BRAZIL AT THE 2025 VENICE ARCHITECTURE BIENNALE: (RE)INVENTION FROM THE AMAZON
Until November 23, 2025, the Brazil Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale will present (RE)INVENTION, a project curated by Luciana Saboia, Matheus Seco, and Eder Alencar, members of the Plano Coletivo collective.
The proposal is based on a reflection on recent archaeological discoveries in the Amazon, which reveal sophisticated infrastructures developed by indigenous peoples over 10,000 years ago. Using this evidence, the exhibition seeks to rethink the socio-environmental conditions of the contemporary city.
Divided into two acts, (RE)INVENTION traces a path between past and present. The first act rescues the occupation and territorial management strategies of Amazonian indigenous civilizations, emphasizing their balanced relationship with the environment. “The word ‘balance’ is key to understanding the proposal,” notes Seco. “The Amazon forests, far from being virgin, are in many cases the result of conscious and sustainable human occupation.”
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Dryland Garden, Instituto Central de Ciências, Universidade de Brasília, Brazil, 2023, Julio Pastore / © courtesy of the photographer (Bienal Br)
The second act shifts the focus to present-day Brazil to explore how certain contemporary architectural practices can reinterpret and re-signify the use of infrastructure. An example is the Garden-Platform, a preexisting concrete structure transformed with native species adapted to the seasonality of the Cerrado. The proposal highlights interventions that, instead of destroying or replacing, appropriate what already exists to reinvent the built environment.
From a spatial perspective, the exhibition also engages with this logic: the pavilion’s first room uses elements placed directly on the ground, while the second is built with CLT panels, stones, and steel cables in balance, allowing for the disassembly and reuse of materials.
For Luciana Saboia, architecture must start from an understanding of natural phenomena and their social appropriation. “Just as indigenous peoples developed complex techniques to manage their environment, we seek to connect tradition and invention through a sustainable perspective.”
(RE)INVENTION responds to the main theme of this edition of the Biennale, Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective., proposed by Italian curator Carlo Ratti. Within this framework, the Brazilian proposal offers a critical and poetic view on how different kinds of knowledge—both ancestral and contemporary—can be combined to build more balanced territories.
*Cover image: Geoglyphs found in the state of Acre, Brazil, 2022 - Diego Gurgel / © courtesy of the photographer (Bienal Br).
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