Don't Mess With Me: Brazil’s Pavilion Warns Against Authoritarianism

In Brazil, placing a dieffenbachia on your doorstep is common practice. The plant is commonly known as comigo-ninguém-pode, a phrase that can mean ‘nobody can handle me’, ‘nobody can defeat me’ or, even, ‘don’t mess with me’. In Amazonian and Brazilian folklore, it is said to have magical properties that protect against the mau-olhado (‘evil eye’), resisting envy and negative energy. By placing it beside an entrance, you create a barrier to keep bad luck or malevolent intentions at bay. It is a beautiful plant – but it is really toxic. 

Rosana Paulino and Adriana Varejão’s joint presentation at the Brazil Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale borrows both the plant’s name and logic as a symbol of protection and toxicity. Comigo ninguém pode is a warning, an acknowledgement of that which has come before, and a declaration of intent for Brazil’s future. Curated by Diane Lima, it interrogates the myth of ‘racial democracy’ in South America’s largest nation, and is a call for counter-narratives to a far-right presidential challenger set on decimating Brazil’s cultural sector and handing the keys to the country’s vast natural resources to the Trump administration.

Not many visitors walking into Comigo ninguém pode will fully understand the weight and enormity of the history that the exhibition addresses. Brazil was the last nation in the Western world to abolish slavery. Nearly five million Africans were forced into bondage between the 1530s and 1888, which is around 40 per cent of the total transatlantic slave trade, and more than ten times the number taken to the US. When the 700,000 remaining enslaved people were given their legal freedom, they received no land, no access to education, and no path to voting rights or citizenship. Unlike in the US, no official segregation policy was set in law, but equally importantly, no integration policy was either.

In 2024, Brazil’s Gini Coefficient, a statistical measure of economic inequality, placed it in the top six most unequal countries in the world. White Brazilian families hold between 1.5 and 2 times the wealth of the Black and Brown families who make up the majority of the population. And Black Brazilians make up around three quarters of all homicide victims.

The myth that Comigo ninguém pode interrogates largely made this possible. In 1933, the sociologist Gilberto Freyre offered the nation a sort of ideological cure-all that enabled discussions of race to be replaced with those of class. In Casa-Grande & Senzala (published in English as ‘The Masters and the Slaves’), Freyre argued that Brazil’s mixed population was evidence of an essentially benign relationship between coloniser and colonised, ignoring the sexual violence and forced cohabitation of plantation slavery.

This pitch for Brazil as a uniquely hybrid and harmonious society became the inspiration for democracia racial (racial democracy), which was state ideology for decades, from Getúlio Vargas’ authoritarian government of the 1930s and 40s through to the US-backed military dictatorship that held power from 1964 to 1985. The consequences of this invented tale reverberate in Brazil today. How can the state dismantle institutional racism having long refused to acknowledge it exists?

Paulino, who was born into a Black working-class family on the fringes of São Paulo in 1967, has spent three decades making work highlighting what this myth was designed to conceal. Her installation, Parade da memória (1994–2015), upended Brazilian contemporary art and has been one of its touchpoints ever since.

Hélio Menezes, former director of the Museu Afro Brasil, describes it as, ‘A very direct, critical act of decolonisation’, calling it ‘one of the first times Black faces were included in the white cube of contemporary art galleries [in Brazil]’. The work is now part of the permanent collection of the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, and Paulino was the first Black woman to stage a retrospective at the museum, a century after its opening.

The work could not be displayed in Venice for conservation reasons, so Lima convinced Paulino to display Arachnes (1996–2026) instead, which she describes as a “hidden work” displayed once in 1996 and never seen again, now reworked for the Biennale. Like Parade da memória, the centrally installed piece features hand-sewn elements overlaid with 19th-century pseudo-scientific photographs of Afro-Brazilian women, connected by a spider-like web of thread. 

“For many years I watched my mother sew and embroider during the night to pay for my studies and that of my three sisters,” Paulino explains. “She was like an enormous insect. Like Arachne [the half-woman, half-spider figure of Greek mythology], she was paid in time with our education, as spiders spend their lives tending to their pearls of captured prey wrapped in silk, to sustain their children.”

While she is represented by Mendes Wood DM, which has galleries in Brazil, Europe and the US, her market is primarily institutional (she is in the collections of MoMA, Tate Modern and Centre Pompidou), with very little secondary market activity to date. In 2024 she won the inaugural Munch Award and has pledged to use the €25,000 prize to build the Rosana Paulino Institute in the working-class outskirts of São Paulo where she was raised and still chooses to live. “The plan is to create a conversation about how we can use fine arts to change the reality of Black people,” she says.

Adriana Varejão, born to a middle-class family in Rio de Janeiro in 1964, is at the other end of the market spectrum. Represented by Gagosian and Victoria Miro, the auction price record for her work is $1.8 million, achieved when a 2001 canvas nearly quadrupled its high estimate at Christie’s in London in 2011. She has cumulative auction sales of approximately $15.3 million across 37 works, and her art is in collections such as the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim, the Stedelijk and Tate Modern.

Since the 1990s, Varejão has centred her practice around Portuguese azulejo tiles and their role in Brazil’s colonial past. The blue-and-white glazed terracotta tiles originated in Moorish Iberia and were adopted by Portuguese royalty, arriving in Brazil in the 17th century via the same colonial trade routes as the enslaved people who built the infrastructure the tiles would decorate. 

Churches, monasteries, palaces and grand houses were covered inside and out with the tiles, many with Baroque flourishes. Varejão’s Azulejão paintings are created by applying a thick layer of plaster to a canvas laid flat. As the plaster slowly dries, cracks form, producing deep surface fissures. The works in the ongoing series continue to evolve, growing larger in scale, with cracks sometimes weeping bloody viscera, and panels of tiles are now interrupted by wound-like gashes.

For Venice she has installed work in direct dialogue with the newly-restored Pavilion’s architecture. Along with 12 large-scale, ceiling-mounted Azulejão paintings, Varejão has seemingly sliced through the pavilion with fragmentary, wall-mounted sculptures revealing an underbelly of marbled flesh and fat that is at once difficult to look at but tempting to touch, hinting at colonial wounds that remain unsutured. 

Although both artists engage with the same history, the difference between the commercial reception of Varejão and Paulino’s work points to how international art markets assign value. The artist who engages through the language of European art historical traditions commands auction prices that the Black artist whose mixed-media work directly centres the Black body does not.

“I think the market has this kind of hierarchy,” says Paulino. “But for me, that’s okay. I sell my drawings. I sell paintings… The important thing is the idea. And to bring ideas and concepts from Afro-Brazilians. I’m not really interested in painting in oil. We know that the market values those paintings. I work the way I do, because I want to discuss the country, and I want to discuss the group where I came from, so I have to reach them, and I use all the methods… We know that the market is the market, but I’m not really worried about this… Of course, I like money, like everyone. But the important thing is to discuss and try to think big.”

The Brazil Pavilion itself is a political object. Designed in 1964, the year of the military coup, its recently-completed restoration was initiated in 2024, reinstating the original glass side walls and refreshing the exterior. Petrobras, the state oil company and largest commercial entity in Brazil, is the exhibition’s lead sponsor. 

Petrobras is also at the centre of Operation Lava Jato, a notorious corruption scandal that sent current and former president Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva to prison in 2017. His conviction was overturned after the presiding judge was found to have colluded with prosecutors; the same judge then joined former president Jair Bolsonaro’s government as minister of justice. 

Two days into Bolsonaro’s presidency, he set about dismantling the culture sector, first dissolving the Ministry of Culture, and soon after drastically cutting Rouanet Law arts funding, the main financial mechanism for promoting culture in Brazil by providing tax breaks for those investing in the arts. On Lula’s return to the presidency, Rouanet Law funding reached R$2.35 billion in 2023, a record at the time. It then climbed to R$3.04 billion in 2024 and R$3.41 billion in 2025, setting a new all-time record for the third consecutive year. Money raised for cultural projects under the current Lula government already exceeds the entirety of Bolsonaro’s era combined. 

Clearly the incentive to give under the programme is real. In 2023, Petrobras resumed arts and culture sponsorship after effectively pausing its giving during the four years that Bolsonaro was in office. Bolsonaro has since been found guilty of instigating a coup, and faces more than 20 years in prison. His son, Flávio, a senator, is now polling neck-and-neck with Lula ahead of October’s presidential vote.

So, the company that was entangled in corruption on a scale that destabilised Brazilian democracy now sponsors an exhibition fronted by three Black and mixed-race women, foregrounding unresolved colonial trauma and encouraging a national dialogue about Brazil and its contradictions. The plant at the threshold is protective and toxic.

Lima is the first Black curator of a Brazil Biennale Pavilion, and her selection of Paulino makes her the first Black artist to represent Brazil at the Biennale. Her team is the first to be made up entirely of women. She describes Comigo ninguém pode as a signal event for Brazil that directly speaks to the precarity of the political moment.

“We are only able to do this kind of show with this content, this title, and this proposition, because we live in a democracy. None of it is possible without democracy – one that is shaped and defined by Black people pushing and fighting for visibility and equality. When you look back at recent history, at the authoritarianism we saw [under Bolsonaro], at the complete destruction of funding, protections and freedom of expression – they tried to destroy the idea of Black and Indigenous cultures. It is a very important moment, not only for Brazil, but for the world, to see our democracy become stronger and remain stronger.”

The Venice Biennale’s national pavilion format is a tool of soft power, a nation’s chance to display its most forward-facing, exportable self-image to the world. Brazil has offered a show about the wound beneath the surface, the toxin in the plant at the door. Lima explains:

“Okay, we have trauma. We have colonial violence that remains today for Black and Indigenous people. But we also have something that remains, keeping us moving forward and alive, which is faith and spirituality… connected with nature. In Brazil, even when you don't have religion, you believe in the plant that says, ‘Don’t mess with me’. You put it in front of your house, and you believe in its protection. I think that’s the beauty of what we’re doing here, because you see the trauma, you see the violence, everything that genocide and colonialism did, but you also see a belief that another way and another world is possible.”