Ouverture

Picture this: Adriano Costa wheeling suitcase after suitcase into Pivô, like some nomad who’s been collecting fragments of the world for thirty years and has finally found the right stage to unpack them all. Born in São Paulo in 1975, Costa emerged from the city’s underground dance floors and fashion catwalks in the early 2000s, when contemporary art was less of a ghetto and creatives mingled freely in a pre-social media world. He developed an intuition that the debris of nightlife and contemporary culture—broken bottles, discarded flyers, the detritus of collective euphoria—contained stories worth telling.

His multilayered practice spans virtually every medium: fashion design to film, bronze casts that immortalize the ephemeral to paintings that capture the poetry of decay. This exhibition, marking his 50th birthday, becomes both celebration and reckoning—a moment to witness how thirty years of subversive interventions have crystallized into a coherent artistic philosophy.

Scene: Within Niemeyer’s serpentine concrete monument—that modernist dream of a collective utopia—Costa stages a total reorganization of meaning, transforming familiar space into something entirely unprecedented. COPAN emerges as more than a container—it becomes Costa’s primary collaborator. The undulating concrete curves provide scenography for a three-decade dialogue between architectural optimism and material skepticism, between modernist utopia and environmental catastrophe, between the dream of the future and the archaeology of the present.

Stage Direction: Each piece emerging from traveling containers undergoes what could only be described as a casting process, with works suddenly finding themselves auditioning for roles they never knew existed.

The title “We Won’t Be Disappointed” serves as both a promise and a manifesto, echoing his philosophy of finding beauty precisely in moments of breakdown and transformation. In his practice, disappointment is never an endpoint but a fertile starting point for new possibilities of meaning. This exhibition embodies that principle on an architectural scale, turning potential disillusion into generative force.

Atto Primo: Breakdown as Beginning

Costa once confessed his dream was to direct an opera. Perhaps he didn’t realize he had been composing one all along—not with voices and orchestras, but through what psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva understood as melancholia’s creative potential. For Kristeva, melancholia isn’t just sadness—it’s what happens when our standard meaning-making systems start to wobble, and in that wobbling, new forms of significance emerge.

Costa’s practice thrives exactly here, in the gap between what things are supposed to mean and what they actually do when let loose in the world. Long before the pandemic made everyone an expert in systemic breakdown, he was already operating in this space where the conventional symbolic order gets deliciously scrambled. His objects become what Kristeva might call “abjects”—things that refuse to stay in their proper categories, that make us slightly uncomfortable precisely because they open up new possibilities for meaning. They exist in the sweet spot between their original economic lives and their new artistic afterlives, generating significance through the very failure of conventional language to contain them.

His titles operate like TikTok algorithms—condensing cultural complexity into seductive fragments that hook you before you fully understand what you’re consuming. Primeiro Cenário para Il Castrato Illuminati – An Opera About The Kardashian Family or The People and the Buttons Pressed By Them function as Roman Jakobson’s poetic function in overdrive. Where Jakobson argued that poetic language prioritizes the message itself over pure communication—making words perform rather than just inform—Costa’s titles become viral equations that multiply meaning through unexpected collisions. They’re less interested in describing what you’re about to see than in rewiring how you might think about seeing itself.

This linguistic playfulness extends into the physical realm. Where Fashion Seats presents a bone adorned with leftover metal letters spelling RITZ—the luxury hotel name decomposing into archaeological fragments, making the poetic function visible as the very material breakdown of language into its component elements.

Atto Secondo: Archeology of Debris

Like the opening sequence of Citizen Kane, where the camera moves through accumulations of personal objects to reveal the meaning of a life, Costa’s practice operates through the archaeology of accumulation. But his Rosebud is collective rather than individual—though it encompasses both the discarded materials that travel impossible distances to find their way into his libretto and the biographical shreds that surface in his notebooks, medicine boxes, and other personal detritus. Found materials mingle with intimate fragments, collective waste with private obsessions, creating an inventory where global and personal histories become indistinguishable.

Consider the fashion waste that ends up in Ghana’s Kantamanto market or Chile’s Atacama Desert, where donated clothes create textile mountains visible from space. These are the same circuits through which Costa’s materials travel, following the hidden geographies of global disposal.

Costa approaches these materials with an animistic understanding, treating every fragment as a living entity with its agency and history. Bronze mingles with marble, concrete encounters fabric that might have once been a fast-fashion garment, creating hybrid assemblages that speak to our contemporary condition of perpetual circulation and abandonment. Objects find their way into his compositions through both “gentle vandalism” and the less gentle choreography of extraction, production, and disposal that leaves the world’s detritus strategically deposited in places designed to remain invisible.

Atto Terzo: The Ultimate Remixer

The most honest way to understand Adriano Costa’s practice is to remember where it all began: on São Paulo’s dance floors, where he learned that the art of the DJ is not about perfection but about the magic that happens when disparate elements find unexpected harmony. Costa is, at heart, the ultimate remixer—someone who understands that the most transcendent moments come from the irreverent reshuffling of what already exists. He knows too well that the real art lies in the transitions, in the moments between tracks where one world dissolves into another: bronze casts become the bass line, his found objects the percussion, his institutional interventions the samples that no one saw coming.

Moving through the exhibition, one realizes that Costa has been composing an opera about our condition as beings who produce, discard, and occasionally rediscover poetry in the wreckage of our own gestures. His personal Rosebud*—old socks, gallery invitations, a burgundy umbrella abandoned mid-performance—mingles with collective waste in this vast modernist stage. Scattered throughout the space lie piecemeal fragments of biography and auto-fiction: wigs perched on pedestals like severed thoughts, transparent boxes filled with paper detritus. These objects refuse to declare whether they’re art or accident. It’s a catalogue raisonné of the unreasonable—impossible to complete because the works themselves are as fleeting and volatile as their meanings. After thirty years of gentle vandalism, the promise holds: we won’t be disappointed.

Fernanda Brenner 

*In Citizen Kane, “Rosebud”—Kane’s dying word—is revealed as his childhood sled, burned at the film’s end. Like the opening sequence’s accumulation of objects revealing personal meaning, Costa finds significance in scattered fragments, but in a collective rather than an individual sense.

**Julia Kristeva (1941-) is a Bulgarian-French psychoanalyst whose theory of melancholia in Black Sun (1987) describes how the breakdown of symbolic structures can become creatively productive.

***Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) was a Russian-American linguist who theorized the “poetic function”—when language prioritizes its materiality over pure communication.

****Torre do Dr. Zero was a legendary Vila Madalena nightclub (1990s-2000s) where Costa DJed in the early 2000s, becoming a crucial meeting point for São Paulo’s creative underground.