The São Paulo Biennial Foundation announces the curatorship of the Brazilian Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. Gabriela de Matos and Paulo Tavares, both architects and researchers with a cross-cutting approach that embraces race, gender, pedagogy, and visual cultures, are organizing the exhibition, which opens May 20, 2023.
The Brazilian representation, with a project entitled Earth, will dialogue with the theme of this edition of the Venice Biennale, The Laboratory of the Future, proposed by the Ghanaian-Scottish architect, scholar and novelist Lesley Lokko, curator of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition.
Gabriela de Matos and Paulo Tavares responded to the provocation by proposing an exhibition that starts from the earth as the founding motif of the conceptions, imaginaries and narratives of national formation.
Representations of nationality were structured by idealized and racialized visions of tropical nature… The land is also a founding motif in the cosmologies, philosophies and narratives of the indigenous and Afro-Brazilian populations that make up most of the national cultural matrix. But in this approach, the concept of land appears in another form, as an ancestry that takes us back to cultural geographies deeper and beyond Brazil. It points to other senses of land and territory – such as belonging, cultivation, law, reparation and other imaginaries of Brazil… Our curatorial proposal is based on these reflections and their contemporary relevance for thinking about the country as earth. Earth as in land, soil, swidden, territory, and yard. But also earth in its global and cosmic sense, as a planet and common home of all life, human and non-human. — Gabriela de Matos and Paulo Tavares
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 place for debating the most urgent issues in architecture and urban planning, fields that, ultimately, reflect on our life dynamics from the use and sharing of common spaces, as a society. At a time of challenges faced by humanity, holding the exhibition proposed by young 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.”
Gabriela de Matos is an Afro-Brazilian architect and urban planner. Born in the Rio Doce Valley in Minas Gerais, she creates multidisciplinary projects to promote and highlight Brazilian architectural and urban culture from the lens of race and gender. She graduated from the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo at PUC-MG in 2010, and in 2016 she specialized in sustainability and management of the built environment at UFMG. Master's student at Diversitas – Center for the Study of Diversities, Intolerances and Conflicts at the Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH) at USP, currently teaches undergraduate courses in architecture and urbanism at Escola da Cidade. She is CEO of Estúdio de Arquitetura – Gabriela de Matos, created in 2014, and vice president of the Institute of Architects of Brazil in the department of São Paulo. She is the founder of the project Arquitetas Negras, which maps the production of black female architects in Brazil. Researches architecture produced in Africa and its diaspora with a focus on Brazil and proposes actions that promote the debate of gender and race in architecture, giving visibility to the issue. She signs the editorial of the book Arquitetas Negras vol.1, which integrates important collections such as the Washington Library (United States) and won the IAB-SP Award in the Best Architecture Publications category. She was a collaborator of the Rebel Architette collective in 2019 (Italy). She participated as a speaker at the 2021 UIA – International Union of Architects. Also in 2021, at the CASACOR show, she signed the Espaço Agô. Besides being awarded Architect of the Year 2020 by IAB-RJ, she was a juror for the 2022 Ibero-American Architecture Biennale.
Paulo Tavares explores the interfaces between architecture, visual cultures, curatorship, theory and advocacy. By using multiple media and methods, his work opens up a collaborative arena focused on environmental justice and counter-hegemonic narratives in architecture. His projects and texts have been featured in several national and international exhibitions and publications, including Harvard Design Magazine, The Architectural Review, Oslo Architecture Triennial, Istanbul Design Biennale, and the 32nd São Paulo Biennial – Incerteza Viva. Tavares was co-curator of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennale (USA) and is currently curator for the second edition of the 2023 Sharjah Architecture Triennale (UAE). He was curator of the Acts of Repair projects (Preston Thomas Memorial Symposium, Cornell University (USA), and Climate Emergency > Emergence, at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) in Lisbon (Portugal). Tavares is the author of several texts and books that question the colonial legacies of modernity, including Forest Law/Selva Jurídica (2014), Des-Habitat (2019), Memória da Terra (2019), Lúcio Costa era Racista? (2020), and Derechos No-humanos (2022).
Source: Fundação Bienal.
