More than an institutional space, the BRICS Arts Association is a platform created in 2025 that seeks to revive this spirit of cultural friendship as a political practice. The proposal is to build an ecosystem (or even a locussystem, made up of many interconnected places and voices) of continuous and horizontal cultural circulation between the BRICS countries and the wider Global South.
It is not a question of replicating the structures we have inherited, but of imagining new ones. Of thinking about networks and bridges. Of reviving valuable initiatives that have frayed over time, creating a common memory, investing in local curatorship and peer sharing. Of restoring the relational and affective dimension to cultural policy, at a more measured and continuous pace, going beyond the logic of productivity.
Already having partner institutions in nine BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Bolivia, the United Arab Emirates, and Cuba), including CAPACETE, the Association aims to create spaces for circulation between countries, such as artistic residencies and BRICS Houses of Culture, as well as exhibitions, festivals, awards, and publications of books and magazines. In this way, it seeks to promote a permanent dialogue between these countries, valuing what is unique and what is common in their cultures.
Friendship, in this context, ceases to be a luxury or an adornment and becomes the foundation of a new cultural geopolitics. A radical gesture of reunion and reinvention, where culture is seen not only as an instrument of relations between peoples, but also of social transformation, in the name of building a more just, free, and beautiful world.
