Vão Tilts Colored Walls Beneath an Exposed Truss Roof to Stage a Brazilian Exhibition on the Body

The curators of Corpos explícitos, corpos ocultos (Explicit Bodies, Hidden Bodies), Agnaldo Farias and Adolfo Montejo Navas, call the body "the first trench of existence": a first boundary, a line between self and world. They extend the idea from the material body to the psychic and the spiritual. That is a hard brief to build, because a trench is not an object you can hang on a wall. It is a condition you have to walk through. São Paulo studio Vão, led by Anna Juni, Enk te Winkel and Gustavo Delonero, answers it in 550 m² of temporary installation completed in 2025 in Brazil.

What makes the project worth your attention is how little it adds, and how much that little does. Vão leaves the long hall and its exposed steel trusses alone, then inserts a series of freestanding wall planes that lean, fold and cut across the room. Each one is painted a saturated maroon, orange, red or dark blue. The walls do the curatorial work that a sequence of closed rooms would normally do, but without sealing anything off. You are always partly inside one zone and partly looking into the next, which is close to what the curators mean by a body that is both explicit and hidden.

An Entrance That Announces, Then Withdraws

The threshold is handled with restraint. Large black and grey lettering, part of the visual identity by Estúdio Campo, occupies the entrance wall with a text panel. An ordinary doorway beside it gives a first glimpse of lit color beyond. Vão does not stage a dramatic reveal; it lets the gallery leak out through the opening.

Once inside, the orange corridor sets the tone for everything that follows. A large pale drawing hangs at the center, a photo collage and a glowing video screen run along the walls, and the color itself becomes a kind of skin. We read it as a deliberate move: before you meet any single artwork, you are already inside a warm, enclosing surface.

Walls That Lean Instead of Stand

The defining gesture is the slant. A partition tilts orange against the room, a broom-like sculpture hangs in front of it, and a cluster of black-and-white photographs and two monitors sit nearby. Elsewhere, maroon and orange planes meet at angles to frame drawings, a grid of portraits and a low floor platform. None of these walls behaves like a neutral backdrop. They have posture.

That posture matters for an exhibition about bodies. A vertical white wall implies an upright, disembodied viewer. A leaning red plane that reads almost like a ramp, set against a dark blue wall with a glass vitrine of white models, asks you to register your own weight and position. The architecture borrows the language of the body: inclination, fold, a surface you could lean into.

Leaving the Truss Roof Exposed

Seen from above, the strategy becomes legible. The sloping partitions never reach the ceiling. They stop short beneath the steel trusses, track spotlights run overhead, and the original roof stays visible across the whole hall. The new walls read as inserted pieces, the old shed as a constant.

This is a smart economy for a temporary installation, and also a conceptual choice. The open top means sound, light and sightlines pass over every division, so no zone is fully private. Fernanda Carvalho Lighting Design, with installation by Ilumina Jão, washes the trusses in a red tint that ties the ceiling to the painted walls below. The structure is left bare, but it is not left out.

Color as a Curatorial Tool

Vão uses color to group works rather than to decorate them. A maroon wall carries a dense field of small framed drawings while a back wall holds collaged nudes and large portraits in warm light. A red-walled room is hung with colorful painted panels, a large body artwork and small screens beside an angled partition.

The risk with saturated walls is that they compete with the art. Here they mostly hold their ground without overwhelming it, partly because the palette stays in a narrow, warm, flesh-adjacent range. Maroon, orange and red sit close to the colors of skin and blood; the dark blue reads as their shadow. It is a palette chosen for the subject, not for the photograph.

Plinths, Shadows and a Model You Can Touch

Some of the most careful moments are quieter. A black abstract sculpture sits on a low plinth near a shadow-figure print and lit photographs, the low base keeping the object at a bodily rather than monumental height. In a dim corridor of framed portraits and a grid of symbols, a tactile floor-plan model sits in the foreground.

That model deserves more credit than it will likely get. An exhibition about bodies that included only sighted, standing visitors would undercut its own argument. A plan you can read with your hands extends the show to bodies the curators might otherwise have left implicit, and it does so at very little cost.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plan confirms the logic you feel on the ground: a long rectangular hall, angled partitions breaking its length into overlapping zones, a central square of framed images, and a red line near the entrance marking the start of the route. The cross-sections are the most revealing drawings. They show the existing truss with its round openings in solid line and the new transverse walls only as dashed projections, a clear statement that the building comes first and the exhibition is a visitor.

The panel elevations show V-shaped and triangular gridded walls, each cut with a small square opening, drawn with scale bars. These are not generic partitions but a small set of repeatable parts. The axonometric pulls it together: pink, red and grey planes standing in sequence inside a dashed volume, like pieces placed on a board rather than rooms carved out of space.

Why This Project Matters

Exhibition design often defaults to one of two modes: the white cube that pretends the architecture is absent, or the scenographic set that drowns the work in atmosphere. Vão finds a third path. With a limited kit of angled, gridded, painted panels and a lighting scheme that ties them to an untouched roof, the studio builds a spatial argument that matches the curatorial one. Boundaries are present everywhere, but none of them is complete.

For anyone designing temporary cultural space, the lesson is about proportion of effort. Leave the existing structure legible, invest in a few well-drawn parts, and let color and inclination carry meaning. The result is a show where the walls themselves seem to have bodies, which is exactly the right kind of excess for this subject.

Explicit Bodies, Hidden Bodies Exhibition (Corpos explícitos, corpos ocultos) by Vão, Brazil. Lead architects: Anna Juni, Enk te Winkel and Gustavo Delonero. Project team: Luiza Souza, Maria Vizeu and Gabriel Wissenbach. Curators: Agnaldo Farias and Adolfo Montejo Navas. General construction: Poro Arquitetura. Lighting design: Fernanda Carvalho Lighting Design; lighting installation: Ilumina Jão. Visual design: Estúdio Campo. Area: 550 m². Year: 2025. Photography: Marília Camelo.

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