This conversation will bring iconoclastic Indigenous author, philosopher, and activist Ailton Krenak’s philosophical framework for a global environmental consciousness in dialogue with architect, educator, and author Paulo Tavares’s concept of reparation architecture. Krenak’s proposal requires that humans abandon our desperate attempts to sustain a caustic system and its associated lifestyles of compulsory making, and instead face the finiteness both of the Earth’s resources and of our selves. The two will explore futures for the built environment grounded in the collective realization that we are not indebted to nature, but inextricably one with it.

Ailton Krenak

Paulo Tavares

Teat(r)o de Mutirão is a performative-ritual that activates the architectural and symbolic spaces of Teat(r)o Oficina through a choral action: a gathering of voices, gestures, and presences that together embody the vital points of the Terreyro Eletrôniko. The performance crosses from street to park inviting the public to journey along in an open ritual where the technologies of the theatre are experimented with and the space is nourished through songs, shared meals, resistance, and celebration. Drawing on songs from the theatre’s repertoire of the past sixty-seven years, each is chosen to activate both pre-existing and newly created infrastructures in and around the building.

Associação Teat(r)o Oficina Uzyna Uzona

Paulo Tavares and historian Ana Flávia Magalhães Pinto come together to discuss possibilities for reparation architecture—a form of engagement in which action is predicated on repair, recovery, and restoration—in the context of collective memory, heritage, and the archive. The conversation will consider how spatial and built environment practices can be situated historically, socially, and culturally in ways that proactively reveal and redress the injustices that have shaped the worlds we inhabit, and our ongoing relationship to the environment.

Ana Flávia Magalhães Pinto

Paulo Tavares

Seminal poet, author, and theorist Leda Maria Martins will initiate the day with a keynote exploring notions of spatiality, and how alternative temporalities might inform how we approach spatial practices. This perspective is informed by Martins’s lifelong inquiry into spiral time and the potential of ancestral temporalities to resist colonial infrastructures of chronology.

Leda Maria Martins

What temporalities are we capable of imagining beyond linear and future-oriented notions of sequencing? This roundtable will reflect on the transformative potentials of expanded perspectives on time. The speakers will consider the ethical, cultural, and embodied dimensions of space, architecture, and communal engagement, offering approaches that center ancestrality, memory, ritual, and relationality.

Leda Maria Martins

Mãe Celina de Xangô

Rose Afefé

Maya Quilolo

Gabriela de Matos

Audrey Carolini