Brazil Pavilion at Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 – Photos by Rafa Jacinto/Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.

Architecture – Earth, Terra in Portuguese, is the key concept and primal matter of the Brazil Pavilion’s exhibition at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale. Visitors can explore the country’s unrepresented ancestral architecture of indigenous communities, its present challenges, and visions for a truly sustainable and inclusive future. 

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Brought forward by the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, the pavilion is filled with earth, putting the public in direct contact with the tradition of Indigenous territories, Quilombola dwellings, and candomblé ceremonies. A series of plinths were made from rammed earth to display the exhibits.

“Our curatorial proposal is based on thinking of Brazil as earth.” Says the young curators Gabriela de Matos and Paulo Tavares. “Earth as soil, fertiliser, ground, and territory. But also the earth in its global and cosmic sense, as a planet and common house of all life, human and non-human. Earth as memory, as well 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.”

Terra is divided into two main sections. De-colonizing the canon narrates an alternative perspective on Brasília, the capital of Brazil, which was built in the middle of nowhere according to Western Modernist aesthetics, and by removing its original indigenous and Quilombola inhabitants during the colonial period.

“We aimed 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.”

Titled Places of Origin, Archaeologies of the Future, the second section of the Terra exhibition presents socio-spatial projects and practices of Indigenous and Afro-Brazilan knowledge about land and territory. It demonstrates what several scientific studies prove: that Indigenous and Quilombola lands are the best-preserved territories in Brazil, pointing towards a post-climate change future where “de-colonization” and “decarbonization” walk hand in hand.

All photos by Rafa Jacinto – Fundação Bienal de São Paulo.