“Construction, Occupation” presents the works of 24 artists and collectives that engage art’s potential to shape the city through the power of community. Show’s curators Yudi Rafael, Juliana Caffé, and Alex Ungprateeb Flynn talk about the social contexts, languages, and poetics grounded in the exhibition.
Communities, like the arts, are shaped by specific social, cultural, and economic conditions rather than existing as abstract concepts. How does the exhibition “Construction, Occupation” map the intersections of these conditions, and what criteria guided this process?
This exhibition project unfolds from our experience curating the 2016-2017 Cambridge Artistic Residency (CARe) in the occupied former Hotel Cambridge in downtown São Paulo. The building occupied and renovated in 2012 by the social movement Movimento Sem Teto do Centro (MSTC) was turned into social housing for more than one hundred families. Additionally, cultural activities were organized in its common spaces. The movement conceived the occupation as a site of intersection: a “storefront” for the MSTC because of its role in reorienting circulation and creating social bridges in a city marked by spatial segregation. While mainstream media often marginalizes occupations, the movement, alongside collaborators in the cultural sector, and the one-to-one encounters with people of different social and economic backgrounds, helped to shield the occupation’s residents from state violence.
At the time of the Cambridge Artistic Residency (CARe), artists were invited based on their interests in urban and artistic communities. The year-long duration of CARe and its public program helped to foster new ones, gathering artists, researchers, and activists in a moment in which the discussion around occupations was at the center of the public debate; students were occupying schools, cultural workers were occupying cultural centers, and the MSTC was the most visible force of the housing movement downtown.
From this experience, “Construction, Occupation” revisits artistic practices that resonate with, or have emerged alongside, urban occupations and housing movements. By collaborating with artists who have directly engaged with these initiatives, the exhibition emphasizes the role of artistic practices in sustaining, amplifying, and complexifying the intersection between art and communal life. The exhibition traces a longer trajectory, linking earlier collective movements from the 2000s, such as Frente 3 de Fevereiro, Contrafilé, and Bijari, through to contemporary initiatives [for example] the 9 de Julho community center and occupation.
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The title “Construction, Occupation” suggests that urban space is not fixed but collectively shaped. How does the exhibition explore the relationship between art and activism as a means of challenging urban hierarchies and reimagining public space?
“Construction, Occupation” doesn’t try to replicate what happened in São Paulo but rather share its pulse – to make visible the artistic language of that very particular form of incremental social change. We are not interested in spectacle but in process. The project represents the continuation of a layered process initiated within an occupied building, sustained through collective struggle, and now resonating within the distinct geography of Los Angeles. The exhibition highlights how collectivity isn’t a moment but a method, a mode of working, imagining, and building together.
Rather than positioning transformation as a distant aspiration, the artistic communities in which the artists in this show are embedded put forward prefigurative politics – the idea that political and social change does not merely follow artistic or activist efforts but is embedded within the very practices of organizing, collaborating, and collectively reimagining urban life. Since the early 2000s, there has been an incremental building of what might be called an affective infrastructure, a series of community processes held together by trust, co-presence, and shared commitments. Art in this manner becomes a relational technology: dinners, conversations, film screenings, and collective actions that allow for the symbolic re-signification of an occupied space, and a reimagination of who urban space is for. The exhibition foregrounds artistic practices that generate forms of support, exchange, and care that do not rely solely on institutional scaffolding but which are sustained through relationships, proximity, and the reinvention of space. For the extraordinary community in which the exhibition is embedded, art is not a separate realm of aesthetic activity but a longitudinal form of urban knowledge production deeply imbricated in the rhythms of occupation, housing activism, and everyday negotiation.
Urban development is often tied to cycles of displacement, erasure, and gentrification. How does the exhibition address the role of memory in contested spaces, and how can art serve as a tool for reclaiming narratives that are at risk of being forgotten?
São Paulo is a city undergoing constant demolition and reconstruction and the sense of the fragility and contingency of memory is very much at stake. Explode!’s Procession (2018) records the route of a commemorative walk in homage to Andréa de Mayo – a transgender and LGBTQIA+ rights activist whose burial was obscured by official records – thereby turning a fleeting act into a living monument for marginalized communities. This drive to confront invisibility also appears in Bijari’s poster campaign, Gentrification (2004), which brought public attention to the realities of eviction by marking buildings occupied by housing movements challenging sanitized media accounts of urban conflict. Meanwhile, Jaime Lauriano’s Monumento às Bandeiras (2016) reimagines a grandiose colonial monument by recasting it in metal from police cartridges, exposing underlying structures of power and violence that continue to shape collective memory.
Together, these artistic practices show how memory in contested spaces transcends mere commemoration. By actively engaging in public discourse – whether through visual, performative, or textual interventions – they carve out space for historically marginalized voices and experiences. In doing so, they offer tangible examples of how art, far from being decorative or neutral, can become a site of counter-history and communal empowerment, reclaiming urban narratives that would otherwise be overshadowed or lost.
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How do the artistic practices featured in the exhibition challenge traditional ideas of ownership, occupation, and access to public space in Los Angeles vexed by poverty and the housing crisis?
While we’re not in a position to offer a solution to Los Angeles’s housing crisis. We’re excited to establish a conversation with the city through direct connections between the artworks on view and L.A.’s history. One clear example is the mural on the external walls of the Lucas Gallery – the first piece visitors encounter – created by UCLA students using stencils designed during a workshop led by JAMAC. Another is the work by the artist Cinthia Marcelle, adapted from a piece that originally paid homage to the 2016 high school student rebellions in Brazil. This new iteration incorporates a UCLA school chair from the era of the L.A. Rebellion, highlighting how actions in different contexts can speak to one another.
Equally significant is the dialogue between the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) and Raphael Escobar, to take place after the exhibition opens as part of a public program downtown. LAPD has spent decades working with artistic approaches in Skid Row, and their biennial Walk the Talk parade resonates strongly with Escobar’s Blocolândia intervention in São Paulo's highly stigmatized Cracolândia neighborhood. We’re especially pleased that LAPD and Escobar will come together to exchange experiences and further explore these synergies, ultimately broadening the conversation around art, activism, and urban life in L.A.
Perhaps we can think of occupation, as it emerges from the projects in this exhibition, as a strategy for reimagining ownership and transforming access to public space. In fact, there are many forms of occupation: students taking over public schools, unhoused people reclaiming abandoned downtown buildings, racialized and gender-dissident bodies occupying the streets, and Indigenous groups such as the Guarani Mbya reclaiming their territories in urban areas traditionally viewed as unclaimed or “public.”
Public space is often policed and surveilled, with certain bodies and communities facing exclusion or precarity. How do the artists in this exhibition confront or subvert the politics of visibility, and what new modes of representation do they propose?
One of the questions at stake for the exhibition is the notion of visibility within the city and the interconnected dimensions of hyper-visibility that surveills and criminalizes marginalized communities; and on the other, the very same bodies being subject to erasure and illegibility.
Eliane Caffé’s Southern Sorceresses (2020), for example, explores this gaze through a feminist, queer lens. The documentary follows a diverse collective of artists and activists in São Paulo – including trans and Black members – who repurpose public spaces, to assert their right to participate fully in the complex and evolving life of the city. Their actions challenge the traditional narratives of public space as being reserved for certain bodies and social groups by engaging in the construction and transformation of spaces that have been historically policed, allowing marginalized communities to construct their narratives and representations.
In Zumbi somos nós [We are Zumbi] (2006), Frente 3 de Fevereiro takes up the memory of Zumbi, a historical figure who led one of the largest rebellions against slavery in Brazil, to address ongoing struggles faced by Afro-Brazilian communities. Through their media interventions, the collective foregrounds the struggles of Black Brazilians whose lives are often dehumanized in mainstream discourse. The work speaks to the power of public memory as a tool for resistance, highlighting how Black communities renegotiate visibility in the face of racism and systemic violence. João Simões' Segregated by time (2024) further interrogates the politics of visibility through the lens of urban transportation and social inequality in cities like São Paulo and Los Angeles. The work explores the spatial dimension of the concept of time, particularly the uneven experience of delay, as a form of racial and social segregation. By focusing on the temporal disparity in transportation systems, Simões highlights how this "delay" becomes a structural feature that reinforces marginalization.
However, while art can be a potent catalyst for challenging established power structures, it cannot, on its own, overcome the deep-seated social and political barriers that shape our world. A troubling reminder is the recent denial of a US visa for Preta Ferreira – an artist and MSTC housing rights activist featured in the exhibition – which prevented her from performing in Los Angeles on opening night. Despite the powerful dialogues artworks can generate, institutional and legal constraints expose the limits and complexities of the terrain in which these practices unfold.
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During times of economic and political crisis, public spaces become crucial sites for gathering, making, and reclaiming imagination. How does the exhibition address the role of the body as both vulnerable and resistant in the negotiation of public space?
One of the central questions in “Construction, Occupation” is how the body – particularly in contexts of collective struggle – carries both vulnerability and resistance, not as opposing forces, but as mutually constitutive conditions. In the show, we include a trajectory of artists working hand in hand with movements that articulate the right to a home: from the early 2000s, through the Hotel Cambridge occupation, and now the 9 de Julho community center and occupation, and we understand this as a layered choreography of presence. Occupying these buildings is itself a performative act – a form of claiming space through the rhythms of daily life, through gestures of repair, collaboration, protest, and celebration. These are not isolated performances, nor are they conceived only for those present. Each action – be it organizing public talks, planting a garden, or sharing a meal – carries outward reverberations that are felt in the “body public” of the wider city.
The play between “Construction” and “Occupation” finds expression in this sense, in this attention to embodied knowledge: the way bodies make space, respond to structural abandonment and collectively generate imaginative alternatives. In this way, artistic and political actions are inseparable. Rather than separating individual agency from collective impact, the works presented show how gestures become contagious, how they gather meaning through repetition, response, and co-presence. The vulnerability of each participant is not erased in collectivity but amplified as part of a broader ethical and aesthetic commitment. What emerges is not a fixed outcome, but a choreography of transformation, one that is always incomplete, always unfolding, and always calling others into being.
Simon & Garfunkel once sang, "The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls." In what ways does the exhibition highlight the prophetic dimensions of collectivity, and how does it position artistic expression as a force for social transformation?
Prophetic is a great word to experiment with! But the exhibition stems from the lived experience and creative labor of an extraordinary community of people in downtown São Paulo. One of the most powerful lessons we took from that period was how transformation doesn’t arrive fully formed. There is no singular moment when a space – or a society – shifts definitively from one state to another. What we saw, instead, was incremental but ever-expanding: words were written on the walls of the occupation – poems, slogans, visions – and over time, more and more people came not only to see those words and engage with them but to write their own.
If there is a prophetic dimension to the exhibition, then perhaps it is this, not prophecy in the sense of prediction, or the preaching of a certain path to salvation, but in the sense of bearing witness to what is possible. The prophet, like the artist, names a reality that does not yet exist but necessarily must come into being. The occupation of the Hotel Cambridge in 2012 was not only a demand for housing, it was also a demand for the right to participate in the city, for a space to live creatively and politically. And the fact that the building was eventually converted into official social housing in 2021 is not the end of that story, but a continuation of the process that art helped catalyze.
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Alex Ungprateeb Flynn is Associate Professor of Art and Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Researching collaboratively with activists, curators, and artists in Brazil since 2007. He is co-curator of Construction, Occupation at the Fowler Museum at UCLA.
Yudi Rafael is an independent curator and researcher based in São Paulo, Brazil. He has worked with art institutions in São Paulo, New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin, and is a co-curator of Construction, Occupation at the Fowler Museum at UCLA.
Juliana Caffé is an independent curator and researcher based in São Paulo, Brazil. She holds a PhD in Arts, with a focus on Art History, and has curated exhibitions across Latin America, Africa, and Europe. She is a co-curator of Construction, Occupation at the Fowler Museum at UCLA.
- Image credits
Cover: Sato, Kopke Occupation Series (2015). Photo by the artist.
Fig. 1: Ícaro Lira, Isadora Brant, and Fernanda Taddei, Filme Frente (2016) (film still)
Fig. 2: Explode!, Procession (2018). Photo credit: Carol Godefroid
Fig. 3: André Komatsu, Realidade perecível / Perishable Reality 13 (The Dream) (2017-2025). Photo credit: André Komatsu
