ABERTO 03, Chu Ming Silveira's house, 2024, installation views
2026. ABERTO
ABERTO was born in the empty Oscar Niemeyer house. Its name, which means open in English, referring not only to the opening of access to architectural gems usually closed to the public but also gesturing to the fact that many artistic treasures remain sequestered in private collections. Founded and co-curated by São Paulo-born and based Filipe Assis, the annual architecture and art exhibition began in the Niemeyer house in 2022, presenting works by more than 80 artists. What was meant to be a one-time, non-recurrent event unfolded instead into an annual series, opening up and revealing homes, usually concealed behind public facades and inaccessible to open contemplation.
“Casting the line in one place and ending up catching something somewhere else,” is Assis’ way of describing the project’s constitutive interdisciplinarity. “Many visitors come for the architecture and end up spellbound by the art, while others arrive expecting a carefully curated exhibition and find themselves absorbed by being inside buildings of profound historical significance. That crossing between the two fields is central to the project and it mirrors many of my own interests, which ultimately converged in Aberto,” he explains.
This emphasis resonates with a broader historical moment in which architecture and the arts have reasserted themselves globally as primary languages through which societies negotiate questions of memory, identity, and the future – extending beyond aesthetic practices to frameworks for inhabiting a world in transformation. In the Brazilian context, this interdependence has long been structural rather than incidental: since the advent of modernism, architecture, visual art and design have developed in close dialogue, sharing institutional platforms, ideological ambitions and often the same protagonists. Aberto situates itself within this lineage while also responding to renewed international attention to Latin American, and especially Brazilian, cultural production, an interest that has intensifie in recent years as museums and collections seek to recalibrate their narratives beyond Euro-American canons.
This connective logic is reactivated at multiple levels within the project. For instance, all participating houses are photographed by the Brazilian artist Mauro Restiffe while empty, a practice long devoted to registering architectural icons as both formal constructs and historical condensations. Stripped of occupation and event, the houses appear as latent structures – suspended between use and representation – before being reactivated by the presence of artworks, visitors and temporary forms of inhabitation.
Each exhibition is shaped in response to the specificities of its site: the curatorial selection of artworks, coordinated by Assis with curator Kiki Mazzucchelli and designer Claudia Moreira Salles, emphasises the spatial, historical and conceptual qualities of each venue, interweaving modern and contemporary practices as well as Brazilian an international production.
What most interests Assis – and what constitutes one of the project’s most compelling aspects – is precisely its refusal of the white cube: the encounter between the subjectivities of each architect and their client as translated into domestic architecture; the constructive specificity of each house; the singularity of each spatial proposition.
These elements are decisive in determining the tone of each edition. For instance, Aberto two, in 2023, echoed a formal rigour that distilled certain principles of São Paulo’s brutalist school through Vilanova Artigas’s house. “Not landing your first job is one of the best things that can happen to someone,” Assis remarks. “I trained in advertising, but I worked for years in real estate development in São Paulo, even though my interests always gravitated toward architecture, design and art. I spent time in Italy, where I pursued training that led me into real estate fund management, but I realised I needed a change –everything felt bureaucratic, arid. In 2019, I moved to London to do a master’s degree at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, and ideas for projects that crossed art and architecture were already taking shape.”
Discovering the Niemeyer house in August 2022 became another fortunate magnetic pull. The architect designed only one house in São Paulo, and many people are surprised to learn that, in Brazil’s largest city, there is an almost unknown residential project by the canonical figure of Brazilian modern architecture, now concealed behind the new towers produced by the city’s vertiginous construction boom. The inaugural edition presented works by more than 80 artists, ranging from Gustav Klimt and Georg Baselitz to Alexander Calder, Louise Bourgeois, Pablo Picasso and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Designed in the 1960s and built between 1970 and 1974 in Alto de Pinheiros, a predominantly residential, tree-lined neighbourhood, the house incorporates Niemeyer’s characteristic curves and, through its large curved-glass walls, integrates interior and exterior – a quality less pronounced in São Paulo brutalism.
In a perceptive and necessary gesture, Aberto editions three and four foreground Brazil’s cultural plurality, shaped by multiple diasporas and long histories of exchange. This orientation coincides with the intensification, over the past decade, of critical research on Asian diasporas and their transnational legacies. This is a field that has repositioned Brazil as a central terrain for these histories, not only because it hosts the largest Japanese community outside Japan, but also because migrations from other Asian nations, alongside those from Japan, generated singular and structurally formative cultural configurations. In 2024, the Japanese and Chinese presence in Brazil materialised in exhibitions staged in the house-studio of the Japanese-Brazilian artist Tomie Ohtake and in the residence designed by the Chinese-Brazilian architect Chu Ming Silveira. Both were born in Asia and emigrated to Brazil, where they established enduring and foundational legacies in their respective fields. The systematic integration of Chinese metaphysical principles in the house designed by Silveira articulated notions of harmony and energetic flow.
“In Tomie Ohtake’s house-studio, we presented three generations of Japanese-Brazilian production: the mother’s work and studio, designed by her son Ruy, alongside a bench produced by her grandson Rodrigo,” explains Assis. Meanwhile, Silveira’s house, whose architecture is informed by feng shui principles and articulated across multiple ground levels, featured tables recently made by her youngest son, Alan Chu, that traced transgenerational continuities and activated the transmission of familial and cultural traditions.
Beyond Ohtake’s own works, which occupied her studio alongside personal objects and archival materials, forming a kind of expanded homage, the house was inhabited by large-scale sculptures by Erika Verzutti and Amilcar de Castro in the garden. Inside, bathed in climactic light from skylights distributed across the building, works by Antonio Tarsis, Alexandre da Cunha, and Solange Pessoa co-existed with Ruy Ohtake’s chromatically blocked concrete walls, painted in saturated fields of yellow and blue. At the same time, in Chu Ming Silveira’s house, the curatorial choice favoured historically established figures such as Anna Maria Maiolino, Lygia Pape, Anish Kapoor and Carmen Herrera.
The fourth edition of Aberto, in 2025, extended these trajectories across the Atlantic and for the first time, the project left Brazil, occupying Maison La Roche in Paris, one of the most iconic residential buildings designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret between 1923 and 1925.
The exhibition crystallised the historical ties between Brazil and France, particularly in the formation of Brazilian modernism around principles of functionality and rationalism, and in the circulation of artists between the two countries from the 1950s through the 1980s. Seeking to introduce French audiences to distinctive Brazilian material cultures, the Red Marquesa chair, designed in 1974 by Oscar Niemeyer and his daughter Anna Maria, was presented and reedited in collaboration with Brazilian design manufacturer Etel. This gesture underscored Niemeyer’s long relationship with France, the country that received him during 15 years of political exile after Brazil’s 1964 military coup, and whose architectural, urbanistic and intellectual production remained in deep dialogue with his own.
“We dedicated a room to the interactions between Brazil and France that shaped Brazilian modernism. We showed historical materials such as correspondence and architectural drawings, alongside works by Brazilian artists who later entered into an intimate dialogue with France, like Hélio Oiticica, Cícero Dias and Lygia Clark. We wante to show these works in France because they are the result of a creative intensity that existed under the Brazilian dictatorship and that could, in part, be discharged in Paris, a city where creativity was pulsating and where everything seemed to be happening.”
The next edition of Aberto adopts a more irreverent register, centred on the radically experimental and deliberately playful Casa Bola (BallHouse) – a spherical building eight metres in diameter, constructed in reinforced mortar clad in metal plates and elevated on pilotis, (unavoidably resembling 1782’s Antonie-Laurent-Thomas Vaudoyer’s Maison d’un Cosmopolite,) designed by Eduardo Longo in the 1970s in a futurist, postmodern spirit. A slide functions as the connective element between floors and round porthole-like windows punctuate the surface like those of a submarine. The house responds to experimental inquiries into how urban space might be inhabited, entering into direct dialogue with architectural currents that embraced formal and social utopia, such as Archigram, the English collective active in the 1960s. Longo has an ongoing practice also as a visual artist, oriented toward inventiveness as its generative principle.
Casa Bola has become a reference within schools of architecture as an example of how an architectural program can escape conventional constraints, particularly those governing domestic design It resists the standardised solutions offered by the construction market, insisting instead on the plasticity and ludic dimension of architectural thought.
This shift toward a more speculative and heterodox architectural language does not dilute the project’s coherence; on the contrary, it strengthens it, expanding its conceptual field and testing the elasticity of its curatorial premises. By now incorporating architecture that resist stylistic classification and functional normativity, Aberto intensifies its investigation into how space conditions perception, behaviour and forms of attention.
Text originally published in Ark Journal, vol XV, March 2026
“Casting the line in one place and ending up catching something somewhere else,” is Assis’ way of describing the project’s constitutive interdisciplinarity. “Many visitors come for the architecture and end up spellbound by the art, while others arrive expecting a carefully curated exhibition and find themselves absorbed by being inside buildings of profound historical significance. That crossing between the two fields is central to the project and it mirrors many of my own interests, which ultimately converged in Aberto,” he explains.
This emphasis resonates with a broader historical moment in which architecture and the arts have reasserted themselves globally as primary languages through which societies negotiate questions of memory, identity, and the future – extending beyond aesthetic practices to frameworks for inhabiting a world in transformation. In the Brazilian context, this interdependence has long been structural rather than incidental: since the advent of modernism, architecture, visual art and design have developed in close dialogue, sharing institutional platforms, ideological ambitions and often the same protagonists. Aberto situates itself within this lineage while also responding to renewed international attention to Latin American, and especially Brazilian, cultural production, an interest that has intensifie in recent years as museums and collections seek to recalibrate their narratives beyond Euro-American canons.
This connective logic is reactivated at multiple levels within the project. For instance, all participating houses are photographed by the Brazilian artist Mauro Restiffe while empty, a practice long devoted to registering architectural icons as both formal constructs and historical condensations. Stripped of occupation and event, the houses appear as latent structures – suspended between use and representation – before being reactivated by the presence of artworks, visitors and temporary forms of inhabitation.
Each exhibition is shaped in response to the specificities of its site: the curatorial selection of artworks, coordinated by Assis with curator Kiki Mazzucchelli and designer Claudia Moreira Salles, emphasises the spatial, historical and conceptual qualities of each venue, interweaving modern and contemporary practices as well as Brazilian an international production.
What most interests Assis – and what constitutes one of the project’s most compelling aspects – is precisely its refusal of the white cube: the encounter between the subjectivities of each architect and their client as translated into domestic architecture; the constructive specificity of each house; the singularity of each spatial proposition.
These elements are decisive in determining the tone of each edition. For instance, Aberto two, in 2023, echoed a formal rigour that distilled certain principles of São Paulo’s brutalist school through Vilanova Artigas’s house. “Not landing your first job is one of the best things that can happen to someone,” Assis remarks. “I trained in advertising, but I worked for years in real estate development in São Paulo, even though my interests always gravitated toward architecture, design and art. I spent time in Italy, where I pursued training that led me into real estate fund management, but I realised I needed a change –everything felt bureaucratic, arid. In 2019, I moved to London to do a master’s degree at Sotheby’s Institute of Art, and ideas for projects that crossed art and architecture were already taking shape.”
Discovering the Niemeyer house in August 2022 became another fortunate magnetic pull. The architect designed only one house in São Paulo, and many people are surprised to learn that, in Brazil’s largest city, there is an almost unknown residential project by the canonical figure of Brazilian modern architecture, now concealed behind the new towers produced by the city’s vertiginous construction boom. The inaugural edition presented works by more than 80 artists, ranging from Gustav Klimt and Georg Baselitz to Alexander Calder, Louise Bourgeois, Pablo Picasso and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Designed in the 1960s and built between 1970 and 1974 in Alto de Pinheiros, a predominantly residential, tree-lined neighbourhood, the house incorporates Niemeyer’s characteristic curves and, through its large curved-glass walls, integrates interior and exterior – a quality less pronounced in São Paulo brutalism.
In a perceptive and necessary gesture, Aberto editions three and four foreground Brazil’s cultural plurality, shaped by multiple diasporas and long histories of exchange. This orientation coincides with the intensification, over the past decade, of critical research on Asian diasporas and their transnational legacies. This is a field that has repositioned Brazil as a central terrain for these histories, not only because it hosts the largest Japanese community outside Japan, but also because migrations from other Asian nations, alongside those from Japan, generated singular and structurally formative cultural configurations. In 2024, the Japanese and Chinese presence in Brazil materialised in exhibitions staged in the house-studio of the Japanese-Brazilian artist Tomie Ohtake and in the residence designed by the Chinese-Brazilian architect Chu Ming Silveira. Both were born in Asia and emigrated to Brazil, where they established enduring and foundational legacies in their respective fields. The systematic integration of Chinese metaphysical principles in the house designed by Silveira articulated notions of harmony and energetic flow.
“In Tomie Ohtake’s house-studio, we presented three generations of Japanese-Brazilian production: the mother’s work and studio, designed by her son Ruy, alongside a bench produced by her grandson Rodrigo,” explains Assis. Meanwhile, Silveira’s house, whose architecture is informed by feng shui principles and articulated across multiple ground levels, featured tables recently made by her youngest son, Alan Chu, that traced transgenerational continuities and activated the transmission of familial and cultural traditions.
Beyond Ohtake’s own works, which occupied her studio alongside personal objects and archival materials, forming a kind of expanded homage, the house was inhabited by large-scale sculptures by Erika Verzutti and Amilcar de Castro in the garden. Inside, bathed in climactic light from skylights distributed across the building, works by Antonio Tarsis, Alexandre da Cunha, and Solange Pessoa co-existed with Ruy Ohtake’s chromatically blocked concrete walls, painted in saturated fields of yellow and blue. At the same time, in Chu Ming Silveira’s house, the curatorial choice favoured historically established figures such as Anna Maria Maiolino, Lygia Pape, Anish Kapoor and Carmen Herrera.
The fourth edition of Aberto, in 2025, extended these trajectories across the Atlantic and for the first time, the project left Brazil, occupying Maison La Roche in Paris, one of the most iconic residential buildings designed by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret between 1923 and 1925.
The exhibition crystallised the historical ties between Brazil and France, particularly in the formation of Brazilian modernism around principles of functionality and rationalism, and in the circulation of artists between the two countries from the 1950s through the 1980s. Seeking to introduce French audiences to distinctive Brazilian material cultures, the Red Marquesa chair, designed in 1974 by Oscar Niemeyer and his daughter Anna Maria, was presented and reedited in collaboration with Brazilian design manufacturer Etel. This gesture underscored Niemeyer’s long relationship with France, the country that received him during 15 years of political exile after Brazil’s 1964 military coup, and whose architectural, urbanistic and intellectual production remained in deep dialogue with his own.
“We dedicated a room to the interactions between Brazil and France that shaped Brazilian modernism. We showed historical materials such as correspondence and architectural drawings, alongside works by Brazilian artists who later entered into an intimate dialogue with France, like Hélio Oiticica, Cícero Dias and Lygia Clark. We wante to show these works in France because they are the result of a creative intensity that existed under the Brazilian dictatorship and that could, in part, be discharged in Paris, a city where creativity was pulsating and where everything seemed to be happening.”
The next edition of Aberto adopts a more irreverent register, centred on the radically experimental and deliberately playful Casa Bola (BallHouse) – a spherical building eight metres in diameter, constructed in reinforced mortar clad in metal plates and elevated on pilotis, (unavoidably resembling 1782’s Antonie-Laurent-Thomas Vaudoyer’s Maison d’un Cosmopolite,) designed by Eduardo Longo in the 1970s in a futurist, postmodern spirit. A slide functions as the connective element between floors and round porthole-like windows punctuate the surface like those of a submarine. The house responds to experimental inquiries into how urban space might be inhabited, entering into direct dialogue with architectural currents that embraced formal and social utopia, such as Archigram, the English collective active in the 1960s. Longo has an ongoing practice also as a visual artist, oriented toward inventiveness as its generative principle.
Casa Bola has become a reference within schools of architecture as an example of how an architectural program can escape conventional constraints, particularly those governing domestic design It resists the standardised solutions offered by the construction market, insisting instead on the plasticity and ludic dimension of architectural thought.
This shift toward a more speculative and heterodox architectural language does not dilute the project’s coherence; on the contrary, it strengthens it, expanding its conceptual field and testing the elasticity of its curatorial premises. By now incorporating architecture that resist stylistic classification and functional normativity, Aberto intensifies its investigation into how space conditions perception, behaviour and forms of attention.
Text originally published in Ark Journal, vol XV, March 2026
ABERTO 01, Oscar Niemeyer's project, 2022, installation views
ABERTO 02, Vilanova Artigas' project, 2023, installation views
ABERTO 03, Chu Ming Silveiras' house, 2024, installation views
ABERTO 03, Tomie Othake’s house, 2024, installation views