Brasília, enfim
Brasília, at Last
The genesis of the series Brasília, Enfim (Brasília, at Last) traces back to the artist's childhood in Paraíba, when his imagination of the Federal Capital first began to take shape through his mother’s narratives. Returning from a trip to Brasília in the 1970s, she described it to her children as a fabulous, utopian city—the prevailing view held by the rest of Brazil at the time. Decades later, the children moved to the capital: the eldest to teach Artificial Intelligence and the artist to pursue graduate studies in Art and Technology, both at the University of Brasília (UnB). Within this context, his interest in AI emerged, alongside the idea of creating a tool capable of materializing his mother’s stories—accounts that, over time, had already been blended and expanded by a child's imagination.
This led to the exhibition Brasília, Enfim, inaugurated on April 21, 2023, in celebration of the city's 63rd anniversary. It was the first exhibition in Brazil to extensively employ Generative Artificial Intelligence. The show featured over 300 works distributed across the four museums of the Praça dos Três Poderes, engaging in a dialogue with the historical archives of these spaces to create a hybrid territory between the documentary and the fictional. By displaying images that simulate belonging to a supposed public archive within a historical site, the viewer is invited to imagine alternative and utopian versions of Brasília. However, beyond offering a new interpretation of the capital’s construction, its geography, and its myths, the exhibition also marked the reopening of these museums to the public following the destruction caused by the January 8, 2023 attacks.
Catálogos da Exposição
Three Powers Plaza
The exhibition simultaneously occupied the four museums of the CCPP
Lúcio Costa Space Takeover
Reimagining the capital's urban planning
A home for the City Model and the memory of Brasília’s urban planning—featuring photographs and texts on Lúcio Costa’s vision for the capital—this space was taken over to reimagine the city's design. The exhibition fused official history with fictional facts created by the artist. This occupation projects a speculative urbanism where the original plan coexists with an invented cartography, blurring the boundaries between historical document and fabulation.
Upon entering the Lúcio Costa Space, the visitor encounters a set of photographs and texts that rewrite the genesis of Brasília’s planning. The central core recounts a fictional episode in which Lúcio Costa, before drafting the capital, visits the Quilombo Mesquita and is initiated into the bone oracle by the matriarch Yetunde Adebayo. The exhibition proposes that the city’s urban design—its wings, axes, and superblocks—was shaped by the casting of these ancestral bones upon the ground. The works document this process, displaying everything from the urban planner’s apprenticeship under the quilombola leader to the transfiguration of the bone pieces into avenues and sectors. It suggests that the city’s foundations rest upon an ancient magic and that, if we were to dig into the red earth, we would still find the bones that defined the capital’s destiny.
Oscar Niemeyer Space Takeover
Fictionalizing the built landscape
Dedicated to the architect who defined the capital's landscape, this space hosted the core of the exhibition focused on architecture and built environments. The works engage in a direct dialogue with Niemeyer’s formal vocabulary, exploring the geometry and curves that shaped the city’s visual identity. The gallery is transformed into a critical mirror where the modernist legacy is re-examined and expanded through the artist's visual poetics.
This space hosts the core of the exhibition that expands modernism into a speculative architecture. The visitor encounters fictional projects that dialogue with the city’s visual syntax, such as the City of the Dead (Cidade dos Mortos)—a labyrinthine concrete necropolis in the West Wind Sector—and the Wind Observatory (Observatório dos Ventos), a circular building with spiral ramps that converts air currents into a sonic experience. The architectural narrative also includes geological monumentality, presenting the Giant Crystals—ten-meter quartz formations discovered during the 1957 excavations and preserved in the Crystal Plaza. In this section, the exhibition projects a Brasília where concrete and nature merge to create new monuments to memory, death, and the invisible forces of the Central Plateau (Planalto).
Pantheon of Fatherland and Freedom Takeover
The history of heroes
The Pantheon housed a series of silenced construction stories, such as the founding of the first women's construction cooperative in the capital, a pioneering group that challenged male hegemony on building sites to erect edifices and monuments. The occupation also documents the First General Strike, an uprising fueled by Paulo Freire’s classes in the struggle for labor rights, and reveals the Memorial dos Candangos—a network of four secret monuments built clandestinely by the workers. This section further displays images of various candangos, including João and Pedro, two men kissing, asserting affection and diversity as the city’s hidden foundations.
A civic temple erected to consecrate national heroes, the Pantheon of Fatherland and Freedom was re-signified in this occupation to house the memory of the candangos (the pioneer workers). The exhibition subverts the monument's hierarchy by introducing representations of the laborers into this sanctuary, elevating the anonymous bodies that built the capital to the status of heroes. The occupation performs an act of historical reparation, asserting the worker as the true protagonist of Brasília’s epic.
Brasília Historical Museum Takeover
Paulo Freire and the Reading Sites
The takeover presents the documentation of a fictional literacy program created by Paulo Freire within the construction sites, designed to teach the candangos how to read and write. The visitor follows the rise of these "Reading Sites" (Canteiros de Leitura) as spaces of emancipation, leading to the creation of the magazine Utupya—a publication developed by the workers themselves as a critical forum on Brasília’s urbanization—and the subsequent violent dismantling of the sites by repressive forces. The narrative culminates in the Civic Parade, an act in which the workers create garments made from the pages of books torn by the authorities and march in a procession, celebrating their erased legacy and claiming, through their festive presence, the right to also engrave their stories in stone.
The Brasília Historical Museum tells the story of the capital’s construction through texts engraved upon its marble walls. In dialogue with the textual nature of this collection, the exhibition occupied the space with a segment dedicated to the fictionalized establishment of the "Reading Sites" by Paulo Freire during the city’s construction. The series confronts the petrified narrative of official history with the emancipatory dimension of literacy, articulating the liberation of the candangos through the power of the word.
