Brazilian photographer and visual artist Leonardo Finotti discusses the development of the Latinitudes exhibition, in addition to his long-term project documenting modern architecture across Latin America, and the accompanying publication series with Lars Müller Publishers. The talk is followed by a reception.

Latinitudes, presented for the first time in the United States, is a photographic survey of modern architecture across twelve Latin American cities: Buenos Aires, Argentina; Bogotá, Colombia; Caracas, Venezuela; Guatemala City, Guatemala; Havana, Cuba; Lima, Peru; Mexico City, Mexico; Montevideo, Uruguay; Quito, Ecuador; San José, Costa Rica; Santiago, Chile; and São Paulo, Brazil. Featuring more than 100 photographs by Finotti and curated by Brazilian architect Michelle Jean de Castro, the exhibition presents modern architecture across Latin America from a new perspective. Combining the words "latitudes" and "Latino," the exhibition proposes a horizontal framework connecting cities across shared geographies and histories, presenting housing, civic, and cultural works by key figures of modernism—Luis Barragán, Lina Bo Bardi, Roberto Burle Marx, Félix Candela, Eladio Dieste, Emilio Duhart, Ricardo Legorreta, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Oscar Niemeyer, Juan O'Gorman, Mario Pani, Ricardo Porro, Rogelio Salmona, Clorindo Testa, and Carlos Raúl Villanueva, among others.

Presented in partnership with the Chicago Architecture Biennial

Leonardo Finotti is a visual artist based in São Paulo, Brazil, whose work centers on two complementary themes: modern architecture and anonymous or informal urban spaces. Trained as an architect, he holds a BA in Architecture from the Universidade Federal de Uberlândia (Brazil) and completed postgraduate studies at the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau, Germany. Finotti began his career in Portugal, where he lived for six years and worked with leading Portuguese architects, before embarking on a long-term photographic project that revisits and reinterprets the legacy of modern architecture across Latin America and beyond. Alongside collaborations with architects, institutions, and publications internationally, he has produced a number of independent projects through exhibitions and books, including Pelada (2014), Latinitudes (2015), Rio Enquadrado (2016), A Collection of Latin American Modern Architecture (2016), and Sacred Groves & Secret Parks (2019). His work has been widely exhibited and is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Bündner Kunstmuseum Chur (Switzerland); Fundação EDP (Portugal); Architekturzentrum Wien (Austria); Bauhaus Dessau Foundation (Germany); and Museu Brasileiro da Escultura e Ecologia (Brazil), among others. He has represented Brazil at two Venice Architecture Biennales and the 10th Mercosul Art Biennial, and was a prizewinner at the 15th Buenos Aires International Biennial of Architecture.

For more information on the exhibition, Latinitudes
A Collection of Latin American Modern Architecture, click here.

In Terra Infecta (MACK, 2025), Andrea Bagnato traces a political ecology of the Italian landscape through the lens of health and illness, recounting histories of dispossession and resistance in Naples, Venice, Milan, and Matera — the result of a decade of research and fieldwork supported in part by a grant from the Graham Foundation.

Bagnato is joined by Jennifer Scappettone for a reading and conversation, bringing together their own research and writings to discuss the long-term markings that fascism, internal colonialism, and modernization have left on the physical environment, and how different narrative forms can help us make sense of ecological change.

Andrea Bagnato is an architect and writer based in Genoa, Italy. He has taught at Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam;  the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA), London; and the Decolonizing Architecture program at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm. Previous books include the collective volumes Rights of Future Generations (Hatje Cantz, 2022) and the Graham-funded A Moving Border: Alpine Cartographies of Climate Change (Columbia, 2019).

Jennifer Scappettone works at the confluence of the literary, visual, and scholarly arts, and is professor of literature and faculty affiliate of the Committee on Environment, Geography, and Urbanization at the University of Chicago, where she directs the Environmental Arts+Humanities Lab. She is the author of five full-length books of poetry, translations and prose, including most recently Poetry After Barbarism, The Republic of Exit 43, and Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice.

Presented with support from the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Chicago.

PAST EVENTS

Photo: Ricardo E Adame

Chicago-based artist Irene Hsiao presents 氣, a piece developed for performances across the Chicago Architecture Biennial and part of Hsiao's project Mond(e): 月亮代表我的心, named for the Taiwanese love song "The moon represents my heart." In 氣, Hsiao performs in response to a sculpture by artist and fellow Biennial participant Dominic Kießling, accompanied by soprano Mickey Farès. Inspired by the shifting phases of the moon and the impermanence of architecture and anatomy, the work explores the interplay of air and energy—氣 (qi)—as Kießling’s sculpture receives, amplifies, and returns each movement and emotion in a cycle of mutual transformation. Mond(e): 月亮代表我的心 – 氣 was developed at the Graham Foundation in fall 2025 for presentations at the Narrow Bridge Arts Club and the Driehaus Museum and Hsiao returns to the Madlener House for the closing presentation.

Mond(e): 月亮代表我的心 is a year-long performance and community art project developed through Hsiao's 2025 residency at Hyde Park Art Center, creating site-specific performances with new collaborators that evolve in reference to the moon's periodic phases and its influence. This program is partially supported by an Individual Artists Program Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, as well as a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, from federal funds through the National Endowment for the Arts.

Irene Hsiao creates dance and performance through object-driven inquiry with museum spaces, exhibitions, and artworks. She is the inaugural Artist in Residence at the Smart Museum, first Artist in Residence at 21c Museum Hotel Chicago, first Resident Artist at the Heritage Museum of Asian Art, a Radicle Resident at Hyde Park Art Center, and the first artist in residence at the Chinese Fine Arts Society.

Dominic Kießling is a visual artist whose practice transforms lightweight materials into large-scale kinetic installations animated by fans, hair dryers, or human performance. Born in Dresden in 1984, he studied industrial design before working for a decade in motion and stage design in Berlin. In 2019, he returned to Dresden to focus on analogue art, experimenting with everyday materials and immersive sculptural forms. In 2023, he established his studio in a former factory building to pursue one of his most ambitious projects. Starting with little more than plastic bags and a hair dryer, Kießling developed a dynamic aesthetic that blurs the line between object and organism. His work continues to explore themes of transformation, movement, and material tension.

Mickey Farès is a Chicago-based soprano and improviser with a rich cultural heritage rooted in Venezuela, Spain, and Lebanon. Trained in classical opera performance, her vocal practice explores the full elasticity of the human voice—stretching its expressive limits and weaving together a diverse range of sonic textures. Her improvisational style draws on the raw spontaneity of free jazz and the rich emotionality of Spanish folkloric singing, creating a unique and deeply embodied sound language. Collaborating with movement artists has become central to her work, where the interplay of physical and vocal expression allows for a dynamic exchange of energy between performers. At the heart of her artistic process is a commitment to shared energy—how it is passed, shaped, and amplified among collaborators. For Mickey, improvisation is a playground for presence, curiosity, and connection.

As Fragmented Manifestos enters its final week, the Graham Foundation Bookshop is offering 20% off all purchases from Saturday, February 21, through Friday, February 28, plus a Chicago Architecture Biennial tote bag with purchases over $100.

The Graham Foundation Bookshop features a curated selection of publications by Foundation grantees, alongside new, historically significant, and rare books on architecture, art, urbanism, and related fields. In addition to monographs, exhibition catalogues, and theory-based titles, the bookshop carries local and international journals and magazines. Chicago-based designer Ania Jaworska designed the bookshop in 2013.

Sale Hours:
Sat, Feb 21 — 12–8 p.m.
Wed, Feb 25 — 12–5 p.m.
Thu, Feb 26 — 12–5 p.m.
Fri, Feb 27 — 12–5 p.m.
Sat, Feb 28 — 12–5 p.m.

On view in the galleries: Fragmented Manifestos, part of the sixth edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change, an exhibition bringing together episodes from recent architectural history through drawings, writings, diagrams, installations, and proposals by Amancio Williams, Sergio Prego, Anne Tyng, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Charles Jencks, Stan Allen, and a collaboration between MOS and Tony Cokes.

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