An interdisciplinary exploration on the past, present, and future of Afro-Brazilian spatial theories and practices. Integrating architecture, art, philosophy, ecology, and traditional knowledge to understand how spatial design, symbolism, and ecological practices shape identity and environmental stewardship.
August 5: 9–11AM EST
August 12: 9–11AM EST
August 19: 9–11AM EST
August 26: 9–11AM EST
September 2: 9–11AM EST
September 9: 9–11AM EST
This course offers an entry point into Afro-Brazilian spatial practices, the ancestral and contemporary ways Black communities in Brazil organize, inhabit, and give meaning to space. Architecture is one register within this larger field, alongside spatial organizations, visual arts, philosophies, and celebrations, each operating at different scales and in different languages, from the built environment to ritual and gesture. Across six weeks, the course moves between conversations around critical reflection, tracing how these practices articulate ancestry, resistance, and invention. No prior background in the field is assumed: the course builds understanding step by step, from foundational histories to contemporary production, centering the readings and spatial practices on Afro-Brazilian knowledge.
African & Afro-Brazilian Cosmogonies
Our first class introduces African and Afro-Brazilian cosmogonies as foundational frameworks for understanding space, land, and belonging, examining how these belief systems shape relationships between people, territory, and the tangible and intangible world.
Body-Territory & Ritual Space
This week explores the concept of body-territory and the role of ritual space in Afro-Brazilian spatial culture, connecting terreiros, quilombos, and collective celebrations as maracatus, blocos afro, congadas e reinados, to the ways bodies and gestures produce and organize space. We begin with an overview of how these experiences take different forms across Brazilian regions, before examining the shared logics of body, ritual, and territory that run through them.
Material Ancestry
Material Ancestry traces the constructive knowledge passed down through Afro-Brazilian communities, revealing materiality as political. It examines the reclaiming of raw materials and techniques in architecture and the arts, and their role in demarcating the importance of specific territories.
Afro-Brazilian Bio Techniques
Examining regenerative practices and Afro-Brazilian bio techniques as responses to ecological crises, rooted in natural materials and in solutions that treat society and nature as one. We trace how this knowledge shapes contemporary projects, and critique its appropriation by groups that fail to credit the traditional knowledge behind it.
Memory & Repair
Addressing memory and repair as spatial and political practices, examining how architecture and design can hold, honor, and redress historical erasure through reparative approaches to territory, heritage, and collective memory.
New Territorialities
This final class extends the course's spatial logics beyond architecture, turning to urban quilombos, favelas, and social movements as spatial practices in their own right. Rather than closing on Afro-Brazilian futures alone, we bring these practices into conversation with the broader struggles of populations denied full rights, including Black, Indigenous, and queer communities, speculating together on liberated ways of inhabiting space.
Instituto Cambará is an independent initiative dedicated to the research, production, and dissemination of Afro-Brazilian architecture. It seeks to amplify historically marginalized voices and build bridges between architecture, culture, and social transformation. Through curatorial projects, public programs, and collaborative experimentation, Cambará operates as a platform for decolonial practices and architectural reimagination.