Freeloaders in Europe! It’s a great pleasure to recommend three (!) upcoming talks by Brazilian architect, curator, activist—and long-time K. Verlag collaborator Paulo Tavares—who will shortly be in Europe from Brazil. These rare appearances resonate closely with two key publications realized with us: his vital contribution to intercalations 4: The Word for World is Still Forest (2017), and the monograph Des-Habitat (2019), now in its third edition.
His sprint of three talks—in Brussels, Barcelona, and Madrid—further Tavares’s ongoing work, with his multidisciplinary initiative autônoma, to decolonize the spatial imagination and confront the epistemic violence embedded in architectural modernism—whether through the erasure of Indigenous Amazonian architectures or the visual grammars of exhibition design and media.
Settler Modernism
27 March 2025 at CIVA, Brussels
As part of the exhibition pre-architectures
In Brussels, Paulo Tavares addresses the visual politics of modernism and its colonial entanglements through two multimedia installations currently on view at CIVA: Des-Habitat Didática and An Architectural Botany.
Des-Habitat Didática explores the cultural milieu surrounding Habitat, the magazine co-created by Lina Bo Bardi and Pietro Maria Bardi, and its role within the pedagogical vision of MASP (São Paulo Museum of Art). Through appropriation and subversion of exhibition architecture, printed matter, and graphic design, the project reveals how visual media masked modernism’s colonial ideologies. In this regard, it’s worth taking a look at Tavares’s exquisite publication Des-Habitat.
An Architectural Botany, in turn, revisits the photographic archive of ethno-botanist William Balée, produced during his groundbreaking research with the Ka’apor people in the 1980s. Gazing through an architectural lens, Tavares re-reads these images to question the ideological foundations of “nature” and the modernist conceptions of primitivism and “primitive architecture.”
Arquitecturas del bosque
31 March 2025 at CCCB, Barcelona
As part of the program Amazonias, Políticas de la selva
In this talk, Paulo Tavares challenges the long-standing dichotomy between forest and city. Drawing on his architectural investigations in the Amazon, he reveals the forest as a profoundly constructed and inhabited space—an architecture of the forest, shaped by Indigenous knowledge systems and social forms. Rather than viewing the jungle as wild and chaotic, in contrast to the ordered city, Tavares proposes the forest as a deliberate, layered, and historic spatial project—one that forces a fundamental rethinking of “city,” “heritage,” and “ruin.”
This perspective calls for a decolonization of architecture and design—one that foregrounds land-based, interspecies practices and unravels the persistent division between nature and culture.
This discussion, moderated by Cristina Goberna (in Spanish), is in direct resonance with his essay “The Political Nature of the Forest: A Botanic Archaeology of Genocide," accessible in open-access via the links provided here.
Earth Works (toward a reparation architecture)
1 April 2025 at the Greenhouse of Arganzuela Crystal Palace
Paseo de la Chopera, 10, Madrid
Organized as part of TBA21’s public program Organismo Year One in Madrid, Paulo Tavares will elaborate on his concept of Reparation Architecture—a form of conduct and affective relation that interrogates the power structures inherited through architectural traditions. Opening such a reparative trajectory means navigating a transdisciplinary field in which architectural thought and action manifest in multidimensional articulations, ranging from design to curating, planning to publishing, and advocacy to building—all in service of sustaining a vital relationship with the Earth and its transformations.
Drawing on his recent publication La naturaleza política de la selva (Caja Negra, Buenos Aires, 2024), Tavares proposes a future in which imagining the world anew is inseparable from processes of healing, restoration, and collective commitment to human and more-than-human communities. As he writes, “If our most urgent political task today is rebuilding the world otherwise, reparations constitute a central question to architecture practice across its trans-scalar, transdisciplinary, and transmedia manifestations.”
We highly recommend attending these events if you’re in any of those cities this month. Paulo Tavares remains one of the most urgent and visionary thinkers working at the intersection of architecture, ecology, and decolonial practice today!
Publications with/by Paulo Tavares with K. Verlag
– intercalations 4: The Word for World is Still Forest (2017)
– Des-Habitat (2019; 3rd edition, 2023)
For more information on the discursive programs see civa.brussels/en/exhibitions-events/paulo-tavares ; cccb.org/es/actividades/ficha/paulo-tavares/246804 ; and museothyssen.org/en/activities/earth-works-toward-reparation-architecture-paulo-tavares
Photo above by Filip Dujardin; courtesy of CIVA, Brussels