Favela Café at Art Basel: Conflicting Signs In Semi-Public Space

On June 14, 2013, Swiss police used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse demonstrators occupying Favela Café and, in doing so, (involuntarily) made visible some of the tensions inherent in an aesthetic of precarious construction. Favela Café is a grouping of eighteen huts interconnected by footbridges; a hamlet that seems to have been cobbled together from planks and rusted scrap metal, it acts as a café and public patio. It is also a work by Tadashi Kawamata and is representative of the forms that the Japanese artist has developed all over the world for more than twenty years. Kawamata’s interventions, most often made with low-grade materials or those salvaged on site — the assemblage of raw, screwed-together planks has practically become a signature — are articulated in the sites they occupy and contribute to their transformation and redefinition. They divert and reconfigure existing architectures: the work is thus simultaneously a commentary, a transformation, and a re-creation of the site. In this sense, rather than being an autonomous and independent construction, Kawamata’s work is allied with a form of renovation or critical reactivation of spatial configurations from which it cannot be separated.

Favela Café was commissioned by the organizing committee of Art Basel, probably the largest commercial contemporary art fair in the world, and stood before the entrance to the building in which the event was held. Ostensibly, it was immediately obvious that the materials used, all salvaged from Basel’s port, were determined not by economic necessity but by aesthetic choice; before becoming a recreational space, Kawamata’s work is determined by its status as an artwork. Thus, Favela Café does not pretend to be a real café in a favela, but is an image — a symbolic form that, like any symbolic production or artwork, is ambiguous by definition. Although Kawamata’s explicit position is clear, it does not suppress this ambiguity; it is the principle of construction that interests the artist — the materials, scale, organization, processes — and not the clichés of the poor habitat. Favela Café is not meant, therefore, to be a complacent illustration of the world’s misery, but it risks being (mis)taken for one because it is situated at the crossroads of various significant markers. It is simultaneously utilitarian, formal, and symbolic, and is positioned more or less explicitly in relation to the interests of its sponsor (Art Basel). This tension is not, in truth, specific to Favela Café; it is a constant throughout the sphere of art. Here, however, it was made particularly visible by the protesters’ occupation of the work and the brutality of the police intervention that followed. The real issue lies in the use — and control — of the space. Although it was freely accessible to the public, and was presented as a public artwork, Favela Café was private property. The work was built on public space, but that space was privatized temporarily for the fair. The authorization of private installations on a portion of public land in exchange for a fee is a common practice. Free access to the work, despite appearances, was not therefore a given right; it was at the discretion of the tenant — in this case, Art Basel. This was what provided the legal basis for the evacuation of the space: trespassing on private property (and disturbing the peace).