Terra. Brazilian Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Biennale, Golden Lion for Best National Participation

Paulo Tavares is an architect who lives in Brasília, where he is a professor at the Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, University of Brasília. His work has been featured in various exhibitions and publications worldwide, including Harvard Design Magazine, the Oslo Architecture Triennale, the Istanbul Design Biennial, and the 32nd São Paulo Biennial – Living Uncertainty.

Tavares’s design and pedagogic practice spans different territories, social geographies, and media. He taught spatial and visual cultures at the School of Architecture, Design, and Arts at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Ecuador in Quito, and prior to that led the MA program at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he also completed his PhD. In 2017 he created the agency autonoma, a platform dedicated to spatial research and intervention. Tavares is a long-term collaborator of Forensic Architecture and he was recently a fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

Tavares was co-curator of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennale (USA) and is currently a member of the curating board of the second edition of the Sharjah Architecture Triennale 2023 (UAE). He has been curator of the projects Acts of Repair (Preston Thomas Memorial Symposium, Cornell University (USA), and Climate Emergency > Emergence, at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) in Lisbon (Portugal). Tavares He is the author of several texts and books that question the colonial legacies of modernity, including Ley Forestal/Selva Jurídica (2014), Des-Habitat (2019), Memória da terra (2019), Was Lucio Costa racista? (2020) and Non-human rights (2022).

André Tavares (Porto, 1976) is an architect, researcher at the School of Architecture at the University of Minho, and programmer of architecture at Garagem Sul in the Centro Cultural de Belém. He has been running Dafne Editora since 2006, exploring publishing as a form of cultural and architectural practice. and was director of the journal Arquitectos between 2013 and 2015 and general curator, with Diogo Seixas Lopes, of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale 2016, The Form of Form. He is the author of several books, including The Anatomy of the Architectural Book (Lars Müller/Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2016).

He holds a doctorate from the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, where in 2009 he completed his dissertation on the presence of reinforced concrete in architects’ design strategies in the early 20th century.

Resulting from his research in Mendrisio, Paris and São Paulo, he has published several books addressing the international circulation of knowledge among Portuguese-speaking architects, including Arquitectura Antituberculose (Faup-publicações, 2005), Os fantasmas de Serralves (Dafne, 2007), Novela Bufa do Ufanismo em Concreto (Dafne, 2009), and Duas obras de Januário Godinho (Dafne, 2012). He co-edited Mark Wigley’s Casa da Música/Porto (CdM, 2008) and Eduardo Souto de Moura’s Floating Images (Lars Müller, 2012).

Gabriela de Matos is an architect and urban planner. Born in Vale do Rio Doce in Minas Gerais, she creates multidisciplinary projects with the aim of promoting and highlighting Brazilian architectural and urban culture from a race and gender perspective. She graduated from the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of PUC Minas in 2010 and in 2016 she specialized in sustainability and management of the built environment at UFMG. Master's student at Diversitas - Center for the Study of Diversities, Intolerances and Conflicts of USP's Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences (FFLCH), currently teaching undergraduate classes in architecture and urbanism at the Escola da Cidade.

She directs the Architecture Studio – Gabriela de Matos, created in 2014. She is vice president of the Institute of Architects of Brazil in the department of São Paulo. She is the founder of the Arquitetas Negras project, which maps the production of black Brazilian architects. She investigates the architecture produced in Africa and its diaspora with a focus on Brazil. Among others, she proposes actions that promote the debate on gender and race in architecture as a way of giving visibility to the issue. She is the publisher of the book Arquitetas negras vol.1, which integrates important collections such as the Washington Library (United States) and winner of the IAB-SP Award in the Best Architecture Publications category.

She was a collaborator of the Rebel Architette collective in 2019 (Italy). She participated as a speaker at the UIA – International Union of Architects in 2021. In the 2021 edition of the CASACOR exhibition, she signed the welcoming atmosphere, entitled Espaço Agô. She was awarded Architect of the Year 2020 by IAB RJ. She was a jury member of the Ibero-American Architecture Biennial 2022.