A Casa é Sua / Make Yourself at Home

“The journey of this exhibition started on a summer evening in 2017. I was in Kherebt Selem…in the South of Lebanon when I received a phone call from Mani Pournaghi, Director of the Goethe-Institut in Beirut. He asked me if I was willing to embark on a curatorial research trip to Rio de Janeiro; a wildly unexpected invitation. (Little did he know of my Carioca childhood history of exile to Copacabana). With his colleague Robin Mallick, Director of the Goethe Institut in Rio de Janeiro, they sought to further investigate an intuition they had. Very few directors of comparable cultural institutions take such risks, let’s admit it… But both were convinced of the necessity of further investigating South-South cultural relations and intellectual alliances between Brazil and Lebanon, which already shared a rich but poorly researched diasporic connection. They programmed the first research trip of a cross-cultural exchange, and selected playwright, critic and philosopher Patrick Pessoa to be my fellow conspirator. We matched in a way I did not expect. We opened our homes to each other, home being our respective apartments in Jardim Botanico in Rio de Janeiro and Furn el Chebbak in Beirut, but also our passionate attachment to our cities and the people who feed their making and perpetual rebirths.” —Amanda Abi Khalil, Rio de Janeiro, 2022 

A Casa é Sua is the exhibition component of this South-South cross-cultural exchange ongoing since 2017. The project looks at hospitality and the tensions in guest-host relations from the perspective of historical and contemporary forms of migrations specific to several southern global contexts and resonating with wider global xenophobic practices towards the other, not only referring to the refugee or the migrant. The exhibition features the works of 19 international artists and collectives, including site-specific commissions in public spaces in the city of Rio de Janeiro. 

The exhibition’s methodology was always intended to be context-responsive and, since 2017, has been permeated with several tragedies and political upheaval which caused its first and second postponements. Nonetheless, the project was able to formulate two alternative gestures of radical hospitality during these difficult times:

The first took the form of an emergency relief residency in collaboration with Kaaysá Artist Residency in Boiçucanga, São Paulo. Make Yourself at Home: Radical Care and Hospitality, which took place in October 2020 in the aftermath of the Beirut Port explosion, transported and hosted seven artists who were impacted by the blast and in need of a safe haven to Brazil, to recuperate physically and psychologically.

The second response took place in June 2020 to meet the urgent need for access to water as the pandemic was ravaging Brazil and increasing the number of homeless people in Rio de Janeiro. Bem Comum, a public mobile fountain commissioned to artist collective OPAVIVARÀ! and now finding its home on the patio of Paço Imperial, circulated the streets of central Rio de Janeiro distributing water to the homeless along the path of dried fountains.

The ways in which this project has allowed for permeability and transformation in response to current political issues, social needs and pressing themes relating to hospitality is an experiment of curatorial nature. A Casa é Sua invites the public to turn the space of the exhibition into a temporary home where affect and relations allow for imaginaries and radical gestures to emerge; where desires of Quilombos and living together with the other are manifested. 

The exhibition features works by international and local artists Ahmad Ghossein (Lebanon), Alexandre Canonico (Brazil/UK), Arjan Martins (Brazil), Ayla Hibri (Lebanon), Bouchra Khalili (France/Morocco), Daniel Steegmann Mangrané (Spain/Brazil), Forensic Architecture (UK), Franziska Pierwoss (Germany), Gabriela Bettini (Spain), Gui Mohallem (Brazil), Khalil Rabah (Palestine), Laura Lima (Brazil), Louise Botkay (Brazil), Marcos Chaves (Brazil), No Martins (Brazil), Omar Mismar (Lebanon), OPAVIVARÁ! (Brazil), Paulo Nazareth (Brazil) and Rayyane Tabet (Lebanon). 

This project is curated by Amanda Abi Khalil, an independent curator and art worker based between Beirut, Paris and Rio de Janeiro, whose work focuses on socially engaged practices. She is the founder of TAP (Temporary Art Platform), a non-profit which aims to shift artistic and curatorial discourse towards social and contextual concerns through residencies, research projects, and commissions, mainly in the region of the Global South.

Associate Curator: Danielle Makhoul
Project Partner: Patrick Pessoa