We are thrilled to republish Des-Habitat on the occasion of the Brazilian pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennial, curated by Paulo Tavares and Gabriela de Matos. Entitled Terra, the exhibition—which in May was awarded a Golden Lion—challenges the construction of the Brazilian capital, Brasília, which was built by appropriating Indigenous lands—an issue also taken up in Tavares’s engaging monograph Des-Habitat.

With Des-Habitat, Paulo Tavares intervenes in Habitat—the arts and design magazine edited by Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi in the 1950s. At the time, the magazine propagated images of modern art and architecture, but also images of popular and Indigenous crafts and artifacts. In this way, it simultaneously introduced its audience to the vocabulary of modernism and vernacular and native forms of cultural expression. In Des-Habitat, Brazilian architect, curator, and activist Tavares investigates how the aesthetic language of Habitat framed such objects and images. The project mobilizes a series of design strategies central also to Habitat itself, such as re-appropriation, collage, and displacement. By focusing on the context from which materials were originally taken Tavares shows how, by virtue of its modern visual language, Habitat functioned as a framing device to conceal its own coloniality, and offers readers an engaging history dealing with questions of oppression, complicity, and decolonization. -Publisher

Text in English and Portugese