Adriano Costa opens Paris Exhibition Spin-off While São Paulo Opera Continues

“We Won’t Be Disappointed: The Paris Spin-off” at AU__PASSAGE

While Adriano Costa’s three-act opera-like show continues to draw in large crowds at Pivô in COPAN, the artist opens a spin-off version of his show in Paris. Like the best TV spin-offs, “We Won’t Be Disappointed: The Paris Spin-off” doesn’t simply transpose the original but discovers what emerges when the same artistic DNA encounters and inhabits completely different cultural conditions and climate.

The setting is Passage Saint-Anne, a historic 19th-century covered passage nestled in the 2ème arrondissement, between the Louvre and the Opéra Comique. More than a gallery space, it’s a working street passage where people cut through on their daily routes, shop for bubble tea, or grab lunch from Japanese delis. Within this flow of everyday foot traffic, the passage becomes both venue and stage for Costa’s work—objects that have survived cycles of production, disposal, and rediscovery.

This journey from São Paulo’s 1,500 square meters of modernist utopia to Paris’s intimate dusty passage and its streamline art-deco style vitrines reflects Costa’s artistic versatility. His practice emerged from early 2000s dance floors, where he learned that the real stories lived not in the music itself, but in what was left behind: the beautiful wreckage revealed by daylight. His work operates as the “ultimate remix,” finding poetry in transitions and marginal moments.

Curated by Fernanda Brenner (whose monumental “Anna Maria Maiolino. Je suis là. Estou Aqui.” exhibition at the Musée Picasso only just closed), the Paris exhibition connects with the nearly 200 works spanning three decades at COPAN while combining new pieces with works from different periods. In this setting, Costa’s “gentle vandalism” encounters another type of audience—not just art visitors but flaneurs, commuters, and passersby drawn into unexpected encounters with objects that refuse to stay silent. The passage becomes the perfect stage for art that has always lived in the margins, in the spaces between intention and accident, where the most profound conversations happen not in grand gestures but in chance encounters that leave you wondering what just happened.