Symposium: arquiteturas do bem-estar planetário

re:arc institute's first symposium in São Paulo, arquiteturas do bem-estar planetário, is an experiential inquiry into the values, practices, and belief systems that express and protect the interconnectedness of all life. Unfolding in three acts across two days, the program will hold considerations of spatial practice through the lenses of reparation and involvement, as well as reorientating the temporality through which we perceive and create the built environment. 

Speakers, presenters, and performers will offer embodied knowledges of collectivity, ecology, territory, design, and architecture. Their perspectives will engage, and be enhanced by, Teat(r)o Oficina’s deep relationship to the intersections of performance and revolutionary imagination.

Act I, Repair, will initiate our program on the evening of 19 September with a conversation bringing Ailton Krenak’s philosophical framework for a global environmental consciousness in dialogue with Paulo Tavares’s concept of reparation architecture. Afterwards, the theater’s company, Associação Teat(r)o Oficina Uzyna Uzona, will present Teat(r)o de Mutirão, a performative-ritual that activates the architectural and symbolic spaces of Teat(r)o Oficina. The evening will conclude as Tavares returns to the stage, this time with historian Ana Flávia Magalhães Pinto, to discuss possibilities for reparation architecture in the context of collective memory, heritage, and the archive.

Act II, Engage, will begin the morning of 20 September with a keynote by poet, author, and theorist Leda Maria Martins. She will explore how alternative temporalities might inform how we approach spatial practices. Later, a roundtable discussion with Martins, Mãe Celina de Xangô, Rose Afefé, and Maya Quilolo, moderated by Gabriela de Matos and Audrey Carolini of Cambará Instituto, will reflect on the transformative potentials of expanded perspectives on time.

Act III, Involvement, will open the afternoon of 20 September with a performance from renowned Recife-born jazz pianist Amaro Freitas. His performance will precede a roundtable conversation, exploring how architecture can be a device for involvement with the landscape, between Tainá de Paula, Jerá Guarani, and Maria Alice Pereira da Silva, moderated by Marcella Arruda. Then, four practices from Brazil (Sem Muros, Palmares Laboratório-Ação, RUÍNA Arquitetura, and Grupo ][ Fresta) will present on the methodologies and values of their own work.

Feminist author, theorist, and curator Joice Berth will close Act III and conclude the entire program by repositioning her framing of empowerment (empoderamento) as a necessarily collective transformation.

Practical information
The entire program will take place in São Paulo, Brazil, from September 19–20, 2025. Sessions will be facilitated in English and Portuguese with respective live translations. Each Act is ticketed separately. Visit the event website for registration and more information. 

Act I, September 19, 5–11pm / Act II, September 20, 10am–2pm / Act III, September 20, 4–8pm.

Previous symposia have come together in Bogotá (CO) and London (UK). These site-specific live events bring together intercultural and interdisciplinary points of view intended to expand the discourse and praxis through the concept of architectures of planetary well-being, as well as to support open-mindedness and mutual learning.