(se)cura humana
São Paulo, Brazil. Founded by Flavio Barollo and Wellington Tibério

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The multidisciplinary practice of the (se)cura humana collective encompasses performances, urban interventions, and audiovisual actions, all oriented toward socio-environmental activism and a critique of the exploitation model of natural resources.

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Urban River Bather is a performative intervention born from real immersions in contaminated rivers in São Paulo, such as the Tietê, Anhanguera, and Guatá Porã (in Osasco), where the collective acts to highlight the environmental violence that affects the daily lives of urban populations.

 

This work connects with the theme of the 2024 Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere. Dressed in a sanitation jumpsuit and a snorkel mask — garments that ironically contrast with the concept of swimwear — the bather is a body displaced in time, carrying the marks of colonialism and capitalist extractivism, which have historically transformed the rivers of the Global South into zones of environmental exploitation, while simultaneously projecting us into a present-future of climate urgency.

 

This intervention seeks to establish a bridge with the work Aguacero, by Daniel Otero Torres, which addresses the Emberá’s struggle for access to drinking water in Colombia, along the Atrato River. Both works explore the impacts of extractivist exploitation and environmental abandonment on Latin American communities. Just as Aguacero uses a stilt structure to capture water in a region rich in rainfall, Urban River Bather engages with a “dystopian” future, questioning the normalization of rivers as destinations for sewage and industrial waste.

 

Through this narrative, (se)cura humana denounces the privatization of water and the commodification of nature, linking the pollution of São Paulo's rivers to the global climate crisis, which threatens places like Venice itself, where rising sea levels put historical and cultural heritage at risk. By entering as a "foreigner" at the Venice Biennale, the collective creates a connection between the murky waters of exploited countries and the vulnerability of a European historic center, now threatened by sea level rise and flooding risks driven by global warming. This presence reveals the universality of environmental impacts that transcend borders and exposes the lingering weight of coloniality on these relationships.

 

Urban River Bather, 2024
Performance and urban intervention. Mixed media: sanitation jumpsuit, snorkel mask, performative journey through urban and exhibition spaces.

With Flavio Barollo, Odacy Oliveira and Wellington Tibério.