Celebrating its 35th anniversary, this edition of CasaCor brings together projects by 68 renowned professionals spread across more than 10,000 square meters inside a landmark of São Paulo modernism, the Conjunto Nacional. Under the theme “Particular Infinite,” this year's exhibition focuses on the accumulation of time, on the stories already told and those we tell about ourselves. In this universe of ways of inhabiting the world, and of the traces we leave around us—from finger marks on the walls to the dust we carry on the soles of our shoes—we are always searching for something that is ours alone, inexhaustibly our own.

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Gabriela de Matos stands out for her pioneering path. The only Black woman in her undergraduate architecture program, she founded the country's first research group on Afro-Brazilian architecture and gender – Arquitetas Negras. She is also the first Black woman to be elected vice president of the Institute of Architects of Brazil's São Paulo department, as well as the first to win the Architect of the Year award from IAB Rio de Janeiro in 2020. This year, she once again makes history as the first Black woman to participate in CasaCor São Paulo. Her debut could not be more auspicious: she has designed Espaço Agô, which welcomes visitors to the 34th edition of the exhibition, centered on the theme "the original house."

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The original house is where we return in times of crisis. It is a mobile fiction, almost like an inverted utopia—the perfect mirror of an unattainable future, not because it belongs to the past, but because it is a starting point created to give meaning to that very utopian future. The original house can be many things: the womb, the cave, the cabin, clothing, the tent, the earth. But above all, it is the story we tell ourselves to feel less lost after being cast out of this first site of identity. Thrown into the world, we remain in a constant search for a place that makes sense—a home. 

By defining sexuality as one of several sexual technologies, Michel Foucault has expanded our understanding of sex. This way, the relationship between architecture and the body is shaped not only by the built object, with its various spatial mechanisms for the production of bodies, but also by thinking, in the form of academic discourse. And vice versa, since gender and sexuality also impact architectural theory. One way or another, these relationships are very rich and capable of expanding our knowledge about architecture and the creation of generic sexed bodies.