Hartwig Art Foundation and Pivô are thrilled to announce their long-term institutional partnership, a meaningful collaboration between two organisations with a shared vision for advancing contemporary art and culture. This joint endeavour aims to nurture a living system where knowledge flows in multiple directions, finding new expressions as it crosses geographical and temporal territories and contexts, creating space for collective learning and shared cultural practices. Spearheaded by Hartwig’s Head of Global Initiatives, Diana Campbell, the partnership marks the first project in her role for the foundation.
This meeting of two like-minded institutions stands to reimagine international cultural exchange beyond traditional frameworks by establishing networks that shift familiar patterns of resource distribution between Europe and the Global Majority. Connecting Brazil and the Netherlands with practitioners across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East through artist exchanges, commissions addressing shared urban challenges, public programming, ecologies of learning, and documentation of emerging methodologies. It also demonstrates the transformative synergy and unquestionable parallels between Pivô’s reactivation of Bo Bardi’s Ladeira da Misericórdia in Salvador and Hartwig’s ongoing transformation of a brutalist former courthouse in Amsterdam into a major museum. Using architecture and urban planning as social tools and platforms for community transformation, each organisation draws inspiration from ecological processes of seed dispersal and pollination—preferring movement over fixity, possibility over preservation, and connection over collection, following a borderless trajectory of shared knowledge and cultural creation.
With Pivô, we are laying the foundation for a shared journey that transcends regions and institutions. In both Salvador and Amsterdam, we are bringing historic buildings to life as spaces for contemporary art and collective exchange.
– Beatrix Ruf, directeur Hartwig Art Foundation
Pivô was founded in 2012 in São Paulo as an autonomous art institution, dedicated to contemporary artistic experimentation, critical thinking, and social engagement. This year, the organisation will embark on a major undertaking—establishing a third venue, Pivô-Coaty, through an unprecedented collaboration between Salvador’s municipality and civic actors that will reactivate Ladeira da Misericórdia, one of prolific landmark architect Lina Bo Bardi’s most significant architectural works in Brazil, as a shared cultural resource.