EXIST/RESIST is the first institutional exhibition surveying almost thirty years of practice of Didier Fiúza Faustino (b. 1968), the French-Portuguese experimentalist whose work has consistently provoked and transgressed the formal and conceptual demarcations between architecture, design and art.

Taking its title from two separate pieces (Exist, 2016; Resist, 2017) the exhibition reveals a propelling tension present throughout Faustino’s creative explorations and its continued resonance in face of the aggravating conditions of physical and mental survival in the world today. Whether taking the shape of installations, films, sculptures, editorial projects, temporary architecture, or built-work, the “body” there emerges as a recurring trope and measure of individuation and, as such, as an economic and political site of struggle. 

This exhibition curated by Pelin Tan brings together a vast selection of works, preparatory materials, and prototypes for the first time – drawings, photos, models, large-scale installations, films, and objects, revolving around four core strands of research that recur in Faustino’s work: Housing and Dwelling, Borders of Bodies, Design as Resistance, Agonism in Public Space. Featuring both past and newly created pieces, loans from international collections and never-seen-before documentation from the artist-architect’s private archive, the show is set in a scenography designed by Faustino’s studio – Mésarchitecture –, and conceptually devised to put in dialogue two core areas of the museum and thus create two distinctive spatial experiences. 

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