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| A conversation between Paulo Freire, myself and me
Since history often repeats itself, revisiting it is always necessary to image possibles futures. Therefore, I refer to their life, their words, images and historical facts to craft these dialogues. As a result, the boundary between fiction and reality is blurred. Though these encounters never really occurred in real life, they do become real the moment I actively challenge their positions as part of a conversation.
I started with these fictional conversations in 2018 during the year I was engaged in the post-Master course Decolonizing Architecture Advanced Studies (DAAS). DAAS is a one-year post-master program hosted at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, Sweden, led by Professor Alessandro Petti, assisted first by Elof Hellström, and later by Marie-Louise Richards.
In this text, I will share my artistic and personal learning journey since my arrival in Sweden bringing a professional background from Brazil. I will also reflect how a dialogical learning environment has helped me to embrace the challenges of re-becoming a student at DAAS and how it has informed my artistic practice—that I refer to as “to be more” from Paulo Freire.
Part One – To be more
As an experienced architect, I was at first very reluctant to enrol in a course. The idea of being a student again after years in conventional education environments was not particularly appealing to me. I love learning, and I believe we should approach life as a continuous learning experiment, but I had lost hope that we can have a genuinely nurturing learning environment within an institutional course.
My reluctance to apply for DAAS lay in the fact that, at that moment in my life, I wanted to continue my learning journey in a real-life context, learning by doing, rather than in an academic institution. Don’t get me wrong; I see universities as vibrant hotbed of ideas, but the structures and dynamics that the position of ‘student’ entails in conventional education settings can feel demeaning. For such, education always rests on the promise of ‘becoming’ and rarely acknowledges the ‘being’.
Also, student-professor relationships can become trapped in a contaminated dynamic that feeds itself in a loop, where students just await to receive tasks, and professors simply give instructions. This logic leaves little room for collaboration. The student remains passive, while the professor assumes the role of knowledge provider, establishing a relationship in only one direction and from top to bottom. This hierarchical behaviour in the classroom, plus the simulation of real-life situations in a protect academic setting, was precisely the opposite of what I wanted. However, as a newcomer to Sweden, enrolling at the university was as a gate – a possibility to enter in any sort of public realm of Swedish society and its professional environment.
Nonetheless, to my delight and contrary my expectations, DAAS offered a radical approach to pedagogy. DAAS didn’t want students in the standard sense of the term. We, enrolled at DAAS, should be more. To be more in Paulo Freire’s concept, means to question the student-professor relationship and to emphasize the active involvement of both in the learning. We had to be more than mere students. Call it participants, collaborators, part of a collective, a group or a community, with the central idea of learning with rather than from the professor as the sole authority.
DAAS challenged the very idea of ‘course’. Rather than course, it is a space for encounters and shared conversations. It became a point of convergence for different people seeking allies to better understand the world and act upon urgent matters. The program brings together an intergenerational, intercultural and multidisciplinary group centred around a discourse of decolonization, acknowledging that each participant carries knowledge and embodied experiences from which we can all learn.
By understanding ourselves as a collective mutual source of knowledge for our learning, the notion of a pre-imposed program did not hold up. In fact, it would repress individual expression, preventing us from first getting to know ourselves, recognizing each body’s presence, acknowledging what each one can offer, and what each one wants to learn.
Thus, unlike my previous academic experiences, this course did not lay out a detailed curriculum or a definitive study plan on the first day of classes. At first glance, it even appeared somewhat chaotic, lacking structure but this was precisely what allowed space for the participants’ agency, decisions, negotiations and debates.
This approach, which challenges the standard idea of a ‘course’ and a ‘student’, requires perseverance and courage from all participants, including teachers. Students are often unfamiliar to that level of freedom and the lack of instructions from above. It tends to be easier to follow directives and not to think for oneself. That freedom can feel as an intimidation, disorienting and disarming, bringing discomfort for the learning experience. As a participant, you must confront your own questions and take charge of your own path. It is a dense and a tense process, carrying emotions into a classroom setting that is traditionally considered objective and dispassionate.
It was an experiment that posed deep challenge and drew me into a continuous conversation with myself. It was at this point that I realized knowledge is not merely an external entity that I must attain, always seeming just out of reach, but rather something that may already reside within me. Something that I can nurture and develop in the direction and manner I choose, with myself as the point of departure. Re-establishing this contact with my 'self', my history and with my own agency, was transformative and crucial for my sense of emancipation.
I began to focus on my own learning journey, recognizing and valuing who I am, where I come from, and the embodied knowledge I have. I transitioned from the futuristic state of 'becoming' to one of 'being'.
Part Two – Conversations
I was born, raised, and trained as an architect in Brazil. After graduating and working for several years in my hometown Rio de Janeiro, I decided to move to Europe, first to Italy, then to England, and eventually to Sweden, where I now write. Despite my years of professional experience in architecture and holding two master's degrees from European institutions: University of Bologna and University College London, I often felt a sense of inadequacy here, as if something lacked value.
Paulo Freire, a Brazilian alike me, was brought into one of our DAAS meetings. I appreciated because he is an iconic figure in Brazil, officially recognized as the patron of Brazilian education. As an educator, Freire viewed the learner as an active subject, possessing knowledge about their own reality and context. He believed that the role of the educator was to equip the learner with the tools for critical reflection, enabling them to transform their own reality.
Although I was familiar with Freire’s texts, this was the first time I experienced a learning environment grounded in his radical pedagogical methods. I use the term radical, often associated to alternative educational approaches like those of Paulo Freire; approaches so transformative that led to his arrest and exile during the military dictatorship of the 1960s. Yet, what is intriguing is that the radical nature of his theory lies simply in recognizing the learner’s agency, potential, and possibilities. It also involves acknowledging the diverse forms of knowledge we all carry, that can emerge from many different sources.
I am not fan of nationalism, but I must admit that I take satisfaction in being his country fellow and even a sort of vindictive pleasure in reading his works in the original language, Portuguese. This may seem trivial, but beyond feeling closer to his theories and the reality he describes, reading in my mother tongue provides me a sense of comfort and belonging that I have been missing for a long time since moving to the Northern Hemisphere. It also served as a much-needed reminder that knowledge does not belong solely to West or Western institutions.
In the same year I was reading Paulo Freire in Sweden, 2018, Brazil faced a fascist offensive with the Bolsonaro government, accompanied by all deplorable elements typical of fascism: colonialism, racism, homophobia, misogyny, machismo, destruction, violence, and hatred. Paulo Freire’s educational philosophies became a target, his ideas and methodologies distorted in the extreme-right sphere in ways that were trivial, careless, and irresponsible. Participating in a course that advocates for critical and dialogical education felt as an act of resistance against the resurgence of fascism, sadly, not only in Brazil.
In Decolonizing Architecture Advanced Studies (DAAS), the ‘being together’ and engaging in conversations constitute the main radical learning methodology. We collaboratively decided course activities, program, and schedule. What Paulo Freire calls dialogical education, that requires the active participation of all involved, challenging the traditional role of students as passive recipients of knowledge dispensed by the teacher.
The dialogical approach of Paulo Freire and DAAS informed the development of my architectural practice. It was through this lens that I expanded my understanding of what architecture is and what architects can do. An architecture not defined solely by lines and drawings, but by the collective shaping of space through dialogue and words. Our conversations themselves became a form of spatial practice.
Indeed, Paulo Freire’s method applied in spatial practices learning environments is essential, particularly when addressing social justice. Embracing individual agency and responsibility, fostering awareness of the context, recognizing diverse forms of knowledge, and cultivating respect and care in the relationships are foundational to a just spatial practice. What Freire emphasizes is that education extends beyond merely learning to read and write; it involves cultivating awareness and shaping one’s political consciousness.
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