In 2014, the former Umberto Primo Hospital, known as Hospital Matarazzo, opened its doors after approximately two decades of closure to host Made by… Feito por Brasileiros, a major contemporary art occupation conceived by Alexandre Allard as a "creative invasion". For five weeks, more than 100 Brazilian and international artists occupied approximately 27,000 m² of pavilions, rooms, corridors and gardens of the historic complex, located just meters from Avenida Paulista.
The exhibition preceded and publicly presented the spirit of the project that would later become Cidade Matarazzo, temporarily transforming an architectural ensemble closed for years into a territory of artistic experimentation. The project brought together an extraordinary combination of Brazilian and international artists, among them Tunga, Vik Muniz, Beatriz and Márcia Milhazes, Lygia Clark, Nuno Ramos, Artur Lescher, Arne Quinze, Barry McGee, Joana Vasconcelos, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Paulo Nazareth, Sonia Gomes, Cinthia Marcelle, Laura Vinci, José Miguel Wisnik, Henrique Oliveira, Cao Guimarães, Douglas White and Xavier Veilhan, among many others.
The project was conceived by Alexandre Allard, with artistic direction and curation by Marc Pottier, associate curation by Maguy Etlin and participation of invited international curators. For Sandro Bianco and SB\Design, participating in this moment meant working at the intersection of contemporary art, architecture, culture, technology and digital experience, building a platform capable of translating the physical and conceptual dimension of that occupation to the online environment.
SB\Design, directed by Sandro Bianco, was responsible for the design and conceptual development of the Made by… Feito por Brasileiros website, working in direct contact with Alexandre Allard and the creative universe built around the exhibition. More than communicating dates and institutional information, the challenge was to digitally organize an extraordinarily complex system: more than a hundred artists, works, physical spaces, videos, news, editorial content, educational programming and the architecture of Hospital Matarazzo itself.
This digital dimension was particularly important because it was part of the curatorial proposal. Marc Pottier explained at the time that there would be no traditional labels identifying works within the exhibition: information would be provided by the website and app, allowing the public to simultaneously discover artists, works and architecture. This transformed the website into something much larger than a communication piece. It functioned as a digital layer of interpretation of the physical experience.
Sandro Bianco and SB\Design organized this large volume of information through a digital architecture that allowed different entry points to the exhibition. Visitors could discover artists, locate interventions within different blocks of the complex, access texts and proposals of the works, follow news, watch videos and understand the spatial dimension of the occupation.
The preserved screens of the project show this logic with clarity: a predominantly black interface, white typography, black and white photography and a golden color used as an orientation and highlight element. The deliberately restrained language made the interface disappear when necessary, allowing artists, works, images and videos to take center stage.
One of the most interesting elements of the project was the relationship between interface and physical space. The website incorporated maps of Hospital Matarazzo and location codes for the works, creating a direct correspondence between architecture, artist and digital content. Rather than simply reproducing an online catalog, SB\Design built an information architecture that helped visitors understand an exhibition distributed across dozens of spaces.
It is precisely at this scale that the work of Sandro Bianco and SB\Design positions itself: not as the isolated creation of an interface, but as the translation of a complex system into a coherent design system. In Made by… Feito por Brasileiros, this system needed to connect Alexandre Allard, Cidade Matarazzo, Marc Pottier, more than 100 artists, historic architecture, cultural programming, editorial content, maps, videos and on-site experience within a single digital platform. The result was a website conceived as an extension of the exhibition itself.
The scale achieved by Made by… Feito por Brasileiros helps explain the importance of this work. The exhibition ran from September 9 to October 12, 2014, with free admission, and brought together more than 100 artists at the former Hospital Matarazzo. Subsequently, the project received recognition from APCA — Associação Paulista de Críticos de Arte — as the best cultural initiative of 2014.
A significant portion of the exhibition's memory remains digitally preserved. Cidade Matarazzo itself maintains a collection on Google Arts & Culture with 111 items, stories and a virtual tour of the 2014 occupation.
For Sandro Bianco, the project also marked the beginning of a professional relationship with the universe built by Alexandre Allard and Cidade Matarazzo, connecting digital design, art, architecture and culture at an uncommon scale. For SB\Design, Made by… Feito por Brasileiros became a particularly clear example of a practice that would continue to appear in different projects: using design to transform large volumes of content, people, spaces and relationships into comprehensible, navigable and culturally relevant experiences.
