Antoni Muntadas, in resuscitation mode

At a time when public space is being absorbed by market logic, surveillance, and fragmentation, Antoni Muntadas emerges with a proposal that is not an exhibition in the traditional sense, but rather a critical occupation. Public Place , at SESC Pompeia in São Paulo, is not contemplated: it is traversed, inhabited, and discussed.

The Catalan artist draws on Lina Bo Bardi 's radical, brutalist architecture not to adorn it, but to engage with it. The exhibition, in Muntadas's words, is not a closed route, but rather "a drift, a journey with elements that invite encounter." And indeed: totem columns, question-post benches, and the illuminated phrases "Where are we?" or "Let's move forward" suspend the visitor in a state of urban and political awareness.

Curator Diego Matos describes it as a “total occupation of the Communal Area” of the cultural center. But more than occupying, Muntadas revives: he unearths the concept of the public as a space for negotiation, not consumption ; as a question, not a certainty. “It is an a priori of the artist: to create a work environment in which dialogue and negotiation are not only necessary, but the driving force of the exhibition program,” writes Matos.

In contrast to the museographic logic of the white cube, Public Place operates in a Situationist key . It reclaims the citadel of freedom that Lina Bo Bardi imagined, and which Muntadas rescues from urgency. The visitor is an involuntary accomplice to a project that poses, from the visual and spatial, questions that resonate beyond the realms: What is public today? Who inhabits it? Who defines it?

There are no autonomous pieces here, but rather devices —visual, textual, spatial—that shift the focus from the artistic to the civic. The phrase "Life is editing" on a rubber mat encapsulates Muntadas's gesture: art as an act of collective editing , where each step of the visitor cuts, pastes, or rewrites the shared space.

The entire intervention is bathed in a dim, almost liquid blue light, which unifies the spaces and creates an atmosphere of suspension and alertness. It can be read as a precise metaphor: a transit zone between states , like a technological interface on hold or a blue screen before a reboot. This color doesn't signal a conclusion, but rather a threshold: a pause that opens the possibility of reconfiguration. It refers to the digital, yes, but also to the political gesture of stopping to think and decide whether to advance or retreat, or to question the very meaning of continuing.

*Cristian Segura is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural manager. He directed the Tandil Museum of Fine Arts.