Architectural Echotones

For this year’s participation in Berlin Art Week, and in the framework of the traveling exhibition of the 36th São Paulo Biennale in Berlin, Savvy Contemporary invites the Brazilian collective Vilanismo to take over the Wedding art space.

Founded in 2021 in São Paulo, Vilanismo, a brotherhood composed of 10 Black artists all inhabiting several peripheries of the city, emerged not only as an artistic collective but also as a counter-movement. One that seeks, in a climate of exclusion and abusive extraction, to challenge historical stereotypes imposed on black bodies, and create spaces of resistance and gathering rooted within Afro-indigenous knowledge systems.

Leaning into Savvy Contemporary’s subtitle and both institutions’ shared interests around space-making and experimentation, the project is conceived not as a mere exhibition that displays (art)works as finished products, but rather as a laboratory that invites Vilanismo to inhabit Savvy as a site of experimentation. One subject to transformation, and formed to the measure of the people. As a result, Savvy Contemporary becomes a living space, a working studio, a gallery, … an echo chamber that pulsates to the rhythm of Vilanismo’s social, political, and artistic practices back home in São Paulo, such that the audience, upon entering the space in Berlin, finds themself immersed in a resonant gesture echoing between both cities. 

The notion of echoing, or being in relation, forms the backbone of Architectural Echotones. From an urbanistic point of view, both spaces share similarities—Vilanismo primarily operates from the outskirts of São Paulo, just like Savvy Contemporary, due to its geographical location in Wedding, a peripheral neighbourhood. These situated perspectives inform a shared endeavour, namely the reclaiming of the notion ›margin‹ and the questioning of any stereotypical ideas associated with it. Doing so, both institutions address the tangible and material conditions tied to inhabiting the periphery and pose the fundamental question: what does it mean to make cultural work beyond the centre? 

Bringing together a constellation of practices spanning installations, paintings, drawings, video works, and in-situ performances, ›Architectural Echotones‹ aims to approach this question.