An artist has “broken” Tadao Ando’s architecture at Punta della Dogana

A long line of coarse salt cuts through Punta della Dogana, one of the two venues of the Pinault Collection designed by Tadao Ando—Domus guest editor in 2021—as the restoration of the former Venetian customs house, built between 1677 and 1682 as a terminal for goods arriving by sea. At first glance, it may seem like a minimal, almost silent gesture. Yet it is one of the most radical interventions this architecture has ever faced. Seen from above, the form traced in salt resembles a cargo ship. Paulo Nazareth, who has spent over twenty years working on migratory routes and colonial legacies, conceived it specifically for this space: a place originally designed to control goods—and therefore bodies as well.

“Nazareth is a trickster, a profaner—even when it comes to architecture,” curator Fernanda Brenner tells Domus. Until now, bodies had never entered Ando’s architecture: pure geometries, light, and exposed concrete—nothing that escaped an idea of the “sublime.”

Fernanda Brenner

The salt ship is a ghost ship—tumbeiro in Portuguese, from tumba, meaning tomb—the name given to vessels that transported enslaved Africans. “Working in Venice means confronting what these routes have left unresolved,” Brenner continues. A drawing with measurements, leaning against a wall, shows that up to four hundred people could be packed into a single hold—“in the very space you are now walking through.”

“Algebra,” on view from March 29 to November 22, 2026, brings Punta della Dogana back to its most concrete dimension: a maritime crossroads between the Grand Canal and the Giudecca Canal, a landing point for goods since the 15th century. Here, merchandise arriving by sea was unloaded and taxed within the customs system that regulated the trade of the Venetian Republic. Nazareth intervenes with a series of works on the upper floor: small paintings depicting migrant boats in the Mediterranean as if they were Dutch maritime scenes; consumer products embedded in resin, their names and logos evoking Indigenous symbols; skulls and ossuaries taken from Brazilian anthropological museums.

If Ando constructed a universal space, Nazareth brings it back into a network of specific, unequal histories. Rather than simply intervening in the architecture, he challenges its very premise: neutrality. This stands in stark contrast to the current exhibition at the Bourse de Commerce in Paris, where works centered on chiaroscuro amplify the abstraction of the Japanese master’s architecture. Here, by contrast, they disrupt it.

The point of maximum tension is Ando’s cube: the concrete volume at the center of the building that organizes the space and makes the architect’s intervention legible, imposing a clear order on a historically layered structure. It is here that Nazareth intervenes, covering it with dishcloths embroidered by his mother—traditional Brazilian panos de prato. In Amor de Mãe, what was meant to stabilize the space is thrown off balance: a domestic gesture introduces a different, affective and relational logic that breaks the formal continuity of Ando’s design.

“Nazareth brings relationships into the exhibition. Even his own name acts as a vessel for those relationships,” says Brenner. The artist’s grandmother, Nazareth Cassiano de Jesus, an Indigenous woman, spent much of her life between Brazilian plantations and psychiatric institutions during what has been described as the “Brazilian Holocaust.”

And then there is a third space—unseen, yet running through the entire exhibition. It is Nova Veneza, a neighborhood founded in 1891 by Italian migrants in Ribeirão das Neves, Brazil: a displaced, transformed Venice. “A poor district, near one of the largest prisons in the world,” Brenner explains.

Fernanda Brenner

It is the only Venice the artist—who has chosen not to return to Europe until he has walked across all African territories as they existed before the Berlin Conference—will inhabit during the exhibition. A ghost Venice he intends to bring in procession through the city.

On Sunday, March 29, starting from the Teatrino at Palazzo Grassi, the public will create a papier-mâché boi inspired by traditions from Minas Gerais. The procession will move through Dorsoduro and the Accademia to the Dogana, while the same route will be performed simultaneously in Brazil. It is one of the rare occasions in which an exhibition from François Pinault’s private collection—founder of Kering, which owns brands such as Gucci, Saint Laurent, and Balenciaga—connects directly with the city. “This is a work that does not end within the exhibition space. It keeps moving, creating relationships, existing across different places,” Brenner concludes.

Opening image: view of Punta della Dogana, 2005. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons