CONSTRUCTION, OCCUPATION CURATORIAL INTERVIEW IN ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS
GRASSROOTS INFRASTRUCTURES THAT AFFECT EACH OTHER
An interview with curators Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, Juliana Caffé, and Yudi Rafael on the exhibition "Occupation, Construction".
“Construction, Occupation” presents the works of 24 artists and collectives that engage art’s potential to shape the city through the power of community. The exhibition’s curators Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, Juliana Caffé, and Yudi Rafael talk about the social contexts, languages, and poetics grounded in the show.
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 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.
Filme Frente [Collective Front] (2017), Ícaro Lira, Isadora Brant, Fernanda Taddei
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.
Read the full interview here
An interview with curators Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, Juliana Caffé, and Yudi Rafael on the exhibition "Occupation, Construction".
“Construction, Occupation” presents the works of 24 artists and collectives that engage art’s potential to shape the city through the power of community. The exhibition’s curators Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, Juliana Caffé, and Yudi Rafael talk about the social contexts, languages, and poetics grounded in the show.
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 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.
Filme Frente [Collective Front] (2017), Ícaro Lira, Isadora Brant, Fernanda TaddeiThe 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.
Read the full interview here
auflynn [at] arts.ucla.edu
Alex Ungprateeb Flynn is an Associate Professor at the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, University of California, Los Angeles. Working as an anthropologist and curator, Alex’s practice explores the intersection of ethnographic and curatorial modes of enquiry. Researching collaboratively with activists, curators and artists in Brazil since 2007, Alex explores the prefigurative potential of art in community contexts, prompting the theorisation of fields such as the production of knowledge, the pluriversal, and the social and aesthetic dimensions of form.