Visit with the Curator It is an activity in which the public walks through the exhibition. Debret in question – contemporary perspectives together with the curator Gabriela Longman, The exhibition was conceived by the French researcher and art critic Jacques Leenhardt. The show discusses the work of Jean-Baptiste Debret (1768-1848), a French artist who lived in Rio de Janeiro and portrayed 19th-century Brazil, in dialogue with works by contemporary artists, many of them indigenous and Afro-descendant, who reference Debret in their work.
Throughout the visit, Gabriela Longman explains the curatorial process. She presents the criteria for selecting the artists, the choices of the works, and how the team organized the exhibition to bring together images produced from the 19th to the 21st centuries. The aim is to transform the visit into a conversation about identity, memory, and representation.
The visit begins with the engravings of A picturesque and historic trip to Brazil., The exhibition's first section features the works of Debret. At this point, the curator addresses the historical context of Debret's work, explaining how the artist represented the contradictions of slave society and denounced, in his images, a society anchored in violence. The exhibition invites the public to reconsider Debret as a critical artist, aware of the political role of images, going beyond his official function as a court painter.
In the second section, dedicated to the 20th century, the visit discusses how Debret's work was rediscovered, appropriated, and disseminated in textbooks, popular culture, and even Carnival. By analyzing this process of circulation and use outside its original context, the curator proposes reflecting on how images construct memories and change meaning over time.
The journey continues into the 21st century, when contemporary artists revisit Debret's collection of images as a space for debate. Works by names such as Rosana Paulino, Jaime Lauriano, Denilson Baniwa, Gê Viana e Dalton Paula They reveal continuities and ruptures in Brazilian social hierarchies. Two creations produced especially for this edition of the exhibition deepen this dialogue, placing past and present in confrontation and questioning what has changed in the forms of violence and exclusion.
About the curator
Gabriela Longman: A curator, editor, and journalist, she holds a Master's degree in Art and Language from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS-Paris) and a PhD in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from USP (University of São Paulo). She curated the exhibitions “Alê Ruaro: Under the Sky, Above the Ground” (Biblioteca Mário de Andrade, 2024) and “Debret in Question” (Maison de L'Amérique Latine, Paris and Museu do Ipiranga). She is a contributor to Folha de S.Paulo, Elle, Esquire, among other publications, and a founding partner of Guia Orbit, a platform dedicated to organizing São Paulo's cultural programming using cutting-edge technology.
Visit with the Curator
Guided tour of the exhibition “Debret in Question – Contemporary Perspectives”
Date: Saturday, March 14th
Opening hours: at 10 am and at 11 am
Duration: 45 minutes
Meeting point: Temporary Exhibition Hall – Ipiranga Museum
Free registration: until March 11th, in this link
