On March 28, one of the iconic buildings in downtown São Paulo will house a new space dedicated to the intersection of art, architecture, and design. LAB MR is inaugurating its permanent space in the Edifício Itália with the Body-Territory exhibition, curated by Ana Carolina Ralston, featuring works by Tamikuã Txihi, Rodrigo Silveira, Gustavo Utrabo, Hugo Fortes, and Henrique Sur.
Created by Melina Romano as a field for investigating different creative practices, LAB MR is launching a new phase of its activities there. The opening coincides with the start of the project's 2026 curatorial program, which proposes to observe how contemporary creative practices relate to landscape, material culture, and ways of inhabiting.
According to curator Ana Carolina Ralston, the exhibition stems from a concept linked to Indigenous community feminist movements of Abya Yala—a term used by original peoples to refer to the territory of Latin America—which understand the body as the primary territorial extension of experiences, memories, and struggles. For her, "body-territory" is the understanding that space is not something external to us, but something that constitutes us and that we constitute in reciprocity. She further observes: if architecture organizes space, design articulates its functions, and art tensions its meanings, together they construct an ethic of inhabiting and reveal that every space is political and affective.
