I received great news in the mail a few days ago from SUPSI (University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland), in the city of Lugano in the Italian part of Switzerland:

Dear Gaston,

I am glad to announce you that the workshop The Island: a multi-player game (24-28 June) has been activated.

I’ve been hoping it would get confirmed, as a similar last year didn’t end up taking place. So, time to pack my laptop and swimwear! It’s summertime in Europe for me this year.

The workshop will be run by Andreas Gysin, and aims at exploring the design opportunities offered by Processing software for creating generative graphics, animation algorithms and collaborative digital environments. The Island is a multiplayer game and a framework for learning the basics of designing through creative coding.

In the Processing workshop we’ll create an island and populate it with programmed characters. Each character will be designed and controlled by each of us and will have to survive on the island. The process and techniques for designing the character will be based on a set of common rules defined during the workshop.

But that’s not the whole trip.

I’ve also signed up for another workshop in the Italian countryside region of Umbria. I’m spending 4 days at La Fratta Art House to learn all about Raku ceramics creation.

I’ve never taking ceramic courses before, so it’ll be a new experience for me. I’m very curious what I’ll end up making, but I’m sure the process will be a lot of fun.

In between these two workshops, I’ll make stops in Zurich, Milan, Perugia, Assisi, and the Italian Riviera. I have friends that live at some of these cities (some I made at the type design workshop in Urbino a couple years ago), so it will be great catching up with them as I visit museums and do sightseeing. Overall, the trip will be three weeks long.

Watch this space for future posts, as I plan to share interesting things I see along the way.

A month ago I had the opportunity to spend some time at one of Brazil’s most beautiful beaches. Jericoacoara (or Jerí, as locals like to call it) is a remote beach town located in the northeastern state of Ceará, about five hours away from its capital Fortaleza.

Since Jerí is within a national park and surrounded by sand dunes, getting there was quite an adventure. I caught a late bus ride, and traveled through those sand dunes in the middle of the night. It was a bumpy ride, but well worth it. And traveling under a starry sky and listening to wind and waves is not all that bad.

The town is very small, and its streets made of sand. The beach has extreme tides, and in two hours the coastline can end up five blocks away. What did I do while there? Sunsets at the top of sand dunes, capoeira performances at the beach, boogie rides to lakes, endless walks through its open spaces, and getting to practice the languages I know by making new international friends.

If I had to describe Jerí in one word, “infinity” comes to mind. Definitely a memorable place!

In between the two beach towns I visited while in Brazil, I squeezed an afternoon in Salvador. The Pelourinho neighbourhood (historical center of town) is as charming as it is scary, because of some of its inhabitants. Even with all the police presence, I didn’t feel very safe. Still, I managed to take some nice pictures of the place with my cellphone. Enjoy.

Ah, Pipa… what a beautiful place. Will I ever come across beaches like this again? I don’t typically post on this blog unless the topic is design related, but this place was so stunning that I feel like sharing. Hopefully the images do it justice.

This small beach town which I visited for a week in January, is located near Natal, in the northern state of Rio Grande do Norte, in Brazil. It has some of the most scenic coastlines I’ve ever seen.

Walking distance from the town, the closest beaches are Praia do Amor (great surfing spot), Praia das Minas (completely deserted, sometimes visited by marine turtles), Praia dos Golfinhos (no waves, visited by dolphins!), and Praia do Madeiro (it has some waves, and is also visited by dolphins). Nearby, by van or boogie, one can access lagoons (one with water the colour of Coca Cola!), an ecological sanctuary, cliffs… the list goes on.

I stayed at the Pousada Pomar da Pipa owned by a great paulista named Mario, and became friends with some cool Brazilians who were also staying there. At night, while the bar scene was very small, the culinary choices were quite varied, considering the size of the town. We tried lots of different restaurants, and even grilled some meat on the last night of our stay.

It’s a place I definitely want to visit again!

During my recent trip to Brazil, one of the highlights was a day at Inhotim, the open-air museum and botanical garden in Minas Gerais. If you’ve never heard of it before, you are not alone. I first read about this 3,000-acre ranch a few months ago in an article from The Guardian:

Located in Brumadinho, a sleepy mining town around 40 miles from the state capital Belo Horizonte, Inhotim began life in the 1980s when Paz bought a 3,000-acre ranch with part of his fortune. He transformed the site into a stunning botanical garden with the help of his friend Roberto Burle Marx, a landscape architect.

In the late 1990s Paz began building galleries at Inhotim to house his growing art collection. In 2006 it opened to the public, rapidly becoming a reference point for the arts in South America: 300,000 people visited this year.

A cross between Tate Modern and Kew Gardens, Inhotim is home to nearly two dozen art “pavilions”, housing work by giants of the Brazilian arts scene such as Hélio Oiticica, Cildo Meirelles and Vik Muniz and international names including Doug Aitken, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Steve McQueen.

Getting there was no picnic. I had planned on staying three days at Belo Horizonte, so I could visit Inhotim one or two days (it’s located 1.5 hours away by bus). Unfortunately, for many days prior to my arrival, torrential rains had soaked Minas Gerais. Many towns were covered by floods. So much so that Inhotim didn’t open to the public the first two days I was in Belo Horizonte. Fortunately, the last day I was there it opened, and I got to visit!

The photos in the slideshow should give you an idea of the place, the botanical gardens, sculptures and pavilions. The buildings contain the private art collection of Brazilian magnate Bernardo Paz, the man behind Inhotim. The sculptures are in-situ installations, specially commissioned for the space.

Thanks to the useful circuit suggested at the Vambora blog, I was able to see everything in one day. Some of the highlights for me were:

• Narcissus Garden, by Yayoi Kusama
• Penetrável Magic Square, by Hélio Oiticica
• Galeria Miguel Rio Branco
• De Lama Lâmina, by Matthew Barney
• Sonic Pavilion, by Doug Aitken
• By Means of a Sudden intuitive realization, by Janet Cardiff
• True Rouge, by Tunga
• Através, by Cildo Meireles
• Desvio para o vermelho, by Cildo Meirelles
• O assassinato dos Corvos, by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
• Cosmococas, by Hélio Oiticica and Neville d’Almeida
• Beam Drop, by Chris Burden
• Galeria Adriana Varejão
• Forty Part Motet, by Janet Cardiff
• Viewing Machine, by Olafur Eliasson

The institute’s website has photos of the artworks created by the different artists. While many of the pieces are interactive (sounds installations abound at Inhotim), they will help you get an idea of what you’d encounter.

If you love modern art, visiting Inhotim is a must. To me, it was as unique an experience as going to the Venice Biennale for the first time. Only that instead of canals, I was surrounded by Brazilian tropical gardens!

The last stop of my trip through northern Italy was the city of Verona. I didn’t get to spend a lot time sightseeing, as I was on a mission to buy a nice pair of sneakers (mission accomplished). So you won’t find photos of Juliet’s house in the slideshow.

But I did get to enjoy one great final dinner, at the Osteria al Duomo. The regional spaghetti con sugo di asino (that’s right, donkey meat) was really delicious.

And with that, my trip came to an end! Italy, I miss you already…