(RE)INVENTION, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025

The São Paulo Biennale Foundation has announced the title and concept of Brazil’s proposal for the 19th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia: (RE)INVENTION, an exhibition that will occupy the Brazilian Pavilion from May 10 to November 23, 2025, in collaboration with the Brazilian Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

“(RE)INVENTION proposes an understanding of infrastructure that goes beyond its physical and utilitarian dimension, taking into account also its symbolic and social character. In our curation, we emphasize design strategies that allow multiple uses and adaptation to context, seeking to transcend the analysis of specific cases to reflect on solutions applicable to different realities.”

Eder Alencar, curator of (RE)INVENTION.

The project, curated by architects Luciana Saboia, Matheus Seco and Eder Alencar, from the Plano Coletivo group, is presented in two acts and constructs a narrative that spans time and territory. In the first act, the exhibition shows how, more than 10,000 years ago, indigenous peoples shaped the landscapes that surrounded them, creating sophisticated infrastructures that integrated technical knowledge and strategies for adapting to the environment.

Geoglyphs found in the state of Acre, Brazil, 2022, Diego Gurgel,Photograph courtesy of the photographer.

Starting from a reflection on the recent archaeological discovery of ancestral infrastructures in the Amazon, the exhibition considers the contradictions and questions the socio-environmental conditions of the contemporary city.

"Today we know that the ancestral peoples of the Amazon were organized in much larger populations than previously thought. The forests of the region are largely the direct result of human action, the fruit of a balanced occupation and careful management of vegetation, in contrast to the model that prevails in the Amazon today, which often reduces the landscape to a stage of devastation".

Matheus Seco, curator of (RE)INVENTION.

For Matheus Seco, the word «balance» is fundamental to understanding the overall meaning of the curatorial proposal.

The second act shifts the focus to contemporary Brazil, exploring the nuances of the relationship between architecture and infrastructure, as well as the possibilities of redefining the city through a curatorship of architectural research, processes and practices. In this way, the focus is on the possibility of recognizing and valuing design strategies and operations that are ‘encapsulated’ in the existing, inherited and appropriated ingenious production.

Dryland Garden, Instituto Central de Ciências, Universidade de Brasília, Brazil, 2023, Julio Pastore, Photograph courtesy of the photographer.

The Platform-Garden, one of the strategies of the exhibition, shows how a linear structure with a garden throughout its entire length, which previously required constant irrigation, has been replaced by native species or species adapted to the temporality of central Brazil. The naturalistic garden of flowers, herbs and savannah plants is born, grows, blooms and dries according to the seasonality of the Central Plateau biome on a large existing platform with a pre-stressed and prefabricated concrete structure. Following this logic, other strategies are revealed as inventive design actions that appropriate the existing, create identities and make the built space an opportunity to reinvent itself as a reality.

The exhibition space was designed by the curatorial team with minimal elements, using the structure of the Brazilian Pavilion as a support to reconfigure its internal spaces. In the first room, all the elements of the installation rest on the floor. In the second room, the installation is built from the balance of CLT panels, stones used as counterweights and steel cables that form a system that remains suspended and stable when subjected to the forces of action and reaction. In this way, the materials of the installation can be reassembled or recycled in new ways after the exhibition.

According to Luciana Saboia, it is important to discuss architecture from the understanding and appreciation of natural phenomena and social appropriation.

"It is about mapping actions that build our cultural heritage. Just as these native populations developed sophisticated techniques of occupation and management of the territory, the exhibition seeks to establish a link between tradition and invention, using elements that dialogue with the environment and propose a sustainable cycle of construction and reuse".

Luciana Saboia, curator for (RE)INVENTION.

“Garden Platform” - Jardim de Sequeiro - ICC, conceived by Julio Pastore and Oscar Niemeyer, 2021, Joana França, Photograph courtesy of the photographer.

Andrea Pinheiro, president of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, highlights that the curatorial concept and architectural design of Saboia, Seco and Alencar provide a key reflection on the climate emergency and the need to rethink our relationship with the environment.

"(RE)INVENTION invites us to learn from ancestral practices and to explore the symbiosis between human beings, the earth and nature as a path towards a more sustainable future. Brazil's participation in the Venice Biennale, the result of a fruitful collaboration with the federal government, highlights the importance of strategies that reconcile a true commitment to the planet".

Andrea Pinheiro, president of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.

The exhibition is in direct dialogue with the general theme of this edition, entitled Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective., a proposal by Italian curator Carlo Ratti, invites participating countries to reflect on the intersection between natural and artificial intelligence, understanding these two axes as part of an expanded sphere that integrates art, engineering, biology, data science, social and political sciences, planetary systems science and other disciplines, linking each of them to the materiality of urban space. The Brazilian proposal responds to this provocation by examining how different forms of knowledge, both ancestral and contemporary, shape territories and urban dynamics.