 Hello everybody, I think we're going to start and welcome all to affirmation number four and as always a warm welcome to everyone joining us here in person as well as the remote participants on the live stream and the members of our planetary cohort. So first the note, as you probably all know, we were incredibly humbled and honored that Sylvia Rivera-Cousy-Conquy had accepted our invitation to speak and to be part of this conversation and but as you also might have heard already and as you can see Sylvia is unfortunately unable to join us here tonight for personal reasons. Yet we will have an amazing, amazing evening ahead of us. Paolo Tavares will be discussing his incredibly relevant and urgent work to which Emmanuel Atmasou will give an initial response after which we will open it up to questions from the audience and our planetary cohort. And I will keep my remarks brief today and I want to stress once again that Affirmations is a project, a project that was developed as a series addressing emergencies through multiple lenses and voices with topics that should be understood as intersecting rather than isolated and that aims to affirm what societies and ecosystems can be. And I think that now after a few sessions we can see some some threats emerge, which is one of the reasons why we're so happy to have Paolo share his work. Work, I want to make sure in which design is fundamentally understood as Paolo is the first to complain to proclaim as as Paolo is the first to proclaim as advocacy and this is absolutely central to his practice, a practice of what he calls militant design. Central also is the continuous interrogation and questioning of the colonial legacies of modernity and this entails an understanding of the notion of repair, for example, as something inherently forward-looking, which of course is something that we also discussed in our very first affirmation and similarly this entails a sort of highly skeptical position towards any notion of geo-engineering, for example, as a way out of the manifold crisis where we're currently part of. Equally important is the understanding that nature has rights, something that was discussed in our second affirmation in a sort of different context as well, and that the rights of nature can function as a way to enact reparations across various domains, domains that are not just environmental, but also cultural. Paolo's incredible research that understands the forest as a cultural artifact and as a way out of a way out of dialectical thinking is of course exemplary here, I would say. So before I move to the more formal introductions, a couple of notes. We're adjusting the format slightly just for tonight. Paolo will speak a little bit longer than we're used to with the affirmations, after which Emmanuel will give an initial response and to make our planetary cohort more visible, I also want to welcome Clarissa who's joining us here on stage tonight and she will follow the live chat on the webinar and channel some of the questions, the live questions that might come up in addition to those from all of you, of course. So now, for the more formal introductions, Paolo Tavares is an architect, author and educator, his practice dwells at the frontiers between architecture, visual cultures and advocacy. Operating through multiple media, Tavares projects have been featured in various exhibitions and publications worldwide, including the Oslo Architecture annual, the Estable Design, Designed by annual, the Sao Paolo Art by annual, and of course, the most recent Venice by annual this year for which he developed the curatorial project Terra in collaboration with Gabriela de Matos, and that was awarded to Golden Lion for best national participation. He's the author of several books questioning the colonial legacies of modernity, including Death's Habitat from 2019, Lucio Costa Era Rascista from 2022 and Diretios No Humanos from 2022. Tavares was selected by Arc de Lios, one of the best new practices of 2023 worldwide, and he was the co curator of the 2019 Chicago Architecture by annual, and is part of the advisory curatorial board of the Sharjah by annual in 2023. Tavares teaches as the University of Brasilia here at Columbia GCEP, and he leads the Spatial Advocacy Agency Autonomia. Emmanuel Atmasou is an assistant professor at Columbia. He's a founding partner with Genwood of Atwo, an art and architecture practice based in New York City and by extension between Melbourne and Addis Ababa. He's also co-founding board member of the Black Reconstruction Collective, and his art, design and teaching practices operate at the intersection of design theory, spatial justice, and contemporary African art. The work Medi meditates on the international constellation of Aphrodite Spork Spaces, and most recently he has been analyzing the social spatial identities of two urban marketplaces, Kariakou in Dar es Salaam and Mercato in Addis Ababa. Atmasou had briefly thought, taught at RISD and at Harvard GSD, and Atwo's work was featured in the exhibition Reconstructions, Architecture and Blackness in America at the Museum of Modern Art, and of course soon together with the Buell Center at the forthcoming Chicago architecture by annual. So with that, Paolo, let's begin. Hello, the mic's working? Yeah, okay, good evening everyone. First of all, thank you, Bart. Thank you, Andres, Dissab for the invitation, Emmanuel, to be this wonderful lecture series. I was also very honored and humbled to be sitting next to Civia Rivera Coussica, and it's a shame that you could not. I was also very nervous to be next to her because I admire her work a lot, and yeah, shame she cannot be here, but I hope that her spirit can also be present here with us. And to begin with, I was very happy with the invitation, although I questioned myself why I was invited to speak in a table called Indigenous Worldings, or Indigenous Wordmaking Practices, and I feel that an Indigenous architect could definitely do a much better job than myself, speaking from urine, this wording making practice, better than myself. And with this caveat, I also understand why the invitation came to be at this particular panel, because throughout my practice, I have had the privilege and the honor of working with different Indigenous communities across Central and South America in different countries, and also work with Indigenous activists and intellectuals, and this has really shaped my practice. And those works that I've done, they are very much on the front of adivocacy, all the core architecture is adivocacy, so if the city is a right, if space is a right, if the environment is a right, if land is a right, if territory is a right, architecture and spatial practice should be conceived of as a means of defending such rights. And this was the kind of work that I was doing, I'm going to show some of it, but even though that I have this sort of practice, I don't feel that I am entitled, so to say, to speak about Indigenous wordings in any capacity. And the fact that Silvia is not here, Silvia Rivera is not here, I think it's also made the sort of context of this table incomplete, absolutely incomplete. Nonetheless, what I think I can do is to try to show you how my experience, the privilege that I had to do this kind of work, to learn from Indigenous communities, Indigenous leaders and intellectuals, what I have learned from those stories, how I take them and bring them back to architecture in order to undermine and expose how architecture is a system of colonial power and try to undo the ways in which architecture as a system, as a tool of colonial power operates. So in a way there's a kind of boomerang sort of attempt in my practice, which is to learn from this advocacy experience and bring them back to architectural theory and practice in order to expose the means by which architecture operates as a system of power and as a system of colonial racist power in many different ways, especially in Latin America and especially in Brazil. So what I'm going to try to do today is to show two projects, eventually three because we don't have much time and to try to share with you how those learning practices with Indigenous wording sort of come back to reveal how architecture operates as a system of power. So I tailor my presentation to that and also I tailor it to respond to some of the work of Silvia Rivera-Kusikanki, who works a lot on the ideas of a sociology of images. And I want to quote to begin with something from, you know, the book that we have has been translated to Portuguese. I cannot pronounce the name because it's in Quechua if I'm not wrong, but she has been working a lot with the power of images and what she says is that in colonialism, there is a very peculiar function to words. They don't designate, they veil, they hide. In that way, words convert in a kind of fictional register that hide reality instead of showing it. And then she's going to say through different types of analysis how images allow us a certain understanding that goes beyond public discourse, which is that what hides or tries to uncover the brutal realities of colonialism and specifically of colonialism in relation to modernity. So I chose some projects to share with you today that talk specifically about the kind of media ecology by which architecture is an act or that we perform it through architecture in a very expanded way that, a expanded way where architecture manifests itself, be it's creating, be it's like publishing, be it's like in relation to heritage practice and also to interventions in constructed matter. So it's very much, the presentation is very much trying to sort of respond somehow to this idea of Silvia Rivera's that one needs to interrogate the image because the image, they have the power to show something to us that goes beyond the kind of structures of the world that veil the sort of brutal realities of colonialism and how it perpetuates through modernity. So the first work is called This Habitat. It was commissioned by an exhibition called Baházi Maxinista, realized in 2019, which investigated the diaspora of the Baházi. And I was working with a magazine called Habitat that was designed and edited by the famous architect Lina Bobardi in the 40s and 50s. And Habitat was a kind of publishing branch or arm of the Museum of Art of São Paulo. It's a very pioneer museum in Brazil. And the whole purpose of the magazine, I call it a militant modernist magazine, which was kind of to teach the public what was a modernist sensibility. And since I was a student, I was very taken by the fact that Habitat brought constantly images of indigenous objects and arts and crafts and that the entering sort of correlation with images of modern art and modern architecture, right? So this was shown very much in a kind of primitivist, in a kind of modernist primitivist idea that one would find as a source of modernism, but with a sort of native difference that they say, you know, those objects of primitive art, of indigenous arts, they are signifier of Brazilian nationalism, right? They kind of express, you know, what is Brazilian nation and what is national modern art. So the whole purpose of this was to teach the kind of elites of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo that the modern sensibility was not only being connected to the avant-garde of Europe, but also to the kind of primitive folk, you know, indigenous arts of Brazil. And they usually appear, you know, as kind of sculptoric objects that often compare to Matisse or to Picasso and things like that in a very pedagogic way. And I was wondering where does those images come from, those objects come from, to whom they belong. You know, how would it be possible that these images of quote-unquote primitive art would appear in a very sophisticated modernist magazine edited by a museum. And what we did was a kind of archeology of media. So we investigated, you know, every number of the magazine habitat and every reportage, every article that they wrote on indigenous arts and crafts. And we started to map where those objects came from. And this in Brazil was related to something that was officially called the politics of pacification. So basically, Brazil designated an agency called the Service for the Protection of the Indian to pacify indigenous groups in order to open up lands for colonization or for national settler society. And this process of pacification, that was the official name, was basically consisted in flying over those lands, mapping those indigenous settlements, and bringing sort of Western goods to them in order to pacify them and later settling them in what was called indigenous outposts in order to concentrate these populations. This was run by the government so they could clear land for occupation. And these are some images of the archive that I have been collecting. I'm kind of, you know, I have a kind of huge archive. I'm a kind of compulsive archivist. So you see some images of this process of pacification, which is really about, you know, transforming indigenous people into what they would say national emancipated workers, right? So that was the objective. And although portraying itself as a sort of modern national politics, what the politics of pacification really did is to reproduce a colonial policy related to indigenous people that was called the cementos in Spanish or reduções in Portuguese, which means like at least it means like, you know, concentrate or it's called reduções because it means like reducing the territory of indigenous folks because they were concentrating those outposts and therefore once again liberating the land for colonization, right? And at this moment, the ideology of nation building in Brazil was circulating around something that I can call auto imperialism or auto colonization. So in Brazil, very much like in the United States in the 19th century, we developed a kind of frontier mythology of our own, which was to say, you know, as one of the famous sociologists, Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freire would say that Brazil's colonization ceased to be European and became a process of auto colonization, a process that would, after independence, take on a national character. And other prominent sociologists or thinkers of this process of nation building were also saying, you know, about that Brazil needs to conquer itself in order to fulfill itself, that, you know, the kind of very foundational of the nation was in this sort of intra-border imperialism. And like Presidente Getulio Vargas said, we have a kind of our own sort of imperial power, which is to conquer our own land. And that is why that was the path that would lead Brazil to realize itself as a nation, that would lead Brazil to the future, the progress. So kind of frontier mythology of our own, the difference, the kind of significant difference is that this was just stated during the kind of modernist revolution in Brazil in a certain sense, and, you know, and very much conceived by thinkers that were associated with the modern movement. And this is a poster of the Vargas regime or the Vargas dictatorship in 1937, when Vargas is going to launch a kind of massive state-backed program of, you know, auto-imperialism of auto-colonization that was called the March to the West, right? And by that time, and by the time that Habitat was being published, you know, in this context of auto-imperialism, the service for the protection of the Indians had over 100 outposts distributed throughout the country. So that's what you see in this map. Those are these indigenous outposts that were distributed around Brazil. So you see, you know, the kind of immense power of this colonial machinery sort of occupying the entirety of the national territory, pacifying those indigenous groups, settling them, you know, transforming them into emancipated national workers. And of course, that this colonial network not only opened up the land for extraction, the land for colonization, but also opened up new possibilities of colonizing, of extracting emits of these indigenous folks because those outposts and the airstrips that they opened up throughout the territory opened up their territories for, you know, journalists and photographers and filmmakers and ethnographers. And to the extent that image-making production became a part of the pacification process. So the service for the protection of the Indian created its own image-making bureau, which was called the Section of Studies. It was led by a very famous anthropologist called R.C. Hebeiro, which is, you know, an anthropologist very much associated with modernist architects like Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa. So there was a way in which this colonial machinery was also, you know, operating through image-making and, you know, and also building collections of objects, you know, collections of objects that would later acquire the status of a museum called the Museum of the Indian that was created in 1957. And I like this image very much because, you know, it's an image of the service for the protection of the Indians and you see a kind of, you know, display, a kind of museum-like display that somehow hides the colonial process from which those images were being extracted. And indeed, it must be, which is the Museum of Art of Sao Paulo, realized in 1939 or 1940. I'm not completely sure. One of the first sort of exhibitions of indigenous objects happening in a museum, which was very much focused on modern art, right? So there is a way in which habitat, and those images were the images that would appear in habitat, right? Those images kind of extracted from this process of colonization. But habitat would completely hide this colonial context, presenting these images as pure objects of art and signifiers of modernity, right? So usually they would appear kind of isolated and, you know, kind of highlighting their sort of sculptural quality, right? As if they were suspended in between an ethnographic and a modern art museum. And habitat, the project is a facsimile of the magazine. We publish these magazines and we also sell them, you know? And what we did is that we use a process that I call a kind of constructivist process that Linnable Bardi himself used. So here you see the cover, the original cover by Linnable Bardi, right? So the sculptures, the Karajai sculptures, a kind of tropical forest and the Breeze Soleil here, right? So clearly making a connection between tropicality, you know, the forest and this idea of the primitive art. And we use the same process, but sort of interfering with other archives. This is an image of Jesco von Putkamer, that is one of the first sort of anthropologist filmmakers that's going to, you know, document the violence against indigenous folks that were happening with this kind of out imperialism. So we use the same process of doing this kind of constructivist associations with image in order to show what was outside the frame, right? So in order to show the kind of colonial process that somehow habitat came to veil and to legitimate. So there is a series of, you know, erasures of texts and the introduction of other archives. So we investigated about, you know, five or seven archives in order to bring these other images to make this the kind of colonial context out of which those objects would appear habitat, but that were hidden by the very pages of habitat visible. And we tell in this project, we tell different sort of histories of how modernity is connected, fundamentally connected, with histories of colonialism. And just to show you some images of how this collage sort of operate. So you see, you know, some original images of the magazine and introduce, you know, this image of pacification and contextualized then. And I just want to mention two histories of this that we tell in this magazine. One is the history of the city of Brasilia. You know, Brasilia was designed by Lucio Costa, this man who you see there. And he, you know, very clearly stated that Brasilia was a gesture of colonization. You would say, you know, the liberate act of possession, a gesture is still in the sense of the pioneers along the lines of the colonial traditions. And everyone says that Brasilia is in the shape of an airplane, but Lucio Costa, if I'm not wrong, as far as I can say, he never mentioned this was an airplane. You know, it was clearly a Catholic cross demarcating the land. So this idea that, you know, it became an airplane is also interesting for me because it shows a kind of structural relationship between modernity and colonialism. And but the idea was really to set up this cross in the middle of the country and to say, you know, Brasilia is the continuation of colonialism. To the extent that before the city was constructed, Presidente Juscelino Kubicek had organized a mass in the construction site of Brasilia, which was called the first mass of Brasilia. And this is the altar designed by Niemeyer. And, you know, I find it interesting because it's kind of like frontier type of architecture, right, that Niemeyer designed at this moment. And what Juscelino Kubicek did, he ordered the Brazilian Air Force to bring a delegation of Carajá people, the same one whose objects would appear in habitat, to be part of this mass. And in doing that, this is one image saying, you know, the cross raises at the, you know, Brazilian Midwest. And in doing that, what he was trying to do was in fact to reenact one of the first acts of Portuguese colonization. When they invaded a territory, they would, you know, organize a Catholic mass in order to celebrate the taking of this land. And this image was immortalized in late 19th century by Victor Mereles, who is a very famous painter in Brazil because he was, you know, creating those images of nationalism as Brazil, you know, became an independent state. And one of these images that celebrate the history of the nation is the image of the first mass, right? So Brasilia is completely sort of, you know, communicating this image of that Brazilian modernization, that Brazilian modernism is grounded in colonialism. Then very briefly, another story that we tell in this magazine is this history of this hotel. It's called Hotel JK, that was, you know, president of Kubicek and one who was building Brazil. He had the brilliant idea of making this kind of resort for the politicians that would come to work in the new capital. So he asked Niemeyer to create this sort of vacation holiday space and he did this in a place called Banana Island, which is the homeland of the Karajá people that would appear later in Habitat. And here's the hotel designed by Niemeyer. And what's, I'm just bringing that story very briefly because, you know, this is an image that showed the hotel and on the upper side, you see the indigenous Karajá villages. So the idea of Kubicek that he would integrate the Karajá villages in the complex. And I'm bringing this because somehow, you know, we see this idea that Brazil, you know, that modernity was related to this sort of tropicality and primitivism and colonization somehow materializing the very structure of architecture. So I say that this hotel was almost a kind of panoptical window, you know, where indigenous bodies could be observed, you know, and white folks, national colonial society could sort of, you know, consume this idea of the primitive. And, but what is interesting about it is that this project is very, it's not a well-known project by Niemeyer. It's a kind of like hidden, lost project. And usually historians, they would say, you know, we found some image of this lost project of Niemeyer. Look how great that is. But we had to look to the archives of the military dictatorship. Most of those images come from the military, the archive of the military dictatorship, that of intelligence agencies of the military dictatorship that were just released when Brazil created its Truth Commission. Because this area was an area with lots of conflicts against the dictatorship of the Araguaya, including the Heales, but also including indigenous struggles. And the government was monitoring this area and monitoring the conflicts of the Karajá that were happening around this hotel because the Karajá started to protest against the hotel, to enter the hotel, to invade the hotel, and then they suggested to create a whole wall around the hotel and things like that. So I was interested to see, you know, how one could sort of tell the histories of colonial violence through these other archives that somehow, you know, are in excess of the history of architecture. And the book finishes with the military dictatorship and with the resistance of the Karajá that took over the land that was, you know, grabbed from them and managed to recuperate their lands in the late 70s and early 80s when Brazil was going back to democracy. And it was interesting to see how this magazine, mostly in the art field, not so much in architecture, but was seen as one of the first works that sort of challenged the ways in which the kind of everything that Lina Bobardi is known for its relational foundations and popular art and kind of the first sort of take on a kind of, you know, thinking about Brazilian modernism if you want in a decolonial lens. This is how it was installed. It's a very simple, this was, the context here, this is a building by Lina Bobardi when the Bauhaus Imaginista was set up. So what we did, we did, it's not a project to be shown, but Mário Volvós and the curator want to show. So we took the furniture of Lina Bobardi that was in the building and created a little reading room with the image of the archive of the service for the protection of the Indian and kind of making this relationship with the exhibition that showed a lot, you know, ideas of Bauhaus modernism and how others out of the Aspera was reproducing the kind of Bauhaus. So a kind of, you know, insertion or intervention into the curatorial project in itself. The other project is called Trees, Vines, Palms and other architectural monuments. I showed this in Venice, this year. So what happened is when the military took power and I used it back at the state school, they sort of, you know, escalated this idea of founting imperialism through the entire Amazon with sort of big territorial planning schemes. Those are some images of those planning schemes and some image of the archives that I have been collecting. So the idea was really to modernize the forest, to conquer the forest, you know, all this idea of outer imperialism and kind of always referring back or making this connection between colonialism and modernity, right? So interventions of this kind were happening at this moment. And of course that this was extremely violent to indigenous people. Indeed, there's many cases against the state because of the genocidal acts that they have committed against indigenous folks. And when the Brazilian Truth Commission happened in 2014, we're asked to deal with a particular case, which is the case of the Chavante people, and to map the village, the settlements from where they have been removed by the Brazilian Air Force in order to take their lands. And there was no registers of those villages as far as we could look in the state archives, but we found many emails in magazines, in illustrated modern magazines that were being published at this time that were portraying the specification missions as a process of nation building in Brazil. And what is interesting about these magazines is that this specific magazine that we're going to see here is that those images, this magazine is called Cruzeiro, and it's responsible for doing a sort of little revolution in Brazilian photojournalism and photodocumentary. And this was done through the very hands of various sort of pioneers, modern modernist filmmakers and photographers. One of them is Jamazon that you see here. So those are emails that really changed the way that Brazil saw itself. And we are looking at these documents, not as documents of modernity, but of course, you know, documents of colonial violence, as Benjamin would say, documents of barbarism, and see how they register the village that have been, that have disappeared later on, that have been forcibly abandoned or destroyed. And we look to these archives and we try to reconstruct those settlements, doing, again, what I call a kind of archeology of the image, in order to try to see how they look like, you know, and how we could sort of rebuild and understand the architecture of those settlements. And as you can see, they are all rounded in a kind of arc-shaped form. And this arc-shaped form is invariably opened up to a kind of gallery forest with a river, right? At the same time, we are looking to several emails of produced by the United States, a kind of secret surveillance, global surveillance program implemented during the Cold War, and that has been declassified very recently. And we found many sort of, you know, inscriptions on the earth that indicate that these were Xavante settlements. So as you can see here, all this arc-shaped forms, arc-shaped geoglyphs, arc-shaped inscriptions in the earth, usually open to the river. And we found many of them through this kind of architectural forensic work on the satellite emails. And eventually, what we discovered, or what we mapped, is probably one of the largest archaeological indigenous complex in central Brazil, right, that has been completely destroyed through the politics of pacification. And of course, that these images, they are very much similar to the archaeology of the other media that we have done. After we did this mapping, we produced a book, which is called Memory of the Earth. And for us, it was very important. We produced like 300 or 400 copies. I don't remember it anymore. But it was very much important for us because we brought this book to the schools of the community. And we autonomously distributed those books to the schools of the community because it was not enough for us that this would stay on the internet, you know, so we can have like a physical object that they're circulating in schools. And it's very interesting how, you know, indigenous students that are accessing university now, sometimes they write me to say how the book is important for them as a sort of material that they can reflect upon. And when you go to these areas today, what you see is that on the top of the village, there is a forest formation, a formation of trees, right? As you can see, this is the village Sorepre. And you see that the forest formation maps precisely the footprint of the village. So we went to do a field investigation with the elders, the elders that guided us to visit those sites and map those sites. Here are some images of the fields that we have done, Polycarp and Domingos. Polycarp is one of the survivors of the genocidal policies of the Brazilian government. And we map the names of the families who are living these areas, you know, in the village. And one of the villages that we visit is this one. It's called Boú. Boú was the sort of cultural geopolitical center of the Chavante people of Maraotsade. And you see that there is a huge forest formation that we identified. And we went there with Polycarp. Here's another image. You see the sort of arc in the front of the river. We can identify the cemetery. We can even find a kind of small settlement that they occupied on. And another village, it's called Ticino. We see the same pattern, the forest sort of growing up as a kind of remain of the village. And I want to show you this video, which is we with Polycarp who lived in Boú in the settlement. And we go back to the settlement. This is the testimony that he gives on the field. What's fascinating for me in this process is that when we were there, we didn't translate anything I was just shooting the camera very precariously. And Polycarp was just narrating what he saw. And it was even emotional to see how he could identify the trees and pointing to certain trees and understanding that who were living there. And he could really recognize and see those trees that for us would appear as a kind of messy nature, right? As something sort of completely historic, right? Completely cultural in that sense, right? Something that sort of bears the imprints of the history of his people in those trees and in this land. So what we asked is, can we see these trees, can we see these forest formations as a kind of ruin of those villages, right? Can we understand that they are sort of traces and marks of those villages? They are the sort of leftovers of these villages, right? Could we interpret them as a kind of archaeological material, as a kind of, you know, archaeological architecture in itself? So we went to present the work in the indigenous villages and we discussed with the leaders that because most of those villages are not in indigenous lands, they are outside indigenous lands, they are in farms, you know, private farms that have been taken from them. So they don't have any means of protection. So we said, why don't we propose to the Brazilian Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage that those villages should be considered architectural heritage of the Chauvant people, should be archaeological heritage of the Chauvant people, and therefore they should be protected. And that's what we did. In 2019, the main center of the Chauvant people was destroyed during the government of Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro was pushing a very anti-indigenous agenda and here you see the destruction of Tzore Previla, which was the larger, the most important settlement of the Chauvant people, including this very beautiful phrase of Ajuda Ndisele de Weh trying to pedagogically explain to white people what this village means and comparing it to the Acropolis, right? What does it mean to destroy such a ruin? And then we went to the villages and tried to produce this petition for the Brazilian Institute of Artistic and Historic Heritage. This was, you know, in the middle of the pandemics after the destruction has happened and we produced this letter, you know, signed it by every chief of this land and calling for, you know, those heirs to be considered heritage. And the petition is called Trees, Vines, Palms, and other architectural monuments and we made sure to send the petition. You see the cover here. So the petition is a work in itself. We send the book and we made sure to send it physically because everything is done digitally now, but we want to have those books in the archive of the Brazilian Institute of Heritage. And in this petition we include, you know, many sort of images of those settlements and we try to make it as architectural as possible. So we use the sort of strategies of trying to model those trees and those sites. So you see this kind of forest formation on the backs, the cemetery. And here is the ancient sort of settlement with these compounds of trees that still preserve even though they are in the middle of farm. And because for us it was very important that this somehow could appear as architecture. And just to speak a little bit about the petition, because the petition is a kind of work in itself, you know, so we are investigating every possible category of heritage that the institute has been implementing, including heritage categories that the United Nations has been implemented. Because in the 90s I call it a bit a kind of decolonial turn of the United Nations when they introduced the concept of cultural landscapes that want to, you know, map heritage that has an association between man and nature or humans and nature. So there is a way in which they want to acknowledge sort of heritage that is not only the kind of traditional archaeological heritage. So we are working with these ideas and kind of like playing with them and understanding they are categories of intervention of heritage practice. And so there's lots of kind of theoretical labor somehow in this. And we also produced as part of an advocacy campaign, a digital platform that was to reach the wider public, because for us it was important to, you know, show the wider civil society that has been instruction of this heritage and how we could mobilize civil society to do pressure so the government could accept. It was a very, you know, tough moment in the middle of the government of Bolsonaro, which was variant indigenous. Yeah. And the public minister immediately opened an inquire to investigate who had destroyed that sort of privilege. So it was kind of very interesting results. And this is how the project is shown in Venice this year. Just some images. It's a kind of composition of different documents. It's almost that the petition is kind of unfolds in space. I call this the forest pavilion. But besides the sort of militant advocacy part of it, which is, you know, how can we protect those lands? How can we protect those sites? There is a way in which this comes back or fits back to architecture. And we are trying to do a kind of intervention into the archive of the Brazilian Institute of Heritage. So here you see the cover of the magazines produced by the Heritage Institute of Brazil that was created in 1937, precisely in this moment where modernism was consolidating Brazil. And the main protagonist that created the Heritage Institute of Brazil were authors and architects associated with the modern movement. So you see that the covers of the magazines, they always refer or nearly always refer to colonial heritage because mainly what they did in the heroic years in the first 50, 60 years of the Heritage Institute was just to protect colonial heritage because that was very much about the source of the nation, right? The foundation of the nation. So what is interesting is that the first project that the Heritage Institute considers a monument is a Jesuit mission in southern Brazil, which is, you know, a kind of indigenous, a kind of colonial settlement of indigenous folks, right? You see the image is one of the largest sort of missionary settlements that were set up during the colonial period in Brazil. And the person that does the petition that, you know, recognized this missionary settlement as heritage is Lucio Costa himself, who was the author of Brasilia, right? So Lucio Costa, he kind of embodies this idea that because he was working with heritage and saying the source of the nation is colonial heritage. At the same time, he was shaping the new language. He was designing Brasilia. He was designing modernist buildings. So this idea between the colonial and the modern was really sort of playing wing heritage and also, you know, in modernism. So there is, he even designed a museum in the place, you know, kind of gathering the ruins. And there was lots of investments in making, not only the building, you know, making this relationship between modernity and the kind of colonial past or colonial heritage, but also photographers like Michel Guterro, who is a kind of pioneer of modern photography in Brazil, was called by Ifan to make photographs of this colonial heritage. So here we see how, you know, colonialism through various sort of medias and architectural medias were sort of framed as the source of Brazilian modernity, as the source of Brazilian modernization. And you are very much looking to this renology of these petitions. You know, we're trying to understand, you know, heritage petitions as an architectural media in itself, right? How we can understand that this is a media. How can we do an intervention, you know, by playing and by understanding this archive and intervening this archive. And that's why, for us, you know, once again, it was very important to frame those forest formations as architecture, try to use some sort of modeling technologies that we could see those, you know, those trees, those forest formations as architectural heritage. Here are some images. This is the video represented in Venice. One of the videos that we presented in Venice, sort of, you know, again, it's a kind of spatial visual unfolding of the petition itself. And eventually we got a victory. So this just arrived, you know, a couple of days ago or a couple of weeks ago where these sites have been recognized as heritage and now they are protected by law. Thank you. Thank you. But, you know, I think, you know, I want to say this because I think, you know, in terms of the architecture, how I learned from these and those stories and I kind of bring back to architecture, for me, it was really an intervention to the archive of architecture, right? It's really an intervention to the archive of heritage, you know, and how can we understand that those archives are also architectural medias. How are you on time? Do you have, okay, so I want to finish showing a little bit of the work that I did with Gabriela de Matos, the curatorial work called Terras, the Brazilian representation of this year Venice Biennale. And I won't show the whole project, it's a very complex and layered project in many different ways, but I want you kind of following up my sort of rationale or my line of thought, you know, how the curatorial and how the building itself can also be understood as an architectural media and how I understand curating as an architectural media that opens certain spaces for intervention and how one needs to understand the context, the historical context from which those buildings and curatorial practices come as part of the history of architecture and as part of architecture as performing a kind of modes of colonial power. So before I do that, I also want to acknowledge that, you know, the Brazilian pavilion has lots of relationship with indigenous landscape practices, but the first time that I think I was tuned to that on the curatorial front was while curating the Chicago architecture Biennale with Fiasomio Mulu and Sipa Kenjima, and we decided to open the Biennale with a land acknowledgement that was written by the American Indian Center. It's the first urban Indian Center in the United States because for us, the minute that we start to, you know, go to Chicago and understand the history of Chicago, we could not go without saying that Chicago is an indigenous lands, including the name Chicago, Chicago comes from Chicago, which is a kind of wild sort of one that was in this region. It was a place of different sort of, you know, indigenous encounters. And it was interesting for us to realize that the chart of Chicago, which is 1833, also comes with the last documents of this possession of the Patawatami people, you know, so Chicago has this double foundation, this expulsion and the establishment of the city, and lots of these experiences I brought to the pavilion with Gabriela de Matos, and I want to show, I'm going to run very briefly to the pavilion because I want to show more the kind of curatorial intervention. So in the first room, it's two rooms, a pavilion, we show this kind of history of Brasilia, you know, it was called Decolonizing the Canon. We show the kind of colonial history of Brasilia, but you also show how, you know, through maps and other archives, how, you know, this land where Brasilia sits was indigenous land, so trying to, you know, tell another history against the sort of canonic hegemonic history that has been told to us, and besides being indigenous lands, we know that Brasilia was a place populated by Quilombos. Quilombos was this refugee territory of former enslaved people, so they would run away from his slavery and set up this kind of autonomous republics in the middle of the country, and it's impressive because very near Brasilia we have the largest Quilombo of the country, and nobody never tells this history, so for us it was very important to acknowledge that, you know, before Brasilia was there, this was Afro-Brazilian land and it still is, and we show this through various archives, also a film by Juliana Vicente talking about this, and in the second room we show, basically it's a pavilion about heritage, and we show, you know, different Afro-Brazilian and indigenous heritage that have been recognized by, very recently, the kind of the colonial turn of the Brazilian Institute of Heritage, and all of this experience, they have somehow a relationship with the land and they teach a different sort of relationship with the land, which is not the kind of colonial relationship that we show in the first room with Brasilia, right? I won't run into these projects, this is a very sort of, you know, I just want to address one of the questions, and for us, of course, because we're talking about land and we're talking about the earth with these indigenous and Afro-Brazilian practices, it was very important for us to have the earth as a sort of material element in the room, but besides this, you know, more literal representation of putting the earth, you're talking about the earth, you're putting the earth in the pavilion, it was really an intervention into the pavilion itself, so this pavilion, as you see, it's a modernist piece, and it was designed by Enrique Mingling, you see the drawings of Enrique Mingling, this modernist architect, Enrique Mingling was someone very prolific in the modernist movement in Brazil, and he's well known for his projects, but he's more well known, and I think his contribution maybe is more relevant on that front, for a book that he wrote, it's called Modern Architecture in Brazil, which became the canonical book to tell the history of Brazilian architecture, and you see by the front piece, by the cover of the book, that the whole idea upholded by this book was a relationship between colonial past and modernity, right? You see the, this is the first building that was designed with Le Corbusier, it's a minister building in the 40s, and you see a baroque colonial church in Rio de Janeiro, so you see how the building was somehow designed to make a kind of background in a relationship with this colonial church, so once we are talking about decolonizing the canon, once we are talking about these other forms of heritage, we could not fail to look at this building beyond its neutrality as a white cube, right? We need to consider this building as heritage, and was the ideological sort of, what was the ideology, the kind of ideological communication that this building but is, you know, as a representation of Brazil in Venice, so what we, and besides that, there is another context that I want to say that, you know, this idea that colonialism and modernity were somehow related in Brazil was also shaped through various curatorial means, and most importantly in an exhibition organized by MoMA in 1943, which is called Brazil Builds, Oh the New, and you see the cover of the catalog here, and you see that there is an image of a baroque church, a baroque sculpture, and a modernist piece of architecture, and here you see some images of the exhibition where they show colonial heritage and colonial buildings in relation to the new language that was being developed in Brazil, so somehow when we are doing the pavilion, we were in dialogue with this curatorial heritage, right? We're in dialogue with this language, with this history that was created through, you know, the history of curating, so we decided to do an intervention in the pavilion, for us it was very important that we take the pavilion as something that we do an intervention, and we call this intervention the landing, so we decided to cover the whole floor with red earth, because we're looking very much to quote-unquote vernacular modes of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian architecture, so this is a candomblé house, we call it terreiro, or rosa, which has a reference to land and earth and cultivating, and it's a space of Afro-Brazilian religion, this is terreiro casaminas de gege, and you see that you have this earth floor. This is very common in Brazil, if you go to an indigenous sort of land, if you go to a terreiro, you'd find this, so for us it was important to bring this building to the ground, right? Somehow to ground this building in a different history, and this is one image of the draft of the intervention that we did, and we're also looking to some forms of ornaments in those candomblé spaces, usually if you enter in what we call barracão, it's the big house of those terreiros, you see all these flags, and you know it depends on the time of the year, when they're celebrated, different scents, the color of the flags change, right? And we're very interested in this way of sort of, you know, kind of ornament in a certain way, so we commissioned the Tessellas do Alacá, Tessellas do Alacá is a group of Afro-Brazilian women that brought those technologies from Africa of doing those textiles, they still do it manually, and Gabriela de Matos could speak much better about this, this more on the side of her research, but those cloths that they produce, they have different sort of meanings in terms of the rituals, and in terms of how do you wear them, and how they protect your head when you are in a ceremony, and they're also used as a way of, you know, of communicating a kind of architecture of the body if you want, so we commissioned them to produce these cloths, you know, kind of making a reference of these terreiro spaces. And to conclude, so yeah, this was a kind of intervention that was important for us, and to conclude I just want to show one of the projects that we exhibit, one of these heritage projects, it's called the Iaurete Waterfall, it's from a different sort of indigenous people on Western Amazonia, so basically it is a waterfall, you know, and they can tell the whole history of the universe through those stones, right, so they can, it's almost like a book, you know, if you go every stone has a history, and we produce these maps, and what was interesting for us is that, you know, when you look to this waterfall you see that the boundaries between nature and culture are being blurred, right, you know, something that was considered just nature suddenly is considered a heritage, suddenly it's considered something historical, suddenly it's considered something saturated with culture, and they had this, and we find these petroglyphs throughout the site that were, where, you know, the history of those indigenous groups, many different indigenous groups are sort of written in stone, and when we were doing the project we realized that there was no documentation of those, of this waterfall, basically what they have was just one map, one point, and there was no documentation, basically the Heritage Institute lost everything in the archives, right, so we decided to I'm going to just jump this quickly, so we decided to commission a kind of mapping of this heritage using the latest tech in heritage conservation with digital scanning, so we went to this area with the group, this is our Fizca Haldo moment, we participated in a very massive meeting of the organization, we had to present the project, we had to share the project with the community, they have a kind of collective meeting, this was organized by the Federation of Indigenous Peoples of the Negro River, it's one of the largest federations of indigenous organizations in Brazil, I say to them that they are kind of, you know, European Union somehow, you know, this kind of, because they manage so many different languages and cultures, which is really a sort of amazing cosmopolitan territory, so we scan this heritage and what was interesting is that because the petroglyphs, because of the water, they are fading away because of erosion, so if they are scanning, we could see even more than on site, right, we could see even more than on site and you see those descriptions and for us this was very important because when we're doing Venice, we never want Venice to stay in Venice, we want Venice to come back to Brazil, right, and the minute that we identified that there was no documentation of this heritage, you say how can we strengthen, how we can, you know, ally with them and help to protect the site that somehow could be violated or, you know, could be lost because there is no documents, because there is no archive about that as we have from the Jesuit mission and we produce this unique document of the monument and now this document is part of the archive of the indigenous federation and yeah, thank you for listening to me. Thank you Paolo for an amazing talk which is amongst many things, the role of the archive as a tool for advocacy, either classified, declassified I would say, but also intervening in and constructing your own archives. I would like to invite Emmanuel to open the questions. All right, first of all thank you for that talk. As you know I'm a big fan of your work so I'll just start, I have too many questions in my notebook, but I'll start with a relatively, I'll try to combine a few questions in one, which is... Take a note. What I found really interesting about your intervention is what you said at the beginning, which is this ambition to undermine kind of these hegemonic narratives that are very much embedded in the discipline of architecture and how a lot of that undermining has required images, right? The way we read these images, the way we interpret these images and the way we communicate these images. So I feel like a lot of the work especially, I mean this really brilliant intervention on you know the indigenous reading of the forest as an architectural monument, I find that really, really... I mean basically I hope there will be more conversations around architectural monuments that are focused on forests. But in reading all of this and kind of you know over the weekend really reading your work, I can't help but to think a lot about the role of the translator, right? And how the role of the translator is incredibly powerful. Obviously it's about various forms of intense intellectual solidarity, right? But it is also very much a position that... How can I frame this? Basically it is a positionality that has a lot of power. So I guess in the work that you continue to do, I'm trying to... And you've written about this obviously, but I'm trying to think... I'm trying to give you an opportunity to maybe like help us think through kind of the possible challenges and pitfalls of this position of the translator. If that is a fair position, you can say it's not. Well I think I mean it's something... It's really a conversation about it because you know I don't have anything out of the pocket to respond to that. But I like very much this idea that my practice or some of it can be seen as a process of translating. And I cannot avoid... I mean to respond to this saying that it's going to be a bit complicated. But I was just listening to a podcast of one of the negudito who is a quilombola Afro-Brazilian intellectual. He grew in a quilombo and he was saying that when he was young his community picked up him and said you know you need to learn how to write and to read because you are going to be the translator of the community. Meaning he would be the one that would read state documents and explain to the community because it was a very oral culture, right? And a culture related to materials to make things and you know to grow things, to plant things, to learn about plants and these kinds of things. And he's chosen by his community to be the translator and he goes to school, he studies and he can translate the documents, he can understand the politics, he can sort of explain to the community and things like that. And now he's a writer. He produces different books in Brazil that the last one I was reading. He's a counter-colonial thinker, one of the most important in Brazil. And the podcaster was asking him about his position as a writer and he said, I'm not a writer, I'm a translator. No, I am a translator because I am in between these words and my whole role is really sort of making this difference somehow in compatible words to communicate it beyond the violence, right? And I feel that if my practice can be seen in that light, I think it's an interesting way to understand what I'm trying to do, so I thank you for that in different ways, you know, and maybe I should start to think more concretely about it. And I think there's, you know, there is potential in that, you know, potential in being a translator in the sense that one can engage in those realities and ally with those political struggles without the traditional mode of doing research about, you know, of telling things about, you know, but like speaking next by, you know, we're speaking more as an ally. And, you know, and this is in my practice because, and I have to say, I don't feel very comfortable when, you know, it's kind of frame, you know, this, the guy who works with indigenous folks and can talk about indigenous wordings because I don't think it's really about that, you know, it's more about the kind of, you know, being able of doing this translation, you know, and it's often the case that because I have the privilege of studying architecture and, you know, being schooled in the means and medias by which the word communicates now and by which the state understands the language of the state, you know, that I can use these tools, you know, to ally and to provide resources and, you know, and maps and cartographs and models that can sort of, you know, add up in solidarity with those struggles. I guess, you know, there's also many pitfalls in that process. And of course, you know, when you are in a practice like that, I think, you know, you need to take the pitfalls as part of it, right, the contradiction as part of it, you know, I like to say, you know, criticality has often positioned itself in a critical distance, right. So people think, you know, for them to be critical about the situation, you cannot be part of it. And I like to say that my practice is very much about a critical proximity. And I try to preserve or, you know, to relate to that. And the pitfalls are multiple. For example, you know, all these readings about, you know, the forest as a garden or the forest as a constructed space, first of all, it does not come from me, you know, I mean, I've been learning from many archaeologists and botanists, who also have the privilege to work and talk with, you know, the most prominent any study, actually, I did the archaeological studies when I was living in Ecuador with the most important archaeologists working in Amazonia now. But, you know, when I say, you know, the forest is an architecture, I mean, and I'm not, you know, bringing something that's completely other than architecture, within the kind of box of architecture, right, them and not like reducing the potentiality of what it is. But at the same time, I think I can bring something to architecture to kind of, you know, maybe decolonize itself, and this can sort of feed back into the world. So that's how I would navigate that. Are there any questions from the audience? Sorry. Hello. Let's start here, and then, oh, yeah. Oh, no, you can go ahead. I want to thank you, Paulo Tamaris, for the presentation. And I'm a friend of Gabriella De Matos, and so I really appreciate you covering in-depth the work. I want to pick up on Emanuele D'Nassu's question of the translator, and maybe this is coming from another slightly different approach of the same topic. So really profound your interview on the site where you're talking to the gentleman where he's able to see what was passed through the trees remaining. And then this question gets at, then when you said we wanted to make it architectural. And I understand, like, you have a different audience who would not, in order for you to convey the significance, there's a certain legibility that they understand space through and kind of a quantification. And so there's an image where you start to overlay in an animation, you overlay a grid on an aerial view. And so if I can ask you, this is not a criticism because I think when you push the boundary of a discipline, there is a fall-off point where what tools do you have, the tools are kind of fashioned in a sense of what's called a colonial framework where the means by which you're communicating are based on a certain objective. So why would you need to quantify the square footage of the land in such a way to understand it from an aerial view versus how the gentleman was reading was not in a sense of space, as quantity, as value, as how many square feet or square miles would we be able to exert force over. So I guess my question is, could the lens of the man be seen as architectural? Could you kind of inhabit that point of view? I would see that the translation is almost linguistic, but could it be spatial and visual to kind of see the values that they are and you are seeing in the land? But could those also produce architectural tools? Thank you. Thank you. What's your name, sir? Amina Blackshire. Thank you for the question. Yes, certainly so, absolutely. And I think this is also a translator work in many different ways. And I see, you know, more and more, I mean, you see architectural schools trying to understand, you know, those values, you know, those ways of seeing, those ways of understanding things. So we can somehow incorporate this in design strategies, right? In my view, design, you know, the way it was conceived and developed and things like that in relation to nature was very much about, you know, colonizing nature itself, you know, dominating it, right? You know, making it an object, you know, transforming it because everything was too messy, you know, and people, in fact, this was a blindness, right? A kind of colonial blindness people could not see, right? So of course, you know, that, you know, I learn a lot from that. And as I said, my work is not ethnographical in the sense that, you know, I'm going to research this and that and things like that. But I read lots of ethnographies, you know, that people have been doing serious work and botanists and archaeologists. And I definitely think that if there is something that will change design, you know, it's really sort about what you precisely just said, you know, how we can, you know, the value and the kind of the different sort of relationships that somehow communicate how we can learn from it. Because, you know, and this is something that we try to say in the pavilion, you know, because people say, oh, it's nice, you are talking about the past. And in the second gallery where we show this practice is called Places of Origin, Archaeologists of the Future. That's why, you know, it's a kind of archaeology, the pavilion, because we say, you know, in fact, we are looking to this ancestral practices that are very much contemporary and are pointing to the future of design. Because if you look, you know, to many of the strategies of design, I think, you know, we are sort of learning with this practice, right, in terms of agroforestry, in terms of biodiversity, in terms of understanding, you know, climate and earth, in terms of, like, establishing different relationships. And maybe that's why we're having this conversation now. On the other hand, in that particular work where I have to measure and show the image, you know, all these sort of tools of colonial power, right? It's like mapping, measuring, you know, even archaeology, of course. I was directly in contact with the state, right? Because what usually happens, even like in legal terms, you have the elderly and they are going to come and tell a story, right? Because it's very much about oral knowledge, you know? And, you know, and they will tell those stories and, of course, sometimes, you know, it's in their language because they don't speak Portuguese, so it's difficult to translate and things like that, right? The question of translation again. And I guess, you know, to communicate it with the state, it was important somehow to corroborate those testimonies with some sort of hard facts and images and maps and, you know, measures, you know, so the state can understand this language. So maybe that's where, you know, the translator can come and sort of, you know, with the tools that we have at hand and can sort of add to that. But I understand, you know, the question, which is a question that we discussed when we were talking on Friday, which is, you know, you cannot dismantle the master house with the master tools, right? And definitely we need to develop maybe new tools and strategies. And there's some of the work that also, you know, navigates this way and definitely thank you for the question. Please, yeah. Hi, Paulo. Thank you so much for your presentation. I'm as well a big fan of your work. My name is Francesca Ramafolini and I'm part of the Planetary Cohort, so I think I'm also contributing on that side. I guess I might follow up on, my question kind of follows up on what you were discussing. It felt to me that you were kind of reusing the subversive use of institutional language of cultural heritage preservation, in a way, through the architect's tools, of course, in order to then, you know, make visible indigenous work. So I was interested in the beautiful presentation. I mean, within the presentation that your presentation, the relationship between these decolonial practices that make indigenous work visible, indigenous culture, communities visible, while recognizing the cultural value of their traces for a national, the definition, the recognition of national cultural heritage. And I found I couldn't help myself by looking at the relationship between Lena Bo Bardi's work and yours, since you've developed this interesting criticism of Lena Bo's habitat and how she represented indigenous culture. So I found this relationship between you both try to make indigenous material culture either movable through, I mean, objects really, and disappeared natural culture. And you've both done that, and in both ways, you've tried to use the language of national cultural heritage in order to move away from the canonical Portuguese colonial heritage that was there, right? So I see similarities, but of course, I suppose there are also differences, and I was wondering whether these differences that you see between you and Lena Bo Bardi, maybe have to do with the hidden collaboration or overt collaboration or reaction to government's agenda. Or it has to do maybe with the evolving or more inclusive understanding of definition of what cultural heritage is, or simply the development of post-colonial theory. Yeah. So I was wondering once again, what's the difference between you see between Lena Bo Bardi's work and yours? I like to say, you know, because sometimes people get angry about this work because, you know, especially in Brazil, Lena, you know, and they don't want even to read it. But I like to say that I'm in dialogue with her, right? Because historians, sometimes I say they live from corpses, right? You keep like, no, feeding the corpse, you know, instead of like making a dialogue with it. So that's why I don't position myself as a historian in a certain way, more as an architect. And I always ask myself, you know, because I wrote a book about the race, the thinking of Lucio Costa, and I'm very criticized for that. And I ask people, you know, what Lucio Costa and Lena would be doing today? Would they be praising, you know, people? Instead, you know, they demolished everyone before, you know, they were really critical and sort of radical, you know. So in that way, I think I feel like I have this legacy from her. I love her work, by the way. And yeah, so I think, you know, it's a conversation, but definitely not different key, right? About the, you know, if I'm, you know, the national in national heritage, I think if I was to write about it, of course, I would do a kind of critique about, you know, the idea of the nation and how heritage has shaped the idea of the nation. And, you know, shall we, is this national heritage, shall this be exploded and things like that? So I think that could be a kind of theoretical intervention on the front. But that's what I mean about critical proximity. I was interested in how, you know, the Heritage Institute in Brazil scribes heritage into law, how the United Nations writes heritage into law. And that's why if you read the petition, which I think it's a work in itself, you know, we kind of try to challenge every possible category. So you say, this is archaeological heritage, but not only. This is my immaterial heritage, because there's many sort of symbols around it, but not only. This is an ecological heritage, but not only. You know, this is a cultural landscape, but not only. So really study these categories, you know, and try to complicate it then. And in order, you know, to understand that the law in itself could be a means of intervention. And of course, you know, it's, is it national heritage? Is it a question to be national heritage or not? Of course there's, you know, the national has many implications. But as far as this act can protect these areas, or at least if someone wants to enter the area, they need to communicate it by law, you know, those folks to who it belong. I think it's a little step. We have one question here. And then after we'll take a question from the planetary cohort. Yeah. Okay. I'm going to try and be brief. Hi, Paulo. Thank you so much for your presentation. My first question was actually going to be about ethnographic images and the violence of the colonial archive and the way that it gets deployed in your documentation. But I think that that's already covered in some of the questions around deploying colonial technologies to try and do decolonial work. So my second question actually relates to the question of return. So I think that there was something really interesting about staging this intervention in Venice to an international audience that understands and reads architecture in a particular way. And I was wondering how you're thinking or if you're thinking about different registers of return and what it would mean to re-stage an exhibition like this in Brazil with indigenous communities and how they read the work and whether that begins to open up ways of thinking differently about archival practices that move beyond the colonial archive. Wow. Yeah. The first question is very important and maybe we can discuss it later because and I discussed this a lot with Gabriela de Matos as well, you know, how we expose colonialism without re-enacting the violence, right? You know, and habitat, there's habitat, there's lots of that. And this is a very important question for me. The question of, you know, I also have to say, you know, the pavilion was made in a very short period of time, little budget, you know, and if we could have sort of involved much more communities in the process that we are doing, it would have been much, much better, you know. But for us, it was very important that, you know, some of it at least, you know, where we could do it, could come back and have a sort of effect on the communities that we are working with. And there's this story, which is this archive that we built. And there's another story. We work with Tejero Casa Branca. I didn't show Casa Branca. It's a condom-like space, Casa Branca, and they were being threatened because their land was being sort of taken by urban speculation. And while we were there, that was the first thing that they told us, you know, there was like big building that was being sort of built upon that land. And we work towards giving visibility to that particular situation. And then after the biennial, after we got the price, I don't know if it's a coincidence or not, the minister said that the building has to be demolished. Right? So a little victory that maybe, you know, the sort of visibility also helped. And we brought the lion to the community. That was the first gesture when we got the price. I didn't show this, but it was also very important for us that the first place that we brought the price was to this community. You know, it's a very emotional moment when everyone is talking about how, you know, the price came to ally itself with the struggle for the land, to protect their land, you know. And I think that, you know, this idea of return, what would be to do this exhibition in Brazil? We are trying to do that. And I wonder, you know, what would be, what would be, how it would be read? Because in Brazil, it's, you know, it tends to be read for the architecture community as something like, you know, we are in this moment of representation and it's important to have, you know, indigenous folks and Afro-Brazilian people in an exhibition like this, but this is not really architecture at the end, at the end, at the end. You know, this doesn't really matter, you know. So we want to kind of forget about this, you know, and how can we sort of really think, you know, and that what we are trying to expose in that is something that, you know, of course it's about representation, you know, of course it's about, you know, telling other histories of Brazil, but how can we sort of, you know, ground this as something that's meaningful for architecture itself and how we can also sort of, you know, bring those people with whom we have been working within the world of architecture. And I think, you know, Gabi de Matos has been doing this for a long time, you know, sort of, especially with Black females architects, you know, she's kind of mobilized in this field. I think, you know, in my work, you know, in working with indigenous leaders like, for example, Ailton Krenaki, you know, they have been more and more sort of heard within the architecture community. The extent to it, this is going to challenge some of the hegemonic histories that are taught in schools that we sort of consume is another question. And because I also feel that there is already a sort of reaction to that, you know, of the establishment of architectural theory and concepts there, you know, there's an already reaction. So you see, you know, how the next Brazilian biennial is being shaped, almost a reaction to, you know, to keep their place of power, I would say, you know. So, yeah, you know, I think this return to Brazil is also a sort of, you know, it's very political in many different ways because, you know, it sort of questions so many sort of hegemonic histories, but also questions, you know, places of power, you know, within architectural scores, within architectural academia, within architectural practice. Clarice. Yes, we have a question from Kiweku Adu Atoa, is asking, just as some portions of the Afro-Brazilian population practice canubla, how does your practice attempt to reach levels of syncretism in contemporary social spatial forms? Syncretism? Syncretism. You know, my experience with people from, you know, from Canubla is very new, you know, we did this work in the biennial, we are very received by the community. We feel that, you know, after this, things are more connected with, you know, and that the work could also ally with the struggle, but it's not, I cannot reply to that, I feel, because it's really not about, you know, sort of reproducing something that is there in my practice. It's much more on the, you know, on that, on that evocacy front, right? So the minute that we are there, it's, you know, this Canubla space, it's the first black monument recognized in Brazil, only 1988, only after the re-democratization. So you see, they were sort of, you know, framing colonial architecture until that moment, right? So, you know, after that we have the recognition of this space, and this is the first Canubla space in Brazil. So Brazil was born there, you know, it's kind of amazing. Brazil, you know, everything cultures, it's, you know, everything is there, you know, it's kind of such a powerful space, and they were losing land, you know, they were not being protected, you know, and it was like for us to say, well, we need to sort of respond to that, and what are the demands that are happening here now, you know, we went there, we hear then, you know, we understood that this was something fundamental, and then we commission a film that talks about this, right? So I think Gabi would have a different response to that, because she's working a lot with Afro-Brazilian architecture, and she incorporates lots of these elements in her architectural practice, but I see my relationship with those spaces very much on the advocacy front. Any other questions from the audience? Hi, thank you for your presentation. I'm also a member of the cohort, and so the other day I was reading your interview on Arc Plus, the one that we members of the cohort have been provided to arrive in case somebody didn't know you, to arrive prepared today, and I read something that kind of, I don't want to say shocked me, but really made me think a lot. You say the expression of knowledge is at the core of colonialism, modernism, appropriation of the indigenous motives, objects, and craft goes back to the opprimitivism that was developed by the early avant-garde, and I said, okay, perfect, yes, makes sense. But then what in a certain sense shocked me was, I had in my mind the image of Jona Friedman, I'm sure you know Jona Friedman, thinking about his house, all covered in, let's call them primitive drawings that he made, or his books where he used a sort of primitive graphic, and he makes it as a critique to contemporary communication. And so at that point I said, okay, is this a sort of colonialist appropriation he does? I mean, I don't consider Jona Friedman knowing his stuff, his thinking, his ideas as a colonialist, but you never know, sometimes we have some mindsets that are stuck, and so I was curious to know, first of all, your opinion about his graphics, the ways he communicates and critiques, and then I was curious to know, related to this, so how, if we want to, I mean, understand probably the problem is also using the word primitive, it makes a divide between extracting expropriation and not expropriation, but how can we use indigenous culture without falling, because indigenous culture is a rich, I mean, cultures, plural, they are a rich context of cultures, and they can teach us a lot to rewrite the present, the future, so how can we use them without falling into colonialism? As a designer, I'm asking for example. Thank you, thank you for the question, your name, sorry? Valerio, I don't know these drawings by Jona Friedman, so I cannot comment on them, but what I can say is that this is a kind of, you know, it has always been, you know, taking the primitive or that which is outside to make a critique of society, right, in that way. I think what usually happens is that this is very much on the sort of symbolic level in a certain way, without seeing the structures that are behind, you know, those sort of relationships. So, you know, Lina did that, she was looking, say, you know, that's interesting, and I think it had an important role in that moment, right? It might have an important role, you know, in the way even she was imprisoned by the military dictatorship, they, she organized an exhibition called The Hand of the Brazilian Worker, which was about popular art and was banned by the Brazilian dictatorship. I talk about this in the book, you know, it's not a condemnation, I say that, you know, she was a militant, but I am in a different moment, right, and you know, for me it's important to understand this historical process and work on a kind of different key, right, and expose that to a certain extent, it was a process, even if not consciously, complicit with a colonial extractive, you know, dimension. And in its complicity, it sort of legitimized somehow this colonial process, right? And the moment that we, I don't know how many decades later, are still sort of telling the same story without sort of talking about the structures that are behind that, I think we are sort of, you know, extending the colonial narrative by other means, right, which is something that has nothing to do maybe with Lina, you know, in my book, when I question the racist thought of Lucio Costa, I say something like this, it's kind of natural that he was a racist. He grew in France, he was a man of the 19th century, the high period of eugenic politics in Brazil, you know, what is not natural is that we at this moment in history don't say anything about it, you know, because nobody has said, so, you know, that's the question, the racism is here, right? You know, so that's how I would reply, and what we can do, I mean, I think, I think first of all, what we should not do, which is to think that you can offer solutions for, you know, those communities and come with your apparatus of design and say, you know, they don't have this, they don't have that, they know, it's like they're usually the sort of approach of designers or, you know, saying, or, you know, many sort of new forms of appropriation that, you know, use these sort of technologies and say, you know, oh, that's interesting, that's interesting. And to really acknowledge that, you know, design in many different ways that most sophisticated technologies of dealing with land and landscape are embedded in those knowledge, right? So how are we going to protect this knowledge, you know, how are we going to protect those lands, right? So I would say, you know, how can you, as a designer, instead of providing solutions, you can come as an ally, right? You can understand the context and come as an ally, you know. Laura, please. One thing to what you're saying and maybe build on what, on Emmanuel's question, there was this really moving moment in your presentation where the video of the man sort of pointing, you know, to sort of these, the things that used to be there and my uncle used to live there and my own, you know, I can't remember what he said. But there's a real urgency, I think, in the work that you're doing because, I mean, what I find so amazing is the, is the ethno, I don't know what you want to call it, but speaking to people who are speaking languages which are disappearing and built into that is a very qualitative way of so-called measuring, you know, disappearance because, you know, language is measured, it's endangered when the child can't speak to the grandfather or something like that. So it's like, it goes generationally, it's not measured at all, it's a very qualitative way. And then your video really links a spatial, that spatial right of, you know, trying to explain what, you know, the right to the forest and the right to everything where you wouldn't remember that, that would disappear when the language the person is speaking disappears and that person dies, you know. So I don't know, there's a real urgency, you can't scale it up, there's not, you know, I hate the word anyway, but I don't know how you start bringing those things together because I think it is about translation and it's about a different kind of tool, it's not about, you know, the image interpretation and, you know, gritting and, you know, you were sort of showing that to us with such certainty, right, we had to believe you and I didn't believe you until I heard that person, you know. And so I don't know, it's a, there's some urgency in it but I don't know, I don't quite know how to put words to it but it's beautiful work. Just to add one minor thing to that though, I feel like, to me what's fascinating is that it's not just the translation from Indigenous knowledge systems to, let's say, dominant architectural discourse but it's actually also decoding the colonial which I find the most interesting because I mean throughout your presentation it became very clear that the colonial project couldn't help but to document itself. So we just, we just need to know where to look and a lot of your reading of images is a way to basically decode and unpack that and make it very explicit. Yeah. Absolutely, absolutely and yeah and I think, you know, just to bring Sylvia here, Sylvia Rivera here, Kanki here, when she talks about the image, you know, and she says sometimes, you know, public discourse and what do you hear and even like what images say they veil, right, they hide but there's something I think in the emails and in the archives and in the archives that we need to build, right, which is not sort of traditional archives but, you know, in memory of the earth, I say the earth is a kind of archive, what we can read in that archive and how, you know, it can really sort of help us to sort of decode as I mentioned, you know, colonialism but I agree with you, it's amazing to see how, you know, colonialism is a system of image making, is a system of creating a regime of visibility, is a system that, you know, documented itself, even knowing paintings in history of art, in curatorial practice and things like that and I guess I'm very much interested in that, you know, and trying to read those documents and materials and, you know, and find ways of connecting them, you know, in different sort of layers and, you know, in oral histories and documents and sort of assemble and tell other histories, right, and kind of in a boomerang sort of, you know, how we can sort of see the role of architecture in that and we can sort of, you know, think in different ways about our disciplines and our practices and our theories. Here's time for one more quick question. Are there other questions as well then we can combine them? Okay, yeah. Hi, thank you very much for your presentation, Paolo and Pancho Brown. I thought it was a fascinating project on incorporating the tools of preservation and designation to protect a particular territory and benefits of a community and I thought it was, it was something very interesting that other communities, for example in New York, have been doing, especially in the African American communities in Brooklyn, to preserve some neighborhoods against realtors. And I wonder, is there a reason why the scale of the architecture of these domes was not included in your research or part of your argument and you just keep it kind of like a territorial scale as a very excelled scale to just create that argument for preservation, though the scale of the architecture itself of that, those domes was not part of the argument or that would be later or what, how that fit into your argument. I'm very curious just because it's such a strong shape and at the end of the day it seems to be the architecture. So I'm very curious about what this unique shape didn't make, did it make it to your research and how that will flourish or it will or not. Thank you. Thank you. Should we combine it with Mark's question? Is that okay? Maybe not. At our mutual risk, at our risk. No, it was just a thought. At some moment I learned so much as always from you and your colleagues and also from the very fact that you have colleagues that you work in this groupings of allied spirits and so on. At one point if I heard you right you said something like that you're not an ethnographer, you're an advocate and then I thought that's right at one level but at another level I'm not sure I agree. I think you are an ethnographer of another kind of forest which is all these images. So I think that at one level normally you would expect that the language to describe colonial authority would like colonial authority be kind of hierarchical, etc. But it's also possible to understand colonial authority as being a mystical force that generates anyway why we call it authority, why is it a power? Like we actually use a language, a kind of almost animus language to describe power and I suppose we could detail off to Mark's or something and then exactly describe the mechanism for this sort of mystification. But it seems to me you have developed a kind of expert ability to read the shimmering rivers, you know, the rocks and the flowing waters of authority and therefore in a certain way you have taken your skills as it were from the forest into the master's house and maybe I'm just echoing I thought very beautiful questions that you were receiving tonight that you could then at a certain moment allow yourself to start singing or dancing or like there would be other protocols that you could invoke that would allow you to see the spirit world of authority in its mysterious forms and so on and that might be quite interesting to locate other master's houses and mistress houses and non houses and actually locate a kind of hidden topography and as you have so beautifully done you know in the other direction so I kind of see a lot of mirror effects in your work that are really and every time you answer the question I thought you describe this mirroring very carefully you're thinking about this a lot the way it works in both directions and maybe I'm only saying the heading back towards authority might be a forest thinking project whereas moving towards the forest as it's been observed by your question is you adopt a kind of language of surveillance of archiving documenting gridding and so on knowing that you want to take things back you know what I mean but I don't know I wouldn't I wouldn't I would be interested in in a kind of and and and here's a fantasy to end that if if all of that made half sense it might it might undermine that authority like it could be a decolonizing approach would be to kind of segment it and take away its own sort of self-control in that sense you know what I mean there's sort of a romantic um anyway I'm just babbling on thank you I started this one thank you for the question the domes are somehow there they were modeled we model we look at very carefully to them but there is a way in which you know and one learn this when you are there and also by reading you know different sort of ethnographies the house is really not about the dome you know there's the inside and outside it's very complex it's you know there's an interview or conversation I did with an archaeological archaeologist friend of mine you know and he he sort of explained to me you know how the forest is the house this is a project that also showed Venice it's called an architectural botany and William Ballet is a botanical you know figure keep figure that you know actually developed this idea of cultural forest and he really shows how the village is the forest and the forest is the village you know so therefore we took like kind of territorial approach also because it's very much about land you know it's very much about land and marketing for the for the question comment I don't know if I I can respond to that but I can definitely take it as as a guide for the future and how this is going to to unfold and and definitely you know I think you are you're right in a way that this this mirroring you know I'm interesting that and somehow I kind of just realize it in doing this lecture you know because I said you know how I'm going to talk about this and and there's this mirroring and kind of going back and forth and you know and the sort of ability to be at both spaces at the same time and making them then the sort of in dialogue and and I guess that my next project which is called earthly memorials it's kind of heading towards that so but that's next chapter. Thank you Paolo and I want to thank everyone. Thank you. So our our next affirmation will be November 20th so not until a few weeks from now so hope to see you all then.