start

"- 50 hectares of land?
- If my family had the 50 hectares?
- If 50 hectares existed and had always existed?
- I would always have ground to return to.
- There would be a large community garden for the entire surrounding area, every neighborhood, so that people could plant their own food and also make a living from it.
- And a fuller existence, more possible, more grounded.
- There would be some fruit trees, a mango tree for sure.
- My grandfather, my grandmother, great-grandfather, right, and great-grandmother... They would welcome everyone, wouldn't they?
- There's so much we can imagine in there that, well, it really becomes grand, imagining everything we could be beyond what we already are.
- I think there would be the security and certainty of ground, I think that's what I'm trying to say.
What would you answer?"

50 hectares: the measure of reparation
Gabriela Gaia, 2025

Site-specific
Exhibition "Baía de Vitória", sept-nov 2025
Vitória, Brazil

Thematic Axis: EXPLORING SPACES / RE-CODING SPACES

Work Stage: In progress. This submission proposes a new phase of the art installation "50 hectares: the measure of reparation," which was exhibited in 2025 (Vitória, Brazil), expanding the gesture from the physical environment to the digital, adding new layers and provocations in response to the call of Ellipses magazine.

Abstract:

"50 hectares: recoding sites, speculating spaces" asks: how to explore colonial vestiges in Espírito Santo's landscape? And how to imagine the "return" of the gesture that coded such lands as colonial commodities—not as reenactment, but as inspiration for other futures? These questions dialogue with situationist psychogeography, particularly the resignification of space as political resistance.

The "returned gestures" proposed engage with the Brazilian Empire's nineteenth-century classification of "devolutas", territories supposedly empty but actually occupied by Indigenous peoples and poor Black farmers (formerly enslaved people) . In Portuguese, "devoluta" means both "vacant" and "returned", both meanings inform this proposal.

The project follows the genesis of my installation "50 hectares: the measure of reparation" (2025). First, a dream of my Indigenous great-grandmother merging with the forest in Santa Leopoldina (ES), a former immigrant colony. Second, a 1915 report by Ernest Wagemann, "German Colonization in Espírito Santo," documenting that 50 hectares of "devolutas" were granted to German settlers in the nineteenth century. The report reveals these lands were not empty, recording conflicts with Indigenous peoples and "colored men" who already cultivated them.

This proposal retrieves the "Topographic Map of the Province of Espírito Santo" (1876) showing German colonies, digitally generating a mask that repeats this boundary. The mask is overlaid onto a contemporary satellite image of the Frankfurt region, the settlers' departure point, thus returning the demarcation gesture to German territory.
Inspiration comes from Marlene NourbeSe Philip's Harriet's Daughter (1988), where Caribbean girls reenact enslaved people's escape to freedom. Katherine McKittrick, in "Freedom Is a Secret" (2007), reads this as a geographic practice reinscribing unfulfilled promises of freedom onto the present. This proposal performs a similar operation:

1. [ANIMATED GIF] Cartographic Transposition as Return: A GIF overlays the 1876 map onto a contemporary satellite image of Germany, sharing the original demarcation of Brazilian German colonies. This psychogeographic exploration shifts the gaze from the occupied territory to the territory of origin, displacing codes of expropriation and revealing historical asymmetry. Further GIFs will be generated from the 1915 report and other period archives.

2. [AUDIO] Other Reenactments: A one-minute audio contains responses from descendants of Africans and Indigenous peoples in Espírito Santo to: "What would you do if your family had access to 50 hectares?" Responses—evoking "ground to return to," "community garden," "family gatherings"—recode land as spaces of possibility. Just as the girls in Harriet's Daughter reenact Tubman to imagine escape routes, these audios enable other reenactments, unconfined by colonial determinism. Transporting expropriation's history toward a future where reparation can be realized on other terms is the wager of this counter-colonial "game."

Situated between geographic imagination, defiance, and political recoding of space, this proposal responds to Ellipses' call for practices that "challenge norms and reshape what spatial practice is and could be." It offers not a solution but a method: to transport discomforts without reenacting violence.

One day I dreamed that I was on the banks of the Santa Maria River and my great-grandmother, Florisbella, on the opposite bank, walked towards the dense forest until she disappeared, merging into it. Of indigenous origin, born in 1887 in Santa Leopoldina, Espírito Santo (Brazil), my great-grandmother was married to a Black man descended from Angolans, and she brought me news of these highlands that were transformed into immigrant agricultural colonies in the mid-19th century, abundant in coffee production. The economist Ernest Wagemann, in his 1915 report on "German Colonization in Espírito Santo," notes that 50 hectares of land was the measure initially conceived for German settler families to cultivate on so-called "public lands." Contrary to what this term supposedly suggests, the lands were not empty, and the report points to conflicts among indigenous people, "men of color," and the new German settlers.

In the installation, an area of 50m² seeks a symbolic equivalence with the 50 hectares (100,000 times the area of the artwork) and uses coffee, the most profitable product of the colonies to the present day, which leads the state's export ranking. 200 golden coffee packaging creates a sky of "black gold." This invented space symbolically suspends the state of violence, interdiction, and expropriation of land. It is an invitation both to imagine a life in abundance and to imagine a concrete measure from which—despite the unpayable debt of the State of Espírito Santo to the descendants of indigenous peoples and Africans—reparation can be elaborated.

Gabriela Leandro Pereira (Gaia)

AI was used in this project for the translation of the text from Portuguese to English, to adjust it to the character count required by the call, and to verify compliance with the conditions of the public notice.

Gabriela Leandro Pereira (or Gaia) is a brazilian architect, urbanist, artist, curator, professor and researcher at the Faculty and the Graduate Program in Architecture and Urbanism at Federal University of Bahia (Brazil). She holds a degree in Architecture and Urbanism (2006) from Federal Universty of Espirito Santo (Vitória-Brazil) and a doctorate (2015) from the Graduate Program in Architecture and Urbanism of Federal University of Bahia (Salvador-Brazil), with a doctoral research internship at the Center for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra (Portugal) between 2014 and 2015. She is the coordinator of the Body, Discourse, and Territory Study Group, where she develops research and investigations into narratives, histories, memories, and epistemologies produced about the city, urbanism, architecture, and their erasures, intersected by the debate on racialities, colonialities, and gender. She received the Thesis Award from the National Association of Graduate Studies and Research in Urban and Regional Planning (2017) and the FAD Award in the Thought and Criticism category (2025). Featured publications include:

- Khalili, Laleh, V. Mitch McEwen, Gabriela Leandro Pereira, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. *The City of Our Dreaming*. Durham: Duke University Press, 2025.
- Pereira, Gabriela Leandro. "Percurso e bagagem" In *Aprender a desaprender: Diálogos para a descolonização da arquitetura*, edited by Paulo Moreira, 109-129. Porto: Dafne Editora / Instituto, 2024.
- Pereira, Gabriela Leandro. *Corpo, discurso & território: A cidade em disputa nas dobras da narrativa de Carolina Maria de Jesus*. [São Paulo]: FAUUSP, 2019.

In 2022, she participated in the 13th International Architecture Biennial of São Paulo with the work "Herança + O Fabuloso Inventário das Obras do meu Avô"; in 2024 she was part of the exhibition "Ecos Malês" at Casa das Histórias (Salvador-BA), working as a researcher and artist with the collective Arquitetura da Revolta, presenting the work "Conjurar: associar-se para um determinado fim"; in 2025 she participated in the exhibition Baía de Vitória, in Vitória (ES), with the site-specific work "50 hectares: a medida da reparação". She was co-curator of the exhibitions "Arquiteturas da Revolta" (2024) at the Goethe-Institut Salvador (BA); adjunct curator of the exhibition "Memórias para Dona Antonia" (2024) at Acervo da Laje, Salvador (BA); and adjunct curator of the exhibition "Antônia visita Pina" (2026) at the Instituto Audiovisual Mulheres de Odun – IAMO, Salvador (BA).

In 2024, she was a resident at the "Water Holds Memories" residency organized by the Terra Foundation for American Art, in Giverny (France), and a guest speaker at the 2024 Alchemy Lecture: The City of Our Dreaming, organized by Christina Sharpe at York University. She is currently developing the research projects "Transatlantic Cities and Racial Thought" and "The Fabulous Inventory of the Material History of Cities."