Aparelhamento Discovered A Legal Loophole to Protect Brazil’s Housing

This article appears in the columns section of frieze 240, ‘Sleight of Hand’

Aparelhamento emerged in 2016 as a network of artists and activists responding to the parliamentary coup process that has affected Brazil ever since. That year, we organized an exhibition and auction at the headquarters of the National Arts Foundation (Funarte) in São Paulo, to raise funds for political actions against both the government’s decision to close the foundation, and the ousting of president Dilma Rousseff. The former objective was achieved, enabling the implementation of a cultural programme that kept Funarte operational under a cultural self-management model.

We later learned that the artworks being auctioned off – as well as those still hanging in Funarte’s exhibition space – created a problem for police trying to repossess the building since, per federal legislation, the municipality is responsible for protecting occupiers’ belongings: in this case, commercially valuable artworks, which required insurance and guardianship they could not afford. The auction served as a sort of shield to prevent the eviction that was looming.

A year later, we began collaborating with Movimento Sem Teto do Centro (MSTC) – an organization founded by Carmen Silva in 2001, comprising more than 2,000 people who work to mobilize and organize homeless families fighting for decent housing in downtown São Paulo. We’re keen to support MSTC and to acknowledge the movement’s ideas about how culture can merge with health, education and social rights to transform our relationship with society. While we recognize housing as a right per the 1988 Brazilian Constitution, we consider it through a broader lens: not just as a roof over a person’s head, but also as access to healthcare, education, infrastructure and culture in order to live safely and comfortably in a large metropolis like São Paulo.

The artist Carla Caffé invited us to collaborate with MSTC for the São Paulo Architecture Biennial in 2017. We decided to build a communal kitchen inside one of MSTC’s occupied buildings, Ocupação 9 de Julho, which housed the National Social Security Institute until 1971, and has subsequently been thrice occupied by the MSTC – most recently since 2016. When the kitchen renovation was completed in late summer 2017, we organized a celebration lunch which was so successful that we went on to hold many more over the following weekends. By the end of the year, we were serving more than 300 customers at each meal, which wasn’t sustainable with the set-up we had. So, from 2018, we offered one lunch a month, which was attended by loads of people, alongside which we organized more than 40 actions, including poetry readings and live music.

For us, the natural next step was to launch a gallery by employing the collective’s experience with the art system. We heard rumours of eviction actions against housing buildings coordinated by social movements, particularly Ocupação 9 de Julho, and remembered what had occurred at Funarte in 2016. While we’d already discussed transforming the building into a cultural centre, we met as a group and decided to turn it into a commercial gallery, Galeria Reocupa. The majority of us agreed that the space should adopt an anti-capitalist stance and seek to hack the art system from within by creating a non-profit commercial space which we could use to raise funds for MSTC.

Currently on display through the end of January, the group show ‘Refoundation’ features works by 116 artists and serves as a manifesto for our project. While the word ‘refoundation’ can be interpreted to mean an act of re-creation, it might also describe a process of deepening. With this show, we call for an urgent review of the political ruptures in our shared historical narrative, recognition that the administration is making decisions that benefit the few to the detriment of the majority, and acknowledgement of the power relations that have created a hegemonic way of thinking in Brazil, suffused with partial truths.

Galeria Reocupa is a platform for people with shared views on micropolitics and purposeful art. The gallery is run non-hierarchically: all decisions are made collectively during meetings. We look only towards the immediate future, answering to urgent demands. Not having a long-term agenda is challenging, but it’s what keeps the gallery open to reimagining. Our relationship with MSTC is continually in flux since both groups are always being re-formulated. We don’t know what the future of our work will be together because we’re constructing the future step by step, day by day.

As told to Marko Gluhaich

Members of the Aparelhamento network typically express themselves in a collective voice, as a whole, without specifically identifying individual members.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 240 with the headline ‘Occupy São Paulo’

_{Main image: ‘Refoundation’, 2023, exhibition view. Courtesy: Ding Musa}