What happens when you take a fully orchestrated opera – costumes, decor, and wigs – and squeeze it all into a music box or when a street riot is suddenly frozen into a natural history museum diorama? When Adriano Costa’s sprawling magnum opus, recently composed for Pivô, in São Paulo, collides with the intimate architecture of a half-forgotten Parisian 19th-century covered passage, something deliciously perverse occurs.
This exhibition follows Costa’s major survey currently showing at Pivô in COPAN, Oscar Niemeyer’s serpentine concrete monument to modernist utopia. There, across 1,500 square meters, he finally realized a dream he once revealed to me over drinks: to write and direct an opera. Nearly 200 works staged as a three-act opera, complete with a libretto and emotional crescendos – a thirty-year span from some of Costa’s earliest pieces to works finished just hours before the exhibition’s opening. Costa’s opera features objects instead of singing subjects: forsaken hotel ashtrays take on tragic soliloquies, orphaned shoes perform dramatic encounters with humanlike metal structures forming a rogue, dry Fontana di Trevi, while bronze casts of forgotten nightclub debris provide the bass line – three decades of “gentle vandalism,” an entire score for largely abandoned things that refuse to stay silent.
Costa spent the early 2000s Djing in São Paulo nightclubs, where he discovered something crucial: more than in the music, the real stories revealed themselves in that which was left behind – the cigarette burns on vinyl banquettes, the broken stiletto found by the DJ booth, the way daylight revealed last night’s glamor as beautiful wreckage. He developed a practice that aspires to be the “ultimate remix,” understanding that art lives in the transitions, or passages, those marginal moments in between tracks where one world dissolves into another. Nowadays, his work fluctuates restlessly between mediums – once-sexy fashion items dissolving into film narratives, ephemeral debris that turns into monumental bronze casts, paintings that find poetry in decay. Hybrid forms of textile, texture, and textuality.
Costa’s arrival at Passage Saint-Anne reads like an inevitable collision between two ecosystems of consumerist capitalist circulation modes – 19th-century commercial desire and 21st-century material abandonment. This specific passage, with its vitrines that once served as commerce outlets, then used for storage for over two decades, only recently restored, functions both as a host and collaborator with the artist. With its iron-and-glass skeleton and use of natural lighting (an innovation of the time; see Eugène Atget’s documentation of ferrovitreous arcades from the 1900s) and negotiation of interior and exterior, the passage becomes the perfect showcase for works that have survived countless cycles of (re)production, disposal, and rediscovery, yet still sustain the “aura” Benjamin articulated in his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”
The setting couldn't be more perfect. Nestled in the heart of the 2ème, among Japanese eateries, bubble tea shops, and some of Paris’s most important cultural institutions, including the Louvre, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the Opéra Comique. Adjacent to the passage entrance and above it is the Hotel Baudelaire, a modest establishment where the poet allegedly spent a night, according to a plaque; it maintains a quiet presence. The poet’s name is inscribed over a red canopy against cream-colored stone – like an old postcard that has survived too many decades in a souvenir shop – it also unveils something essential to Costa’s artistic practice: trading literary nostalgia for branding commodity. Baudelaire, a critic of urban alienation and the spleen of modern life, whose poetic expression embodied this tension, inspired Benjamin’s unfinished Arcades Project. Now, Baudelaire’s work serves as atmospheric decor for tourists seeking an “authentic Parisian experience.”
Moving from Pivô’s vast expanse to the passage’s intimate corridors creates a similar alchemy. This isn’t downsizing, it’s strategic reduction. The way a great DJ might distill a full orchestra into the essential beat that makes your body move. The shift in scale is everything: where São Paulo was about inhabiting space, Paris becomes about excavating it. Objects that once commanded entire walls now huddle like conspirators, their meanings shifting in compressed corridors where nineteenth-century commercial optimism meets twenty-first-century material skepticism.
In this compressed format, We Won’t Be Disappointed becomes less a manifesto than an intimate promise. The Paris spin-off proves what all the best spin-offs discover: that the most interesting stories emerge not from expanding the original but from finding what remains essential when everything else is stripped away. Like the greatest DJ sets, it’s about recognizing which elements can travel – and which transform completely in translation. Sometimes the most profound conversations happen not in grand gestures but in the spaces between – in passages, transitions, those brief encounters that leave you wondering what just happened and why you can’t stop thinking about it.
– Fernanda Brenner
