Weekly Cultural Outing: Oi Futuro

For my weekly cultural outing this week, to remind the Cariocas of the hidden gems of their city and to inform the gringos that Rio is a lot more than Pao and parties, I went to the Espaco Cultural Oi Futuro.

Though not as large or grand as say, the Sony museum in New York, it's the most fantastically modern building I've seen in Rio, hidden in the Largo do Machado neighborhood, a charming section of the city in/near Flamengo with a gorgeous park and lots of fast food. It's six floors in a transparent building, with a fabulous space to use wireless and hang out in the lobby (with a photography book store). They have temporary exposition space as well as the Telecommunications Museum.

Oi is a telecommunications company, and its Oi Futuro organization runs the museum and also does social and cultural projects throughout Brazil. When I was there on a Thursday afternoon, there were a surprising amount of visitors and school groups, perhaps because entry is totally free.

The current exposition this month is a photography exhibit by American David LaChapelle called Heaven to Hell - Belezas e Desastres (Beauties and Disasters). This is apparently a book and they blew up some of the prints for the exhibits. You may know LaChapelle from his movie, Rise, which was kind of meh but I really liked because I love the evolution of new dance forms. So apparently this guy is a photographer too and umm. Well.

Most of the exhibit are photos of famous people and not famous people doing odd sexual things. They were pretty obscene and I didn't find them to be so much artistic as tacky. There's a nude of Pamela Anderson that's absolutely horrific (unless you like to see the stretching limit of human skin over silicone) as well as other weird ones of Madonna, Angelina Jolie, and Courtney Love (looking like a hot mess). The only celebrity one I liked was one of Marilyn Manson dressed up as a crossing guard, with all his makeup, surrounded by little Goth children. Hey and somehow I found it online!

The rest were odd and out of place with the celebrity ones: some were nude, unfunny erotic ones of models, while others were perfectly beautiful, like one of a woman and girl dressed in hot pink, with their house covered in the same hot pink fabric. I was kind of perplexed by the whole exhibit.

Upstairs is the Telecommunications Museum, where they give you this cool little cell phone-shaped listening thing and headphones and you go inside a sealed room. It was amazingly well-done and cool, besides the crazy technological effects and the fact that you point the cell phone thing at lasers to hear the audio in different parts of the museum. Except I think something was wrong with mine because I couldn't hear any audio, just music, but I didn't figure that out until later. Anyway, they have lots of videos and lots of phone artifacts and lots of information and cool technological STUFF and I'm not much of a techie but it was very very cool. I will probably drag Eli back there at some point.

If anything, it's a great place to bring your laptop, either to the downstairs lobby or to the supposedly extremely cool cafe I missed on the uppermost floor.

Eli's going to get dragged around a lot this long weekend.

Comments

[Silvia]

Their cafe isn't a big deal as far as I remember, but it has a nice terrace. Their theater is pretty cool too, it's a nice space - or it used to be at least, it's been almost 2 years since the last time I went there. Did you visit the Ilha Fiscal yet?

[Trapped in NJ]

"unless you like to see the stretching limit of human skin over silicone"

HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! Ha! HA! HA! HA! HA!