Anri Sala No Window No Cry (Lina Bo Bardi, Casa de Vidro, São Paulo), 2026
328,8 x 162 x 7,3 cm (129 1/2 x 63 3/4 x 2 7/8 in) (frame)
No Window No Cry is an ongoing series of site-specific works by Anri Sala. Each consists of a miniature brass music-box cylinder fixed to a sheet of glass. The glass has a round indentation to accommodate the winding handle of the automatically playing music box. The shape of the windows draws on those of famous existing modernist buildings, whose architects are named in the work’s title.
This iteration is based on a window from Lina Bo Bardi’s Casa de Vidro in São Paulo. Completed in 1952, Casa de Vidro is a landmark of Brazilian modernist architecture by one of the period’s pioneering female architects. It was Bo Bardi’s first built architectural project and the home she designed for herself and her husband, Pietro Maria Bardi. Surrounded by Atlantic Forest vegetation, the house is distinguished by its façade of glass and its close relationship to the landscape.
Although most of his windows were installed in existing buildings, replacing actual windows in situ, Sala increasingly came to approach the window in more abstract terms. Rather than it being a specific architectural feature, he saw it as an opening that articulates the relationship between inside and outside—an abstract signifier of architecture. Removed from its architectural setting, the window could stand as an autonomous, freestanding sculptural presence.
The title echoes Bob Marley’s 1975 song No Woman, No Cry and Martin Kippenberger’s book No Drawing No Cry (2000). The music played by the music box is Should I Stay or Should I Go, by the British punk rock band The Clash, released in 1982. Sala first chose the song for his 2010 film Le Clash, then used the same music box for the first No Window No Cry in 2011. The windows change from work to work, while the song remains the same.
The title of the song also became significant. For Sala, there is a melancholia in the song—the sense of something that was there and is no longer, but perhaps still is. He relates this to modernism, since all the windows used in the series belong to the period associated with modernism.