Boxing has always been more than fists. In the hands of Dorothée Munyaneza and Boxe Autônomo, it becomes a method of listening, a language for what goes unspoken, a way of being together in tension and care. This shared evening brings into dialogue two distinct yet resonant practices – one emerging from the diasporic poetics of the stage, the other from the everyday pedagogy of Casa do Povo.
At the center is Version(s) (2025), a work by Rwandan-British artist Dorothée Munyaneza, developed in conversation with Christian Nka, a former boxer from the northern outskirts of Marseille, and musician Ben LaMar Gay, from Chicago. Part portrait, part invocation, the piece navigates the charged space between survival and transmission. In the ring, in movement, Munyaneza searches for what history didn’t record: the gestures passed down in silence, the knowledge carried in muscle memory, the contradictions of masculinity forged under pressure. The fight is not re-enacted – it is dismantled, repurposed, held with care.
In Version(s), the ring becomes a stage, but at Casa do Povo, the inverse has already happened. Since 2016, Boxe Autônomo has turned the cultural centre into an antifascist gym. Born out of a desire to reclaim boxing from its machismo and institutionalization, Boxe Autônomo grew out of wandering classes in squats and favelas, and over time has become a living part of Casa do Povo’s architecture – daily sessions folding seamlessly into the building’s rhythm, echoing its history of radical pedagogy and collective practice. The ring becomes a democratic space: open, porous, and self-managed; a space where bodies can renegotiate their place.
The encounter with Munyaneza does not seek to fuse these practices, but to hold them side by side, to see what resonates in the shared silence before a movement, in the exhale after contact. It unfolds through some days of the workshop and two nights in which Version(s) will be presented in a special setting, contaminated by Boxe Autônomo, and followed by a shared dialogue. Boxing, so often aligned with domination, is transformed into something else: a terrain for relation, rupture, and repair. Between Marseille’s outskirts and the São Paulo downtown neighborhood Bom Retiro, between art and daily practice, between personal history and collective reimagining.
