Brazil Pavilion rethinks past, present and future at the Venice Biennale

The Venice Biennale is almost here! Starting in May, the international art exhibition is now releasing information about Brazil's participation in the 18th International Architecture Exhibition : based on a reflection on Brazil's past, present and future, the exhibition places land at the center of the debate , both as a poetic and as a concrete element in the exhibition space. To this end, the entire pavilion will be filled with earth, putting the public in direct contact with the tradition of indigenous, quilombola and sertanejo dwellings, as well as candomblé temples. The curators are Gabriela de Matos , from CASACOR São Paulo 2021 , and Paulo Tavares . “Our curatorial proposal starts by thinking about Brazil as land. Land as soil, fertilizer, ground and territory. But also land in its global and cosmic sense, as a planet and common home for all life, human and non-human. Land as memory, and also as future , looking at the past and heritage to expand the field of architecture in the face of the most pressing contemporary urban, territorial and environmental issues”, say the curators. Elements of Brazilian popular housing are present in the exhibition at the entrance to the Brazilian pavilion, in contrast to the modernist features of the building, such as the railings with the sankofa symbol – belonging to an African writing system called Adinkra, from the Akan people of West Africa, which was widely used in railing designs and can be seen in many Brazilian cities, and means “ looking to the knowledge of our ancestors in search of building a better future ”. A green and pink flag, by Leandro Vieira, is also part of this reception area, contrasting with the national flag. In it, the emblem “order and progress” is replaced by subjects that evoke the relationship with the land evoked by the curators: “ Indians, blacks and the poor ”. The first gallery of the building is called by the curators “ Brasília Território Quilombola ”, questioning the imaginary surrounding the version that the capital of Brazil was built in the middle of nowhere, since the indigenous people and quilombolas who inhabited the place were already removed from the region since the Bandeiras period, being finally pushed to the outskirts with the imposition of the modern city. In this way, what we intend to expose is a more complex, diverse and plural territorial, architectural and heritage image of the national formation and modernity in Brazil , presenting other narratives through architectures and landscapes neglected by the urban architectural canon, such as that of Quilombo Kalunga, the largest in the country, which is located 250 km from Brasília.

With multiple formats, the works that fill the gallery range from the projection of an audiovisual work by filmmaker Juliana Vicente and created in conjunction with the curatorship, commissioned for the occasion, to a selection of archive photographs, organized by researcher Ana Flávia Magalhães Pinto , to the ethno-historical map of Brazil by Curt Nimuendajú and the Brasília Quilombola map. The second gallery, called “ Places of Origin, Archaeologies of the Future ,” welcomes visitors with the projection of two videos by Ayrson Heráclito – The Shaking of the Casa da Torre and The Shaking of the Maison des Esclaves in Gorée, both from 2015 – and focuses on the memories and archaeology of ancestry . Occupied by socio-spatial projects and practices of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian knowledge about land and territory, the curatorship is based on six essential references : Casa da Tia Ciata, in the urban context of Pequena África in Rio de Janeiro; Tava, as the Guarani call the ruins of the Jesuit missions in Rio Grande do Sul; the ethnogeographic complex of terreiros in Salvador; the Agroforestry Systems of the Rio Negro in the Amazon; and the Iauaretê Waterfall of the Tukano, Aruak and Maku. The exhibition demonstrates what several scientific studies have proven: that indigenous and quilombola lands are the best preserved territories in Brazil . Their practices, technologies and customs linked to land management and production, like other ways of making and understanding architecture, are located on the land, are equally universal and carry within themselves ancestral knowledge to resignify the present and design other futures . For José Olympio da Veiga Pereira , president of the São Paulo Biennial Foundation: “The International Architecture Exhibition of the Biennale di Venezia is a privileged space for the debate of the most urgent issues in architecture and urbanism , a field that, ultimately, reflects on our life dynamics based on the use and sharing of common spaces, as a society. At a time of great challenges facing humanity, holding the exhibition proposed by architects Gabriela de Matos and Paulo Tavares is a way of giving visibility to research and practices that can contribute to the collective elaboration of our future ”.