Occupation, Resistance and Art: Recent Artist-led Occupations in Brazil

A panel discussion on the experience of artist-led occupations in Brazil, with four members of São Paulo’s Ouvidor 63, the largest artistic occupation in Latin America.

Artist-led occupations are a defining feature of the contemporary art scene in Brazil, especially in São Paulo, the country’s vast cultural and financial capital, and one of the world’s most dynamic cities for contemporary art. Occupations in Brazil have a long history, both as a necessity for housing, and as a form of cultural resistance. The 2023 São Paulo Biennale was all about cultural and artistic occupations, defining both its content and organisation, turning a formal institution into a temporary site of resistance. This lecture brings to Edinburgh for the first time four members of São Paulo’s Ouvidor 63, the largest artist-led occupation in Latin America – a ten-storey downtown building where hundreds of artists live and work. They will discuss the place of artist-led occupations in Brazil, and their potential as a model for cultural resistance elswhere, and the decade-long experience of Ouvidor 63 in particular. If you are interested in art as activism, art as cultural resistance, or occupations in general, this is for you.

The panel is Pedro Fiori Arantes, Professor of Art History at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP) and director of Projeto Ocupações, with the Ouvidor 63 artists and Projeto Ocupações members Tássia do Nascimento, Sol Calderón Vargas, and Micaela Yañez. The chair is Richard Williams, Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures, who has published extensively on Brazil, and has been involved with Projeto Ocupações since 2022.

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