Exhibition "Manual for traveling the shortest distance from one point to another"

The artist Luiza Sigulem inaugurates his second solo exhibition, A guide to traveling the shortest distance from one point to another., with its opening scheduled for January 24, 2026, in Workshop 397, in São Paulo. Bringing together a unique collection of works, the exhibition, curated by Juliana Caffé, explores the relationship between body, architecture and time, proposing displacement as an operation of adjustment and critical reflection.

The project takes instability as a condition that reorganizes the relationship between body and architecture, producing a time that does not coincide with the logic of efficiency. In tune with Crip theory (a term reappropriated from cripple, which names practices that displace the "standard body") and the concept of crip time—a temporality that embraces pauses, variable rhythms, and non-alignment with the productivist clock—Sigulem's work affirms difference not as an exception, but as a method.

“Throughout my process, the lack of accessibility manifested itself in the time needed to deal with small and large obstacles and in the attention required for minimal adjustments that accumulated almost imperceptibly,” the artist states. “This experience shifted the idea of ​​efficiency and brought my production closer to a notion of expanded time, in which the rhythm of the body does not coincide with the normative expectation of capitalist reproduction. It is in this mismatch that my work is constructed.”

The project, which for the first time incorporates video performances, interventions, and a sculpture in dialogue with photography, marks a moment of expansion in the artist's trajectory and places accessibility at the center of the aesthetic and poetic construction. It also highlights the invisibility of a significant portion of the population: according to data from the 2022 PNAD Contínua (IBGE), Brazil has approximately 18,6 million people with disabilities, of which approximately 3,4 million have physical disabilities in their lower limbs, a group that faces daily the architectural barriers discussed in the exhibition.

Architecture and poetics: an expository inversion

The project stems from an unavoidable fact of the São Paulo context: the structural difficulty of finding exhibition spaces capable of accommodating the artist's research in a way that is coherent with her issues. Faced with the lack of viable alternatives and institutional deadlines, the exhibition embraced this limitation as part of the project, transforming it into a field of reflection.

“The choice of Ateliê397 as the exhibition venue responds to this context. As an independent space, it offers a conceptual openness and a real field for negotiation in the construction of this project,” comments curator Juliana Caffé. “Located on Travessa Dona Paula, in an area marked by important cultural facilities that are also limited in terms of accessibility, the space is incorporated by the exhibition as an active element, ceasing to operate as a neutral support and integrating architecture, circulation, and surroundings into the proposed field of discussion.”

Given the architectural limitations of the Atelier, Sigulem does not treat the lack of accessibility as an obstacle to be corrected, but as a condition to be critically addressed. The exhibition design operates a deliberate inversion: instead of adapting the space to a normative standard, it is the public that is led to recalibrate their bodies in the face of reduced passageways and displaced scales.

In this sense, the exhibition presents an installation, developed by the artist in collaboration with the architectural duo Francisco Rivas and Rodrigo Messina, which brings together accessibility and permanence devices conceived as a constitutive part of the work. The intervention reorganizes the reception area: the door and frame were moved to allow for full opening (180°); benches and stools were distributed to accommodate rest; and cushions on the outdoor benches extend the experience to the surroundings.

The radical nature of the proposal is reflected in the institutional occupation: the side of the staircase, which leads to a second floor inaccessible to people with disabilities, was converted into a small library of Crip theory. “During the exhibition, Ateliê397 agreed to render the upper floor inoperable, suspending its use as a projection room to make the architectural limitation explicit instead of concealing it. And, as an external development, the project includes the production and donation of custom-made mobile ramps for neighboring cultural spaces in the village, prompting the circuit to collectively consider its accessibility conditions,” Caffé points out.

The project aligns with contemporary debates that seek visibility without capture, where the work operates through sensation, rhythm, and bodily micro-events that are not reduced to an "explanatory" image or easily consumable content. It is an approach that recognizes access as aesthetics and disability as a diagnosis of space and norms. In this way, curatorship and exhibition design become an active part of the work. Texts in Braille, audio description, and photo-tactile guides accompany the exhibition, whose operation and mediation incorporate the hiring of people with disabilities, respecting different circulation times.

Furthermore, all the devices in the exhibition were made with simple and low-cost materials, affirming the possibility of creating welcoming spaces even in architectural designs that do not fully comply with legal regulations.

Body in negotiation: video, sculpture and photography

In previous works, Sigulem invited the viewer to adjust to certain scales, as in the series Jeito de Corpo (2024). In this solo exhibition, the artist places her own body at the center of the experience. Different works explore this shift in perspective, sometimes proposing situations in which the public is led to reorient their spatial perception, and sometimes accompanying the artist in gestures of continuous negotiation with space.

The videos are based on reinterpretations of historical performances, created from the artist's body and traversed by issues of gender and power. The actions do not seek fidelity to the original gesture, but operate as a situated translation, in which each movement bears the mark of a necessary adjustment. The camera follows the process without correcting the deviation, allowing the flaw and the effort to remain visible.

This is the case with the previously unreleased series Ramps (2025), a set of twenty photographs derived from the video-performance Painting (Retouching) (based on Francis Alÿs). In the video, the artist marks points on the streets of São Paulo with yellow paint where access ramps should exist, highlighting the lack of accessibility in the urban landscape. The photographs isolate these gestures and traces, transforming the performative action into images that record the friction between body, city, and infrastructure.

By adopting the height of a wheelchair user's field of vision as a reference point, the exhibition shifts the normative scale of the exhibition space and introduces a regime of perception in which the body does not adjust to the architecture, but rather the architecture becomes an index of its limitations.

A sculpture punctuates the space, testing the boundaries between function and failure and questioning structures designed to guide movement. In an installation, a video dedicated to the image of falling articulates its repetition as a physical and symbolic experience. Together, the works suggest that every trajectory is traversed by detours, pauses, and negotiations, and that the shortest distance between two points rarely presents itself as a straight line.

The exhibition "Manual for Traveling the Shortest Distance from One Point to Another" is part of the "Jeito de Corpo" project, funded by the PNAB CULTURE FUNDING CALL NO. 25/2024, from the Secretariat of Culture, Economy and Creative Industries, State of São Paulo.

Service
Exhibition | A guide to traveling the shortest distance from one point to another
From January 24th to February 28th
Wednesday to Saturday, from 14pm to 18pm