Taking into account the change of pace and the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic – in operational, sensitive and relational terms -, in 2022 we will deepen the program’s ongoing investigation on the use that the anthropologists Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser make of the term PLURIVERSE, initiated in 2021. In their studies, the researchers advocate for “a world in which many worlds fit”, from a methodology capable of embracing ecologies and practices transversal to heterogeneous universes, human and other-than-human.

In this sense, Paulo Nazareth’s exhibition Vuadora, which opens the year occupying Pivô’s two exhibition spaces, curated by Fernanda Brenner and Diane Lima, works as a conductor for the individual and collective projects that follow it. In his work, Nazareth questions what shapes ideas of origin, identity, and belonging, and deliberately complicates the separation between what is “from within” and what is “from outside,” revealing the structuring violence of what the Western world  perceives as reality.

Initially scheduled for last year, artist Ana Vaz’s exhibition was one of those projects transformed by the temporal contingencies and is now rescheduled to 2022. Originally from Brasília, living between Lisbon and Paris, Vaz was in Brazil searching for the argument and the first shoots argument of a new audiovisual work when she was prevented from going back to Europe. While visiting Brasília, where part of her family lives, the artist made various visits to the zoo. What was initially a source of curiosity turned out to be the primary setting for her upcoming movie, in which she gets closer to the captive non-human individuals living in adverse conditions. In ‘É noite na América’, a video commissioned by Pivô, we follow the story and the daily life of Macau, a giant otter born in Dortmund, Germany and transferred to Brasilia’s zoo. In the film, we are led, in an experimental and non-linear approach to the moving image, to reflect the visible and subjective effects of colonialism on different bodies, territories and species.

Parallel to Ana Vaz’s solo show, Pivô, in partnership with KADIST, receives a group exhibition curated by Yina Jiménez Suriel. Combining works from the institution’s collection with the production of young Brazilian and Caribbean artists, the main theme of the show is the emancipatory aesthetic tools created by different Cimarrona communities around the world, and the way in which these tools enable the generation of different imaginations and political horizons for the management of power from non-binary or “stable” perspectives.

Pivô’s 2022 program insists on the idea that possible answers to the state of crisis in which we find ourselves depend above all on a revision of the very premises of the global present; so that the model established by colonialist modernity be one among many possible worlds, and no longer the structure that invalidates them.