Desali / Rafael Rocha — Banho de sol

Banho de Sol, the third solo exhibition by Desali at Athena, created in collaboration with Rafael Rocha, unfolds as both a continuation and a symbolic closure of a cycle initiated with the exhibition Quebra-Demanda in 2022. On that occasion, the artist transformed the Cubo Room at Athena into a space of resistance and collective engagement, where artistic practice merged with the construction of networks of solidarity. The formation of the collective 18 do Front, coordinated by Desali, Rafael Rocha, and Yan da Silva Costa, was the driving force behind an experience that exceeded the limits of the gallery: throughout the exhibition, workshops gathered artists, visitors, and residents from different territories, converting everyday residues into artworks that were exchanged for food baskets and hygiene products delivered to families of incarcerated people. In Quebra-Demanda, art and life intertwined in the same gesture, and the exhibition space became workshop, laboratory, and trench.

In Banho de Sol, Desali and Rafael Rocha shift the focus from the field of collective action to the intimate and poetic dimension of survival. The title, drawn from the expression that designates the brief moment when prisoners are allowed outside, carries a double symbolic weight: it is both the vital breath of air amid deprivation and the reminder that freedom, under such conditions, is rationed and controlled. The exhibition is constructed around this tension, where artistic practice gazes at the small cracks of contact with the outside world, revealing not only precariousness but also the vitality of invention and resistance.

At the center of the exhibition, a video created in collaboration between Desali and Rafael Rocha serves as testimony and fabulation, record and poetry. In it, the voices of the ‘guardados’ - a colloquial term for the incarcerated - interweave with the narrative of delivering aid kits, shaping an intimate portrait of the mobilization of 18 do Front and the affective dimension of this solidarity. The film goes beyond documentation: it exposes the symbolic density embedded in precarious life, turning images of confinement into glimpses of dignity, suggesting that art may also be a form of shared breath.

The installation occupying the gallery amplifies this atmosphere. Structures reminiscent of prison bars intersect with improvised objects from carceral daily life: cigarette butts, pieces of toilet paper fashioned into makeshift wicks, and small mirrors used for signaling between cells. Far from being read merely as remnants, these elements function as material testimonies of the ingenuity of those who persist in communicating and reinventing life under reclusion. Transposed into the art space, they retain their rawness while gaining the strength of symbols: fragments of everyday life that testify to resistance, persistence, and survival.

The photographs in the exhibition displace one of the most entrenched repertoires of Western imagery. By reenacting Catholic iconography, ordinary people occupy the center of the scene, transformed into bearers of transcendence and symbolic reverence. Sacredness, in this displacement, is no longer the privilege of canonized figures but an attribute of historically invisible subjects, who here are reframed with historical weight and poetic dignity. Between reverence and vulnerability, between staging and real life, these images destabilize the place of the sacred, returning it to those whom history has often relegated to the margins.

Although the focus of Banho de Sol is on the intimate dimension of survival, the exhibition does not abandon the participatory logic that characterizes Desali’s trajectory and his collaboration with Rafael Rocha. Easels arranged throughout the gallery present works by the artists and members of the collective, open to public intervention. This openness reaffirms that artistic practice is never complete in itself but extended through the gesture of those who accept the invitation to shared creation. The gallery remains, therefore, a site of exchange and dialogue—continuing the logic of Quebra-Demanda, yet now attuned to the elaboration of a more intimate and sensitive testimony.

If the previous exhibition was organized around the transformative energy of the collective, Banho de Sol centers on what endures after the communal gesture: the minimum breath that sustains life, the vital need for contact with the outside, survival that asserts itself despite the bars. This is where the strength of the practice of Desali and Rafael Rocha lies: by articulating politics and poetics, denunciation and lyricism, their work not only exposes Brazilian social contradictions but insists on opening cracks of light amid darkness. Banho de Sol is, at once, the conclusion of a cycle and a manifesto for continuity, reminding us that art can be not only language or reflection but also a tool for breath, a space of care, and a gesture of hope.