T and T Projetos Spread an Exhibition on Artistic Contagion Across a Brazilian Plaza, Library and Gallery

Contaminações, or Contaminations, is an exhibition design completed in Brazil in 2017 by T and T Projetos. Its curatorial premise is about contact: how one artistic language touches another and alters both its form and its content. Most exhibitions describe that idea from behind glass. This one acts it out across an entire precinct. Photography leaves the frame and stands on the pavement, typed pages climb the stairwells, and poetry is stitched, pasted and projected onto surfaces that were never meant to carry it.

The project is worth your attention because it treats exhibition design as a spatial argument rather than as packaging. We see a sequence that runs from an open plaza to a tiled pavilion, a stair hall, a gallery under steel trusses and a library reading room. The designers do not use a single display system across these spaces. Instead they invent a new object for each one, and the result shows how much a show can borrow from the buildings that host it.

Portraits That Stand in the Square

The first move is also the boldest. Life-size street portraits are printed onto solid timber blocks and set loose on the paved plaza, standing in loose clusters among the trees. At a distance they read as a crowd. Up close, the hourglass-shaped blocks reveal the grain of the wood through the faces of the people printed on them. The photograph turns into a body, and the plaza turns into a room of strangers.

The totems also work as wayfinding. Their rows lead toward the low pavilion with its red clay tile roof, and a mirrored wall beside the steel frame doubles the crowd. You arrive inside the exhibition before you have reached a door, which is exactly the kind of leakage the title promises.

A Facade Borrowed by Photography

On the building edge, a long band of black-and-white portraits runs above the glazed ground floor like a frieze. The scale is closer to advertising than to gallery practice, and that is the point: the images speak to people passing on the lawn as much as to ticketed visitors. Below, a man reads his newspaper on a wooden bench, apparently unbothered by the faces overhead.

The entrance continues the logic in smaller gestures. Large lettering sits directly on the glass, and the steps are painted pink. Neither move is expensive. Both make the threshold part of the content instead of a neutral gap before it.

Paper as a Second Skin

Inside, printed sheets and book pages are pasted across walls, balconies and stairwells until the architecture looks wallpapered in literature. The paper wraps the concrete stair, the glazed timber balcony and even the reception desk zone, while tall photo-printed columns rise through the hall. A painted letter in the stairwell and a word assembled from loose sheets on a grey wall show the same material moving between text and image.

The treatment is cheap, temporary and very legible, and we think that is its strength. Paper wears, tears and gets brushed against as people climb the granite steps. The exhibition accepts that contact rather than protecting itself from it.

An Inflatable Tower for Listening

The most inventive object sits in the library. A round plywood table carries a stack of clear inflatable rings that rise into a translucent column, and a reader can sit inside it. Headphones rest in routed recesses in the tabletop, next to paperbacks and small engraved labels. The piece is part furniture, part listening booth and part sculpture, and it carries sound into a room usually kept silent.

The layered plywood base is detailed with care, as the low view across the polished timber floor shows. Children in headphones sit at its edge while adults read beside the brick wall. The inflatable softens the acoustic and visual boundary without closing anyone off, a light way to mark a zone inside a shared reading room.

Screens, Lyrics and Pinned Pages

The gallery under exposed roof trusses holds the more conventional material, yet it is still staged as overlap. Old television monitors sit on white plinths and play black-and-white interviews, while the surrounding walls are printed with lines of song lyrics in black and blue. You hear one voice and read another at the same time.

Elsewhere, a curved wall carries rows of pinned typed pages under a projected rectangle of light, and plywood-mounted portraits stand in a line beneath the timber trusses. Outside, people sit on a timber deck in front of Portuguese text panels. The display language changes with each room, but the habit of layering media stays constant.

Text Turned into Thread and Birds

Two further techniques push writing toward craft and image. Red and black capital letters are embroidered into white perforated mesh, built from vertical thread lines that read as a word only from the right distance. The letters become textile, and the reader becomes a viewer.

The bird silhouettes are the gentlest move in the show. Tiny printed passages are pasted onto white concrete block walls in the outline of birds, and in a narrow paved passage under tall trees the flock covers both sides. A poem becomes a drawing, and a service alley becomes a gallery you walk through looking up.

Why This Project Matters

Exhibition design is often judged by how invisible it is. Contaminations argues the reverse. T and T Projetos give each medium a physical object suited to its site, such as timber totems for portraits, an inflatable column for sound and pasted paper for text, and then let those objects spill past the gallery walls into plazas, stairs and a library. The curatorial theme becomes something you move through rather than something you read on a label.

There is also a lesson in economy. Plywood, print, paper, thread and a stack of inflatable rings are modest materials, and the project relies on placement and scale far more than on budget. For anyone designing temporary installations in public institutions, this is a strong case for working with the existing building, its trees, brick and steel trusses, and treating them as collaborators in the show.

Contaminations (Contaminações) by T and T Projetos, Brazil, 2017. Photographs by Pedro Vannucchi.

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