Before it names a region, an identity, or a community of origin or destination, “Latin America” names overlapping territories and intertwined histories, a zone of political, cultural, and symbolic disputes shaped by colonial invasions, independence movements, authoritarian modernization projects, and Indigenous, Black, feminist, and ecological struggles. Consolidated in the nineteenth century, the term refers to Mexico, Central America, parts of the Caribbean, and South America, where languages of Latin origin, particularly Spanish and Portuguese, predominate. To think about Latin America, therefore, is to grapple with an unstable idea. Latin American Histories takes this instability as its starting point: it does not seek a totalizing synthesis of the continent, nor does it attempt to establish a fixed definition of what Latin America means. The exhibition looks to the past and present, asking how the region was and continues to be invented, contested, and reinvented.
Occupying all five exhibition floors of the Pietro Building, the exhibition brings together 187 works by 148 artists from 20 countries. The selection encompasses Latin America and its diasporas, as well as contexts historically connected to the region. It brings together works from the MASP collection with loans from museums and public and private collections in Brazil and abroad. Rather than organizing Latin American art according to national schools or chronological sequences, the exhibition adopts a thematic structure, bringing different periods into dialogue: precolonial objects coexist with contemporary works, devotional and religious images with conceptual works, and documents and maps with paintings, photographs, and videos.
The exhibition is organized into five sections, each occupying one floor of the Pietro Building. The World Turned Upside Down, on the sixth floor, examines the European invasion of the Americas and the role of images in describing, classifying, and administering colonial territories. The Rhetoric of Progress, on the fifth floor, addresses projects of modernization and industrialization and the promises of rationality that produced factories and planned cities, but also inequalities and violence. Sociedades Americanas, on the fourth floor, turns to forms of collective life and political imagination, revisiting pedagogical and emancipatory traditions and experiences of community organization. Estamos em salsa, on the third floor, traces the routes of circulation of sounds, commodities, and images, as well as the migrations and diasporas that transformed Latin American cultures. The Falling Sky, on the second floor, draws on contemporary Indigenous thought to reflect on the exhaustion of modern utopias and brings together works around technology, ecology, and the dream in the face of the devastation produced by the idea of progress.
Latin American Histories presents the region as a territory of conflict and creation, whose histories, shaped by fractures, overlaps, and persistence, continue to be produced and contested in the present.
