Transmigração: Pivô Boulevard welcomes project by Puerto Rican collective Beta-Local

As part of the ongoing partnership between Pivô, OtherNetwork, and ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Pivô Boulevard will host Transmigration, a project by the Puerto Rican collective Beta-Local, starting September 6.

As an international platform supporting alternative forms of cultural exchange, OtherNetwork enables Beta-Local’s temporary relocation to Salvador, fostering horizontal learning, resource sharing, and mutual support that challenges conventional cultural hierarchies.

In Salvador, Beta-Local — a nonprofit organization founded in 2009 by artists from Puerto Rico and the Caribbean — will connect its artistic and cultural practice to the history and lived experiences of the Boulevard house, a hub of cultural effervescence since the 1960s, when it helped spark the revolutionary Brazilian Tropicália movement.

The project adopts “making soup” as a curatorial methodology — a direct reference to the community soups prepared at the Boulevard Suíço house in the 1960s — transforming the traditional exhibition format into what Beta-Local calls “a practice of displacement, embodiment, and reactivation of territorialized memories.”

This collective ritual, which began in Puerto Rico, continues in Salvador through the gathering of ingredients at the São Joaquim Market, culminating in the offering of a soup on September 6 at Pivô Boulevard, with sonic invocations by Mima in collaboration with Salvador-based musician Julio Caldas.

On September 7, Transmigration unfolds as an exhibition that connects artists, territories, and creative gestures between Salvador and Puerto Rico through actions, installations, and activated objects, featuring works by Jochi Melero (the “Soup Wizard”), Mima, William Murphy, Michael Linares, Fabián Vélez, and Pablo Guardiola.

The program is part of the series of artistic and cultural events Pivô will present throughout September in celebration of the second anniversary of its Salvador headquarters. More information coming soon.

Beta-Local – is a nonprofit organization founded in 2009. Our work focuses on developing times and spaces for artistic practices in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. We are currently an initiative led by artists, from where we generate long-term relationships based on knowledge exchanges, thus expanding a cultural work network focused on new ways of thinking artistic practices in and beyond the established circuits.

OtherNetwork – is a decentralized cultural institution that connects independent art spaces. At its core are hundreds of projects rooted in their local context, responding directly to the needs of artists. We see the term “independent” as fluid and context-specific, and continuously seek to unpack what this means to cultural practitioners in different global localities.