On the centenary of Paulo Freire's birth, Itaú Cultural dedicates its new Occupancy to the philosopher of education

From September 18th to December 5th, Itaú Cultural holds the Paulo Freire Occupancy exhibit to celebrate the philosopher, writer, and educator's centenary. In addition to the on-site exhibit, there will be also online activities, including weekly meetings with intellectuals who study his work or have spent time with him, to talk about his work; a podcast and other activities organized by the educators of the institution.

The Occupancy exhibit is complemented with a printed publication containing articles, testimonies, and interviews with guests representing different areas of knowledge and expression, such as health, security, music, theater, photography, architecture, inclusion, education, and their internationalization. Art educator Ana Mae Barbosa; Ilse Schimpf-Herken, founder and director of the Paulo Freire Institute in Berlin, Germany; Eymard Vasconcelos, pioneer in the research and practice of popular education in health; and André François, photographer and founder of ImageMagica, among others, tell how they base their work on the knowledge learned from Freire. The website shows part of the material displayed at the exhibit and exclusive contents.

The Audiovisual & Literature and Education & Relationship Departments are the curators. The exhibit, designed by Thereza Faria, occupies the entire Multipurpose room, on the 2nd floor of the institution. The exhibit follows Freire's life story, since his birth in 1921, goes through the development of his literacy method – which was implemented in Angicos (Rio Grande do Norte) and gained international notoriety, and follows him in the different countries where he lived during his exile forced by the military regime, until his return to Brazil and work in the country, where he died in 1997.   
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This is the 53rd exhibit of the Occupancy series held at Itaú Cultural since 2009, which seeks to promote dialogue between the new generation of artists and intellectuals and the creators who influenced them. Occupancy Paulo Freire started to be planned more than two years ago. Due to the pandemic, its production was carried out entirely online. The exhibit also integrates the network of partner institutions of the 34th São Paulo Art Biennial.


‍Exposição
An animation with the handwritten pages of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire's best-known book, opens the way for the exhibit. An interactive map, called Paulo Freire around the world, concludes it. It shows all the places in different continents impacted by the educator's work – adult literacy and the sharing of knowledge and insights about education. The educator's work reached more than 30 countries, and the repercussion of his ideas is recorded in more than thirty books – part of them, which belong to the Itaú Cultural collection, is on display on a shelf at the exhibit.  
 
Freire was acknowledged with at least 41 Honoris Causa degrees, and dozens of studies were carried out on him and his work, which also reflect on professorships, Academic Centers, institutes, and research groups. Homages, honorary citizenships, awards, medals, event commemorative plaques, trophies, various certificates, honor decorations, and school names are among other recognitions of Paulo Freire's work.  

From the animation to the map, the exhibit extends through more than 170 meters of the Multipurpose room, divided into four displays – Background, Angicos, Exile, and Return Home. Nearly 140 items are displayed, including 60 photographs that show Freire in the most diverse contexts and locations in Brazil and abroad, as well as videos and dozens of his original books – from the Baby Book, made by his parents when he was born, to his own manuscripts, such as Under the Shade of This Mango Tree, Pedagogy of Hope and Pedagogy of Autonomy.

Original poems and letters sent and received by him are also on display. Among the items there is also some of his marginalia found in books by authors such as painter Johann Moritz Rugendas, Erich Fromm, Aldous Huxley, and Caio Prado Júnior, which belonged to him and today they are part of the Paulo Freire Institute Library pre-exile collection.  
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Posters and illustrations used in the so-called 40 hours of Angicos, which is the name of the Rio Grande do Norte town where about 300 people learned to read and write in 40 hours using Freire's method, are also part of the exhibit. It also contains a plethora of documentary materials and photographs of his travels to Chile and other countries such as Kenya, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Angola, and São Tomé and Príncipe, as well as Switzerland, where he lived and worked in the years before his return to Brazil.   
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The Background display shows Freire's northeastern origins, with an emphasis on his childhood, his family, and the house where he was born and learned to read and write, in Recife – where he used to sit under the shade of a mango tree and wrote his first words using sticks.   
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In Angicos, there is a large number of documents and pictures related to this small town in Rio Grande do Norte, detailing the literacy experience that Freire developed there from 1960 to 1964. Among them is the documentation prepared by Freire for the training of educators involved in the experience, including textbooks and notes on how classes were conducted. Focus is also given to documents on the National Literacy Plan and other applications of the Paulo Freire Literacy System – the planning of culture circles throughout the country and literacy experiences applied in the states of Acre, Rio de Janeiro, Santa Catarina, São Paulo, and the Federal District.
 
Exile covers the period from 1964 to 1980, when the civil-military regime led him to exile for 16 years. There are records of his departure from Brazil and his stay in Bolivia before settling in Chile, where he wrote Pedagogy of the Oppressed, as well as of his years in the United States and Switzerland, his work at the Cultural Action Institute (IDAC) in the 1970s, and the education and literacy programs he led in African countries.   
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In this area, there are other important documents from that period, such as the 14 stapled pages of the police inquiry into his work at the university, which eventually led to his leaving the country.   
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Finally, the Return Home display, which covers the period from 1980 to 1997, shows the life of Paulo Freire when he returned to Brazil, after he was given amnesty, and began teaching at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC/SP) , at the University of Campinas (Unicamp), and in other university circles. In 1986, he was awarded with the UNESCO Prize for Peace Education. Three years later, in 1989, he became municipal secretary of education for then mayor of São Paulo Luiza Erundina. Paulo Freire died in May 1997, at the age of 75, one year after the publication of Pedagogy of Autonomy, his last work.   
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This display ends the journey through the Occupancy and reveals the internationalization of Freire's work from the interactive map to a variety of items, such as training materials for educators, drafts for bills that provided for better working conditions and other bills for the dissemination of specific actions, such as the creation and/or reactivation of school councils.


‍ACCESSIBILITY
A tactile map positioned at the entrance to the venue displays the exhibit in reliefs for blind visitors and suggests routes. Tactile paving helps visitors to move around the exhibit following a suggested path and indications of points of interest, where audio materials are available.   
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The exhibit also counts on tactile objects that reproduce materials related to Paulo Freire's Literacy Method. Seven audio description tracks present the exhibit's displays and the materials contained in them. The videos include audio descriptions of the tactile objects and the interactive exhibit Paulo Freire around the world, and the material is also interpreted into Brazilian Sign Language.  

Tablets attached to the walls with video guides, created by Itaú Cultural's educational staff to present the occupancy to the deaf community, suggest paths and dialogues. They are divided into four thematic tracks, in line with the exhibit's displays, with contents complementary to the curated exhibit.