brazil pavilion receives the golden lion at the 2023 venice architecture biennale

THE golden lion for best national participation goes TO BRAZIL

The Brazil Pavilion has won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale with ‘Terra’ (Earth), curated by the architects Gabriela de Matos and Paulo Tavares. The news were announced today, May 20, 2023, during the Awards Ceremony of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition that took place at Ca’ Giustinian, Venice. The international jury, composed of Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli (president, Italy), Nora Akawi (Palestine), Thelma Golden (US), Tau Tavengwa (Zimbabwe), and Izabela Wieczorek (Poland), awarded the Brazilian pavilion ‘for a research exhibition and architectural intervention that center the philosophies and imaginaries of indigenous and black population towards modes of reparation.’ The jury is appointed by the Board of Directors of La Biennale di Venezia upon recommendation by Lesley Lokko, the Curator of the 18th Exhibition titled The Laboratory of the Future. 

view of the exhibition Terra, Brazilian participation at the 18. International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia | Photos: Rafa Jacinto / Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

‘TERRA’ pavilion AT THE 2023 VENICE ARCHITECTURE BIENNALE

Through ‘Terra’, curators Gabriela de Matos and Paulo Tavares propose to rethink the past in order to design possible futures, bringing to the fore actors forgotten by the architectural canons. ‘Our curatorial proposal is based on thinking of Brazil as earth. Earth as soil, fertiliser, ground and territory. But also earth in its global and cosmic sense, as planet and common house of all life, human and non-human. Earth as memory, and also as future, looking at the past and at heritage to expand the field of architecture in the face of the most pressing contemporary urban, territorial and environmental issues,’ say the curators. Located in the Venice Biennale’s Giardini venue, the pavilion includes exhibitors such as Mbya-Guarani Indigenous people, Tukano, Arawak and Maku Indigenous peoples, Alaká Weavers (Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá), Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká (Casa Branca do Engenho Velho), Ana Flávia Magalhães Pinto; Ayrson Heráclito, Day Rodrigues with the collaboration of Vilma Patrícia Santana Silva (Grupo Etnicidades FAU-UFBA), Fissura collective, Juliana Vicente, Thierry Oussou and Vídeo nas Aldeias.

‘We are very happy to have received this opportunity, inspired by Lesley Lokko, to present Brazil as a diasporic territory, with great ancestral contributions by the Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous communities,’ Gabriela de Matos and Paulo Tavares noted upon receiving the Golden Lion news. ‘We believe that those are the technologies that must form part of the solutions to create a different and more egalitarian future for humanity and to restore and protect our natural world.’

THE TWO GALLERIES OF THE BRAZILIAN PAVILION

‘Terra’ places land at the center of the debate both as a poetic and as a concrete element in the exhibition space. The entire space is filled with earth, putting the public in direct contact with the tradition of Indigenous territories, Quilombola dwellings, and candomblé ceremonies. The first gallery of the modernist pavilion has been named ‘De-colonizing the canon’, questioning the imaginary surrounding the version that Brasília, the capital of Brazil, was built in the middle of nowhere, given that its Indigenous and Quilombola inhabitants had been removed from the region in the colonial period, and were finally pushed to the fringes with the imposition of the modernist city. The aim is thus to show an image of a more complex, diverse and plural territory, architecture and heritage of national formation and modernity in Brazil, presenting other narratives through architecture, landscape and heritage neglected by the architectural canon.

The second gallery of the pavilion, named ‘Places of Origin, Archaeologies of the Future’, welcomes visitors with the screening of the video by Ayrson Heráclito – The Shaking of the Casa da Torre and The Shaking of the Maison des Esclaves in Gorée, from 2015 – and turns to memories and the archaeology of ancestrality. Occupied by socio-spatial projects and practices of Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian knowledge about land and territory, the curatorship brings forth five essential memorial heritages of reference: The Casa da Tia Ciata, in the urban context of Pequena África in Rio de Janeiro; the Tava, as the Guarani call the ruins of the Jesuit missions in Rio Grande do Sul; the ethnogeographic complex of terreiros in Salvador; the Indigenous Agroforestry Systems of the Rio Negro in the Amazon; and the Iauaretê waterfall of the Tukano, Arawak and Maku.

curators Gabriela de Matos and Paulo Tavares

project info:

name: Terra

commissioner: José Olympio da Veiga Pereira, president of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo

curators: Gabriela de Matos and Paulo Tavares

exhibitors: Ana Flávia Magalhães Pinto, Ayrson Heráclito, Day Rodrigues with the collaboration of Vilma Patrícia Santana Silva, Fissura collective, Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká (Casa Branca do Engenho Velho), Juliana Vicente, Mbya-Guarani IndigenousPeople, Tukano, Arawak and Maku Indigenous Peoples, Tecelãs do Alaká (Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá), Thierry Oussou, Vídeo nas Aldeias

venue: Giardini, Venice