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PIVÔ 2025: NEW HORIZONS
Memory is not a record of a fixed past that can ever be fully or simply erased, written over, or recovered (that is, taken away or taken back into one’s possession, as if it were a thing that can be owned). And re remembering is not a replay of a string of moments, but an enlivening and reconfiguring of past and future that is larger than any individual.
(Karen Barad)
Since 2012, when it was founded in São Paulo, Pivô has established itself as a platform for contemporary artistic experimentation and critical thinking. In 2025, we expand our activities with the creation of a third space: Pivô-Coaty at Ladeira da Misericórdia in Salvador. This movement reaffirms our approach of reanimating emblematic historical spaces, a methodology that began at the Copan building and continued with Casa do Boulevard in Salvador, inaugurated in 2023.
“Pivô understands the city as a field for radical experimentation, where art can create tension and reimagine urban space. At Ladeira da Misericórdia, we seek to create an open laboratory that dialogues intimately with Salvador’s artistic practices and local knowledge. This project stems from the desire to strengthen existing cultural ecosystems, not merely importing external models, but building platforms where different ways of thinking and creating can coexist and mutually contaminate each other’, states Fernanda Brenner, founder and artistic director.
LADEIRA DA MISERICÓRDIA AND PIVÔ-COATY
Pivô-Coaty emerges from an articulation between the Municipality of Salvador and independent cultural agents, proposing to reactivate an architectural landmark conceived by Lina Bo Bardi in collaboration with José Filgueras Lima (Lelé), Marcelo Ferraz, and Marcelo Suzuki. With the adopted name we rescue the affective memory of “Coaty,” a restaurant that would have occupied part of the construction in the 1980s, establishing a line of continuity with local history.
The announcement of the partnership with Salvador City Hall, made back in 2024, was expanded this year with the task force proposed by Deputy Mayor Ana Paula Matos in April. Now, a joint effort by the Municipal Secretariats of Culture and Tourism (Secult), of City Maintenance (Seman), the Mário Leal Ferreira Foundation (FMLF), the Secretariat of Sustainability and Resilience (Secis) and the Gregório de Mattos Foundation (FGM) promises to speed up and expand the project and the works on Ladeira da Misericórdia.
With this initiative, we understand the approach of Ladeira da Misericórdia not as a simple architectural heritage to be preserved, but as a critical engagement with Bo Bardi’s social vision of spaces for popular education and the resignification of historic centers. The project questions conventional perceptions of “empty” spaces. As physicist and philosopher Karen Barad suggests, what appears vacant constitutes “a lively tension, a desiring orientation toward being/becoming.” This territory carries multiple historical layers, ecological processes, and possibilities for collective reimagining. That’s the space we want to act in.
The project forms a complementary axis with the Boulevard Suíço space, Pivô’s first venue in Salvador. While the latter will continue to host artistic residencies, Pivô-Coaty expands the possibilities for intervention in Salvador’s cultural scene.
TRANSNATIONAL ARTICULATIONS AND ECOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES WITH HARTWIG ART FOUNDATION
Pivô-Coaty launches with a long-term partnership with the Hartwig Art Foundation. Together, we propose to rethink international cultural exchange as a form of resource sharing. This multi-year collaboration establishes a multilateral network that reconfigures knowledge flows between Brazil and the Netherlands, with connections extending to Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Beatrix Ruf, director of the Hartwig Art Foundation, observes: “By rethinking collaboration models, we investigate possibilities for a trajectory with multiple partners and plural narratives. Our projects dialogue on various levels: we activate historic buildings, transforming them into spaces for contemporary artistic use. In Salvador, Pivô proposes to revitalize Ladeira da Misericórdia; in Amsterdam South, we resignify a brutalist courthouse that will become the Hartwig Museum. These are institutions committed to their cultural ecosystems, seeking to create conditions for a decentralized exchange of references.”
In our methodology, we seek references in ecological processes of seed dispersal and pollination—privileging movement over stability, possibility over preservation, and connection over accumulation. Through artist exchanges and commissions that address shared urban challenges, we foster a system where knowledge circulates in multiple directions, finding new expressions as it traverses different contexts.
SÃO PAULO: CELEBRATING 15 YEARS
In São Paulo, Pivô Pesquisa—our artistic residency program that has become a reference in the Brazilian circuit over the last decade—continues as the beating heart of the space at Copan. Since 2013, we have welcomed more than 300 artists from different regions of Brazil and the world, offering an environment for free experimentation and intense exchanges. Many artists who participated in the program presented their first significant works in this context and are now part of important collections and international institutions.
In 2025, as we start the celebrations for our 15 years of trajectory, the exhibition program will undergo a brief reconfiguration in the first semester, preparing the ground for a new cycle of experimentations. Pivô Pesquisa will be amplified as a platform for formation, creation, and debate, connecting initiatives in São Paulo and Salvador in a system of cross-site residencies.
In late August, to mark the beginning of Pivô’s 15th anniversary celebrations, we have invited Adriano Costa to return to our main exhibition space. Curated by Claude Adjil, the artist will occupy the entire exhibition area with a combination of new works and existing pieces from his career, as well as reinterpreting his emblematic installation “Amazonia” (2012), which was part of our first show “Next Time I’d Have Done It All Differently,” conceived by Diego Mattos. This return to origins is not merely a retrospective look but a gesture that reaffirms our essence as an experimental platform that evolves in constant dialogue with artists. The commemorative program will unfold until September 2026 in a cycle of activations, performances, and encounters that seek to celebrate the multiple collaborations and experiments that have defined our history.
RAMIFICATIONS AND POSSIBLE FUTURES
More than a simple physical expansion, our movements in 2025 represent a commitment to decentralization as a critical method. After one and a half years of presence in Salvador with Casa do Boulevard, the institution deepens its insertion in Salvador’s context through Pivô-Coaty, creating an axis of exchanges that challenges the historical concentration of resources in the Rio-São Paulo axis.
This new project articulates distinct temporalities: on one side, the historical density of Ladeira da Misericórdia and the conceptual legacy of Lina Bo Bardi; on the other, the contemporary and experimental language that characterizes our activities. This dialogue between times does not seek a pacifying synthesis, but the production of productive frictions, questionings, and new formulations about the role of artistic institutions in Brazil today.
By connecting São Paulo, Salvador, Amsterdam, and other points on the map through horizontal partnerships, we propose a networked institutional model—without fixed centers or rigid hierarchies—where each space maintains its autonomy while participating in a broader system of exchanges. Cross-site residencies will allow artists to move through these territories, incorporating their contrasts and specificities into their practices.
In this network under construction, we position our environmental commitment. We do not aim merely at the circulation of artists and works, but at the collective elaboration of conceptual tools, methodologies, and vocabularies based on sustainability that are capable of responding to present challenges—from the growing pressures of the financialization of culture to the social and ecological urgencies that mark our time.
The names of artists, thinkers, and other collaborators in this new phase will be gradually disclosed over the coming months. We invite you to follow this expansion movement not as a distant spectator, but as an active participant in a continuous exercise of institutional imagination, fostering critical thinking and artistic experimentation.
