"Our curatorial proposal is based on thinking of Brazil as Terra/Earth. Earth as soil, fertiliser, ground and territory. But also the earth in its global and cosmic sense, as a planet and the 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"
Gabriela de Matos and Paulo Tavares
The first gallery of the modernist pavilion has been named De-colonizing the Canon by the curators, 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.
In a variety of formats, the works that fill the gallery range from the projection of an audiovisual work by the filmmaker Juliana Vicente, created in conjunction with the curatorship and commissioned for the occasion, to a selection of archive photographs, compiled by the historian Ana Flávia Magalhães Pinto, to the ethnohistorical map of Brazil by Curt Nimuendajú and the “Brasília Quilombola map”, the latter also commissioned for the occasion.
Maloca Tukano, in Iauaretê, Amazonas, Brazil, 2005. Photograph by Vincent Carelli/Video in the Villages.
The second gallery, named Places of Origin, Archaeologies of the Future, welcomes us with the screening of the two supports video installation by Ayrson Heráclito – The Shaking of the Casa da Torre and 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 ethnographic 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.
The exhibition demonstrates what several scientific studies prove: that Indigenous and Quilombola lands are the best-preserved territories in Brazil, and in that way point towards a post-climate change future that “decolonization” and “decarbonization” walk hand in hand. Their practices, technologies and customs linked to land management and production, like other ways of doing and understanding architecture, are located in the earth, are equally universal and carry within themselves the ancestral knowledge to re-signify the present and design other planetary futures, for both human and nonhuman communities alike.
