Postponed for a year, this exhibition opens amidst the sanitary, economic, institutional, ethical and aesthetic crisis that reigns in Brazil. We realize the future has dreadful contours, and yet we remember that it still is—and will always be—a site in dispute, and affirm the importance of autonomous spaces of creation and exchange where alliances are formed.

The exhibition brings together six new installations produced by artists who identify as travestis* and live or have lived in São Paulo. TRANSÄLIEN creates an optical instrument of revelation that challenges the impulse of categorization. Invested in her vulnerability, Bruna Kury constructs weapons against violence and exploitation. Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro penetrates the invisible in order to fertilize the grounds of life. Lucyfer Eclipsa exhibits ludic creatures marked by signs of transience and mutability. Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos investigates traces of time and memory on the borders. Vulcanica Pokaropa unifies the sacred and the profane in a series of paintings and oratories.

Invoking metamorphosis as a collective strategy of survival, The Day Before the Fall questions what will we transform ourselves into tomorrow. And with us, the territory: what kind of transformation awaits the center of São Paulo? A battleground of contradictions lay before us: of encounters and emptiness, celebration and tragedy. Emerging between the ruins and the proliferation of showrooms, we find a space of LGBTQ+ life and resistance. The center is a territory of cracks, and it’s precisely on these breaches that we forge the impossible.

*Travesti is a transfeminine gender identity rooted in Latin-America.