A casa de Francisca Dumont is an exhibition built from silence. Its title freely borrows from the 1906 article “The House of Ricardo Severo,” published in the Diário Ilustrado. This coincidence is not accidental—it draws attention to what is absent. While the article celebrated the public figure of a man, this exhibition begins with the near-total absence of documentation about a woman: Francisca Santos Dumont (1877–1930).
Little is known about Francisca. We know she was born in Rio de Janeiro, lived in São Paulo, married, and had ten children. We know she was the sister of a famous aviator and the wife of a man renowned in cultural and architectural circles. Her name has reached us only through these relationships. No words, gestures, or memories directly attributed to her have survived—or, if they exist, they remain buried in archives, yet to be uncovered or valued. Perhaps this is precisely why this exhibition is necessary.
Installed in the Palacete Severo—the house where Francisca actually lived with Ricardo Severo—the exhibition proposes an exercise in critical imagination: a biographical simulacrum that does not attempt to fill in the gaps with certainties, but rather to inhabit them with questions.
Who was Francisca? What did she think? What did she desire?
Taking the domestic space as its point of departure—so often invisible and yet central in the lives of women—the exhibition reflects on the historical forms of erasure of the feminine. Here, the house becomes much more than a setting: it is a body of memory. Each room offers a hypothesis; each object evokes a possible gesture.
More than a singular life story, A casa de Francisca Dumont invites us to consider how women's histories have been (and continue to be) systematically silenced. Through fiction, the goal is not to substitute truth for what is missing, but to open up a space for multiple possibilities of existence.
Francisca becomes a symbol of countless other women whose presence survived only in daily gestures, imposed silences, and the memories we dare to reconstruct.
In times when the rights we believed secured are increasingly questioned, this “house” also speaks to the present. Women are still being silenced, revealing just how fragile those guarantees are when not backed by vigilance and action. The story—or absence—of Francisca echoes in the uncertainties of our time, reminding us that the struggle is neither past nor guaranteed: it is ongoing, urgent, and collective.
To give shape to this collective exercise in critical imagination, eight artists were invited to reflect with us on the questions raised by this house, this absence, and these untold stories. Each proposal in the exhibition expands, unfolds, and interrogates the possibilities of femininity, domestic space, memory, and identity.
Liene Bosquê uses her family’s lace doilies to produce cyanotypes that speak to intimacy and inheritance. Lace, a knowledge passed down from generation to generation among women, becomes here a symbol of emotional memory and the quiet delicacy that upholds so many homes. These are blue images of suspended time, where touch and gesture take center stage.
