Fronteira Livre, São Paulo Biennale, Brazil, 2017

A close collaboration with migrants of CAMI migrants support center to design six banners in the Sao Paulo Metro. Each banner contained a pattern and message that the group wanted to communicate to the city. 

In collaboration with migrants from the CAMI Migrants Support Center, six banners were designed and displayed in São Paulo Metro stations during the 11th Architecture Biennale of São Paulo (October 16–November 15, 2017). This project, inspired by mutirão (community effort), used patterns and messages to translate personal stories into powerful abstractions, addressing the theme of borders. Eight migrants from Bolivia, Peru, Angola, Haiti, and Congo shared experiences of the invisible borders—cultural, social, and economic—that persist even after crossing Brazil’s national border.

The banners, located at six stations along the busy Red Line (carrying 4.7 million passengers daily), conveyed collective experiences of these challenges, inviting reflection on borders in personal and shared contexts, addressing questions like “Where do you face borders?” and “How can we build a movement to address them?” Beyond the Biennale, the project became an integral part of the migrants’ march down Paulista Avenue, calling for legislative change to immigration  laws in Brazil. The project won a special mention in the Design and Participation Category, 6th Ibero-American Design Biennial 2018 (bid18)

Team: Alexander Eriksson Furunes,
Maria Cau Levy, Gabriela Forjaz & Lucy Bullivant
Partner: CAMI Center for Migrant Suppor