"Another work that adresses the balance between different energies is Bar Restaurant (2010), which will reach its full size for the first time at the Migros Museum in Zurich. It is a peculiar sort of bar: the patrons occupying the tables and chairs scattered throghout the room are not humans but things. Stacks of paper, cylindrical shapes, and rectangular solids in various colors have been set on the chairs as rectangular solids in various colors have been set on the chairs as actants. Glasses of beer sit in front of these patrons, gradually emptying as though invisible drinkers were sipping from them. A waiter dressed for the part, continually refills the glasses. The situation seems absurd, but also meditative and focused. The formal vocabular suggests a reference to late-1950s Brazilian art, when Concrete Art started to integrate time and the human body into the works in a challenge to the era’s ascetic geometry and its association with industry and progress. In Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, it metamorphosed into an organic movement. Lygia Pape worked on these ideas as well, developing a Neo-Concrete ballet in 1958 in which cylinders and cubes floated across the stage. The figures in Bar Restaurant now give the impression of a colorful posse of descendants of Pape’s geometric ballet figures sitting down for a drink. Is this a play with the animist idea of things possessed of a soul and agency: Or does the work conjure the Spirits of art history:

It is as though the bodies Lima arranges in Bar Restaurant playfully blend the invocation of the Spirits of Neo-Concret art with aspects of magic. Interestingly, she manages to bring all these themes together in a syncretistic whole, for example referring to the animal as well as the human body and drawing no fundamental distinction between the two. The animal body is not regarded as a legitimate part of the rational world; it is assigned to the natural cosmos. That holds even for domesticated animals such as cows or chickens. All participants, be they human or animal, act as extras who, in keeping twith the idea of mimesis as laid out by Taussig, enable a translocation to a different reality such as appears in Gala Chickens. The body serves various functions in this contexto. It may, for instance, become the scene on which forces and energies of the “otherworld”, to take up Greenswood’s concept, are enacted. The body is the energy field with the potential to “channel” such forces. Like The Naked Magician abiding in the “intermediary world”, the server in Bar Restaurant is charged with maintaining contact with the “otherworld” of magical objects and determining the volume of energies to be deployed and extracted."