We are pleased to announce Paulo Tavares’s participation in pre-architectures, an ongoing exhibition at CIVA in Brussels (October 6, 2024–March 30, 2025). Tavares’s contribution to the group show—a newly commissioned installation—extends the critical inquiries of his book Des-Habitat, which we published as part of the international research initiative Bauhaus Imaginista. The installation entitled Des-Habitat Didática not only refers to the book but integrates its physical pages, transforming the publication into a spatial intervention that challenges viewers to confront both their own gaze and the legacies of architecture’s complicity in colonial extraction.
Des-Habitat scrutinizes Brazil’s modernist aesthetics and their entanglements with colonial histories, taking Lina Bo Bardi’s influential 1950s magazine Habitat as a focal point. Through re-appropriation, collage, and textual displacement, Tavares exposes how Habitat’s modern visual language, though celebrated, obscured the violent colonial contexts from which its featured objects and materials often originated. His critique extends to broader architectural practices, questioning the complicity of design in systems of oppression and displacement while offering decolonial strategies for rethinking architecture and its histories.
At CIVA, pre-architectures examines practices that exist outside or in opposition to conventional architectural frameworks. Tavares’s contribution exemplifies this premise, drawing attention to architecture’s dual role as a witness to and instrument of colonial domination. His work reminds us that the built environment is not neutral—it is shaped by histories of extraction and erasure. By unfolding Des-Habitat into a visual palimpsest and spatial installation, Tavares creates a dialogue between text, space, and image, compelling us to critically engage with how the historical forces embedded in these media continue to shape the present.
This project follows Tavares’s participation in the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, where he co-curated the Brazilian Pavilion under the theme Terra. That project reimagined architecture through Indigenous epistemologies and earth-bound ethics, emphasizing land as a living being worthy of respect and care, rather than a commodity for exploitation.
Through his books, exhibitions, and spatial advocacy, Paulo’s practice continually advances decolonial methodologies and envisions alternative futures grounded in justice and care.
Top image: Paulo Tavares autonoma, Pacificaçao. Des-Habitat Didática, digital print, screen print, 2024. Courtesy of the artist. Second image: Exhibition view, pre-architectures, CIVA, 2024. Paulo Tavares, autonoma Des-Habitat Didática, 2019–24. Photo by Filip Dujardin. Courtesy CIVA and Paulo Tavares. Bottom: Book covers of Paulo Tavares, Des-Habitat, K. Verlag 2019/23.
For more information on the exhibition pre-architectures, curated by Silvia Franceschini, Nikolaus Hirsch, and Spyros Papapetros, see civa.brussels.