May 10–November 23, 2025
The Fundação Bienal de São Paulo presents Brazil's participation in the 19th International Architecture Exhibition—The Venice Biennale, with (RE)INVENTION, which occupies the Brazilian Pavilion from May 10 to November 23, 2025, in partnership with the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Brazil.
Curated by the architects Luciana Saboia, Eder Alencar and Matheus Seco, of the Plano Coletivo group, the project explores the dynamic relationship between nature, infrastructure, and architectural practice, addressing the
social environmental urgencies of contemporary urban life.
Represented in two acts, (RE)INVENTION builds a narrative that crosses times and territories. In the first act, the exhibition shows how, more than 10,000 years ago, Indigenous peoples shaped the landscapes around them, creating sophisticated infrastructures that integrated technical knowledge and strategies for adapting to the environment.
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 re-signifying the city through a curation 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 ingenious existing production, inherited, and appropriated.
The Garden-Platform, one of the strategies in the exhibition, shows how a linear structure with a garden along its entire length, which previously required constant irrigation, has been replaced with species that are native or adapted to the temporality of Central Brazil. The naturalistic garden of flowers, grasses, and savanna plants is born, grows, blooms, and dries according to the seasonality of the Central Plateau biome on a large existing platform with a precast, prestressed concrete structure. Following this logic, other strategies are disclosed as inventive design actions that appropriate the existing, create identities, and make the built space an opportunity to reinvent itself as 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 constructed from the balance of wood 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.
The exhibition inaugurates another achievement in the Brazil Pavilion itself, which now features a new configuration thanks to the recovery of the building’s original project, with the support of Arquitetos Associados. Designed by Giancarlo Palanti, Henrique Mindlin and Walmyr Lima Amaral, the pavilion has been home to the latest Brazilian art and architecture since 1964, and its recovery underscores the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo’s vocation to preserve and maintain Brazil’s cultural and architectural heritage, as has been the case with the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion in São Paulo for almost seventy years.
The Fundação Bienal de São Paulo would like to thank its main sponsors: Itaú, Bloomberg, Bradesco, Petrobras, Instituto Cultural Vale, Citi and Vivo.
About Plano Coletivo
Plano Coletivo is a group of architects, teachers, and researchers with diverse interests and backgrounds who freely collaborate around two common goals: to discuss urban territory as a critical narrative and to reflect on architecture as a socio-environmental action.
(RE)INVENTION
Commissioner: Andrea Pinheiro, President of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo / Curators: Luciana Saboia, Eder Alencar and Matheus Seco [Plano Coletivo] / Collaborators: André Velloso, Carolina Pescatori, Cauê Capillé, Daniel Mangabeira, Guilherme Lassance, Henrique Coutinho, Sérgio Marques [Plano Coletivo]
Press contact
Fernando Pereira: fernando.pereira@bienal.org.br / Kitty Malton: kitty@sam-talbot.com / Maja Renfer: maja.renfer@sam-talbot.com.
