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Paper short abstract

Based on the exhibition Construction, Occupation, this paper proposes exhibition-making as a mode of ‘ethnographic confluence’, showing how art and anthropology can generate embodied, affective knowledge and alternative publics in a polarised world.

Paper long abstract

This paper reflects on Construction, Occupation, an exhibition that translated long-term ethnographic and curatorial engagement with artists and housing movements in São Paulo into an embodied, spatial encounter in Los Angeles' Fowler Museum. Drawing from research and curatorial work conducted in an occupied building that was subsequently transformed into social housing, the project responds to conditions of political polarisation by foregrounding exhibition-making as 'ethnographic confluence'—a mode of knowledge production in which anthropology and art do not lose their specificity, but gain force through their encounter across space, bodies, and publics. Following quilombola thinker Antônio Bispo dos Santos, confluence here names a meeting that strengthens rather than absorbs difference.

I argue that the exhibition, and the artistic practices it brought together, enabled a different kind of knowledge to take form: one grounded in corporality, empathy, and collectivity, and accessed through shared spatial and affective experience. Art works, the public programme, and the exhibition design recreated and engaged with architectural and material elements of the occupation, inviting visitors to move through and inhabit the rhythms and constraints of collective life in São Paulo. In doing so, the exhibition foregrounded the body as a site of knowledge, making vulnerability, care, and resistance perceptible through proximity and co-presence.

Housing is a polemical issue in Los Angeles, where moral frameworks regulate who is deserving of a home. In this context, the exhibition rejected accusation or didactic critique and, through proximity, conversation, and shared attention, created an affective community that opened unique spaces for relational understanding.