, university professor, essayist and art critic. He began life in the city of Aveiro in 1962. He studied philosophy, was a high school teacher and, tired of inflicting Plato on hormonal youngsters, returned to his first love, contemporary art. On his travels he has been Director of the Centro Cultural de Belém Exhibition Centre and consultant for the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
He sees himself, above all, as a curator, a talent scout of the art world, a mediator between artists and the marketplace, a bookie, exhibition creator, inventor of geniuses. He is totally focused on the present, visits many exhibitions, looks through catalogues and travels – a lot. On some of his journeys there are obligatory stopovers. “Every time I go to Madrid I go to the Prado”. Every time he goes to the Prado, he goes to see Velázquez. Every time he sees Velazquéz, he visits Las Meninas. He strides along corridors of paintings, only stopping when he has reached his destination. He looks, approaches, steps back. “It is a painting you can’t see just once, you have to look many times”. He stays. In front of this Baroque masterpiece by the master portrait-painter, the star of the court of Filipe IV of Spain, observing the canvas on which the whole philosophy of art is framed, filled with photographic realism, the key to modern art, a window onto an epoch. One picture can justify an entire journey, at least for Delfim Sardo.
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Light and darkness
There are two cultural events that punctuate his travels around the globe: the Biennales in Venice and São Paulo. He always answers the call. “São Paulo is difficult to know well, it’s enormous”. True. Every time he goes, there are different restaurants vying for attention, gallery openings, new buildings – architecture is one of his passions – new paradigms. “Last time I was there, I stayed in Higienópolis and loved it. It’s a neighbourhood built to strict hygiene standards, a city of the future”, he says. The city is so immense that, when he is in São Paulo, Delfim Sardo puts himself in the hands of local friends to get around and find out what’s new. “It’s insanely frenetic, lots of business being done, very intense. The museums and galleries are in São Paulo and the artists live in Rio.” One of his favourite cities. “The way you get around in Rio is fantastic. There are few big cities where, everywhere you go, you’re just a few steps away from the beach. It’s hard to imagine having a normal working routine there. You always feel like taking a break, having a coconut juice, sharing a beer with friends”
As for Venice, there’s never enough of it. It’s that size, right at the limit, almost falling into the water. “Every time I go to Venice I do things I did in the past. The only thing I want is to go to the same places I was the last time.” Having a beer in the same old Harry’s Bar, or dinner in his favourite restaurant to sample the Venice cuisine: the Trattoria Antiche Carampane. There is another stopover for Delfim which has the same emotional charge as seeing Las Meninas. It is a restaurant tucked away in a labyrinth of alleyways in the old brothel quarter, with just a few tables, two or three under the stars, a matron at your service, fish and seafood to the fore. On the night of a blackout across the whole city, Delfim Sardo had an eerie experience. “I was coming from Antiche Carampane and you couldn’t see a hand in front of your face, which is dangerous because you could go into the canal. People started to light lamps in the windows. I had the feeling we were back in the days of Casanova in the 18th century: it was hidden, frightening, and fairylike. I managed to get there but you couldn’t see anything, except the candle when they laid the table. I didn’t even know what I was eating, but it was delicious.”
Our inner journey
“What is fantastic when you’re travelling is that you meet the worlds of the imagination created by literature and cinema, there are some places where you experience a kind of confirmation.” Delfim experienced just such an epiphany in a restaurant in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand. It was a traditional house, built in a cross to let the air circulate like a Marguerite Duras novel. He was shown a spot in the ideal place for the breeze. “It was a feeling of complete well-being. I thought: this will never come again.”
Arriving in New York confirms the images of all those films you’ve seen from the city. Even before you go, you’ve been there thousands of times already. “I have an American friend who insists on taking me to a diner in Greenwich Village, where he reckons you can eat the best hamburgers in the world. It’s a bit of a greasy place with a fat long-haired old man in the kitchen, some customers who look a bit unhinged, on a street corner. Being there is to be inside New York.”
Los Angeles is a different film. A city with some amazing scenery. “You feel like a film location scout. Here I am in Mulholland Drive, over there is Sunset Boulevard…” In Odessa, the Ukraine, he went to see the steps used for the mythic scene from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.
The references won’t let him go and he is intent on seeing the ones that are missing. “I love travelling with books: reading Orhan Pamuk in Turkey or The Memoirs of Jacques Casanova in Venice”. On his first grand tour, his first InterRail as an adolescent, Delfim Sardo found himself reading Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar on a Greek beach: “It was a formative experience”.
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by Manuela Carona
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