And Decio Pignatari left…

I remember the day Decio started selling his furniture because he was moving… I was his neighbor (in Barão da Ladário) and I still didn’t have a table that I really liked to do my projects. I went for a visit and left there with his own desk in his arms and his comment in his head “São Paulo got lost, I’m leaving for Curitiba”. I told him that day that I wasn’t mature enough to understand what he was saying when he was my teacher, but that “today” I was almost an amateur semiotician or perhaps more than just an amateur, but I would never compare myself to Pierce, Lucrecia or him – because that wasn’t my goal. A few years later, I concluded that I no longer wanted to hear from clients at all and I left for neuroscience and, at the same time, I sent Decio’s table to Maria da Fé, at the house of my cousin (Luiz Eugênio) who lived in State farm where he was the responsible agronomist… too bad I never wrote the story of that table (and pasted it under the top) so that one day it would be recognized and end up in a semiotics museum. A feather. Maybe that table is still with my cousin… Anyway, today, December 2, 2012 (02/12/2012), he’s gone… he died at the University Hospital of the University of São Paulo (HU/USP). That was a privileged mind. Décio translated McLuhan’s work, which anticipated a digital revolution long before the Internet existed. Retired and already living in Curitiba for some years, Décio made a very lucid statement “In Brazil, today, the only artistic expression that surprises me is fashion”. At the time, I was teaching Colorimetry for the Fashion course at USP and I was starting to research the boundaries between fabrics and perception… Today I start my courses saying Perception is Everything, but I paused in extremely recent neuroscientific studies. Décio had known all this for decades.

Written by Feitosa-Santana

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