Vilanismo is a brotherhood of Black artists formed at the end of 2021 with the aim of challenging the Western visual arts system by bringing race, gender, and class into tension in their artistic work.

The term “villain” carries multiple meanings, including wickedness or someone lacking in wealth, which have historically been associated in Brazil with Black men. It is from this symbolic charge that Vilanismo is constituted. Among the elements that make up its conceptual framework are the figure of the trickster and the MC, alongside references such as the periphery, the mutirão (collective effort), Black struggle movements, and other Black figures from the visual arts. These references collaborate in the aesthetic and political construction of the brotherhood, challenging the ways in which Black male subjectivities have been systematically denied, dehumanized, and reduced to the status of things. This image was shaped by a humanist project that, although it proclaimed ideals of equality and progress, actively contributed to exclusion and violence.

For the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, Vilanismo is expanding and re-signifying the idea of the workspace, the right to land, and conspiracy by presenting the installation Os meninos não sei que juras fraternas fizeram [The Boys I Don’t Know What Fraternal Oaths They Made] (2025) – a title borrowed from the short story “A gente combinamos de não morrer” [We Agreed Not to Die], written by Conceição Evaristo.¹ The proposal invites the public to immerse themselves in a subjectivity marked by artistic and intellectual expressiveness, in which the studio materializes in furniture, productions, and dialogues, stimulating the imagination and making the viewer experience the universe of Vilanismo. In the installation, the “villains”² – as they call themselves – articulate systems, knowledge, actions, and symbolic struggles through artistic production. The brotherhood thus reveals and reconfigures new possibilities for Black masculinities and humanization, bringing to light intellectuality, fragility, differences, flaws, and the possibility of a historically denied love.