Rewriting Latin America’s Image in Europe – Brazilian Artist Victor Fidelis Receives Award at New Latin American Art Fair in Paris

Last November, the Maison de l’Amérique Latine in Paris hosted the second edition of MIRA Art Fair, an event dedicated exclusively to Latin American art. In a European context where the region’s artistic production has historically been fragmented, exoticized, or subsumed under broad categories such as “Global South art,” MIRA emerges as a deliberate attempt to challenge and reframe this gaze.

The fair featured a public program in Spanish that fostered dialogue among curators, cultural managers, and institutions from Latin America. It also included a special project by Colombian artist Mercedes Hoyos examining the commercial routes of the transatlantic slave trade, resource extractivism, and commodity exchange between Europe and the Americas.

Its founder, Manuela Rayo, a Colombian curator and cultural manager based in Paris, noted in conversation that “showing our artistic scene allows us to bring that image closer, blur clichés, and reveal nuances” (Terremoto, January 2026). When asked about the fair’s objectives, she added: “MIRA was born with a dual goal: to build a cultural bridge between Latin America and Europe, and to generate a solid market for our artists. Both missions are equally important” (Terremoto, January 2026).

When considering the history of how art from other territories first came to be exhibited in Europe, the starting point is often the world’s fairs, where each country’s culture was organized and displayed through national pavilions. The clearest legacy of this model in contemporary art is the Venice Biennale, which to this day continues to reproduce a logic of state representation.

International art fairs and exhibitions are not neutral spaces. From the universal exhibitions of the nineteenth century to what we now recognize as international contemporary art institutions, including art fairs, these platforms have functioned as stages where power, representation, and symbolic value are negotiated.

Within this framework, the concept of soft power is key to understanding these dynamics. Unlike traditional forms of influence—economic, military, or institutional—it operates in the symbolic realm, in a culture’s capacity to be recognized, desired, and legitimized by others. Cultural diplomacy functions as one of its primary instruments, facilitating forms of mutual understanding between nations that do not seek to impose a narrative, but rather to sustain it over time, generate familiarity, and establish the conditions through which certain cultural expressions are deemed relevant.

While cultural diplomacy has historically been a strategy of nation-states, these functions have increasingly shifted toward private and semi-private actors. Fairs, galleries, and cultural foundations now operate as agents of soft power in a field where symbolic legitimization intersects with the dynamics of the international market. Through repetition, proximity, and continuity, these spaces generate familiarity and trust. They do not officially represent a country, but they nonetheless influence how its cultural productions are perceived and the place they occupy in the European imaginary.

MIRA aligns with a new model of art fairs conceived as “boutique fairs.” Smaller in scale, more curated, and often situated in central venues that move away from the aesthetics of industrial halls, these models place experience at the center. They distance themselves from acquisition as mere transaction or investment, instead privileging a deeper engagement with a specific theme or ecosystem. These are fairs one can return to several times over the course of a weekend, wandering slowly, where pauses are not only possible but actively valued.

It is precisely in these non-state, less hierarchical, and more porous spaces that new strategies of cultural diplomacy begin to operate, reconfiguring European perceptions of Latin America. These insertions of “the Latin American” into the Parisian art market can be understood as part of a broader strategy of mutual understanding and recognition.

The integration of Latin American culture and art into the global market acknowledges the artistic practices of these territories as a fundamental component of international collections and, consequently, points to the implicit incompleteness of those that have yet to incorporate them. This raises a critical question: why does this matter beyond the creation of a European market for Latin American artists?

On April 15, 2019, news spread around the world: Notre-Dame was on fire. The wooden structure of the world’s most famous Gothic cathedral vanished in a blaze that deeply moved the international community. Reconstruction efforts began almost immediately, fueled by massive donations totaling 840 million euros., with 340,000 contributions from more than 150 countries (El País, December 2024).

Just a few months earlier, on September 2, 2018, a devastating fire struck Brazil’s National Museum, destroying 90% of its collection of more than 20 million items. The loss included unique fossils, ceramics, Indigenous artifacts, sound recordings of extinct languages, and complete collections of insects and mollusks found nowhere else in the world (El País, September 6, 2018). Despite the magnitude of this cultural tragedy, the international response was vastly smaller than the one that followed the fire at Notre-Dame.

This unequal capacity for response may be traced to a legacy of economic and infrastructural inequality between territories; however, this explanation falls short. The difference was not merely economic or infrastructural, but also symbolic: it raises the question of which heritage is considered universal and which losses are felt as one’s own.

To understand the rapid, efficient, and highly publicized response to the reconstruction of Notre-Dame, it is necessary to consider the extensive network of French Institutes, cultural centers, and Alliances Françaises that promote culture through language education, exhibitions, funding for artistic residencies, and other cultural initiatives. Decades of French cultural diplomacy have reinforced the idea that this culture holds universal significance. How, then, is the image of Latin America being constructed, or rewritten, in Europe?

More than isolated events, fairs like MIRA function as small mechanisms of symbolic rewriting. While they do not correct inherited asymmetries, they do generate familiarity—one that, at the moment of loss, allows certain cultures to be perceived not as distant or foreign, but as shared.

If fairs like MIRA are part of this overall strategy, it is worth examining what takes place within them. In this edition, the acquisition prize was awarded to Brazilian artist Victor Fidelis, whose pictorial work depicts everyday scenes of Afro-Brazilian communities in the working-class neighborhoods of São Paulo.

Far removed from exoticism and sensationalism, Fidelis focuses on gestures, bodies, and silences, imbuing his painted figures with dignity and intimacy. The city that emerges in his work distances itself both from imaginaries of violence and from tropical exoticism. Instead, a complex São Paulo comes into view—marked by social tensions, but also by bonds, affections, and forms of belonging.

Fidelis’s paintings do not seek to translate an experience for a European gaze, nor to conform to external expectations of what an image of Brazil should be. On the contrary, they construct a visual language grounded in the legitimacy of their own references. The recognition of Victor Fidelis’s work thus functions not only as individual validation, but as a broader gesture: an affirmation that these lives, these bodies, and these territories deserve to be seen without reductive translations and can occupy a place in the collective memory.

In this context, Fidelis’s case allows us to observe how strategies of recognition operate—not through imposition, but through the slow accumulation of an aesthetic and an imaginary. Perhaps decades from now, if Brazil’s cultural heritage or that of another Latin American country is once again threatened, the world may respond from a different place. Perhaps then an empathy will exist, built not in the face of catastrophe, but through prior recognition.

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Photo cover: Victor Fidelis, No limite do privado (2025; detail), Estúdio em Obra