Andréa Hygino builds a playground that disciplines you at MAM Rio

Hygino, PIPA 2025 award winner, had spent years researching education and learning, from desks and pencils to the pedagogies of the canteen and the yard.

A working playground — frame, slide, swing, seesaw, roundabout — built from school-chair steel, so the equipment itself shows how play instructs and disciplines bodies.

Five real-scale works fusing school furniture with playground structures fill MAM Rio's Espaço Petrobras foyer; Sunday mornings 10–11am are reserved for visitors with intellectual disabilities, autistic and sensory-sensitive visitors.

The show runs October 17, 2026 to March 14, 2027 at MAM Rio, with the accessible Sunday hours built into the museum's public program.

From October 17, 2026, MAM Rio hosts Projeto parquinho, a show by Andréa Hygino — PIPA 2025 award winner and 2026 nomination committee member — curated by Phelipe Rezende. The exhibition gathers five works in real scale that fold elements of school furniture into playground structures to discuss discipline, control and ways of playing. A playground with climbing frame, slide, swing, seesaw and roundabout occupies the museum's Espaço Petrobras foyer.

The show marks a new stage of Hygino's years-long research into education and learning processes. Where earlier work concentrated on the classroom and its objects — desks, pencils, school materials — she moved on to the school's other spaces and the pedagogies of the canteen, the yard and leisure time. In Projeto parquinho her gaze reaches recess: the break that seems to suspend the rigid organization of lessons but also imposes rules and ways of orienting the body.

Hygino's statement anchors the show: wondering where the playground Brazil keeps repeating comes from, she arrived at 'guided leisure' as a way of disciplining bodies — the toy already carries an instruction for how to play, and dissecting the structures shows the material that makes the school chair, holding the body inside the classroom, is also what builds the toy and determines its movements. Sunday mornings run as exclusive visiting hours for people with intellectual disabilities, autistic people and anyone hypersensitive to visual or sound stimuli.

Hygino noticed Brazil has repeated the same playground for decades and traced it to 'guided leisure' — play as a way of disciplining bodies outside class time.

Dissecting the equipment shows the school chair's material also builds the toy and dictates its movements, making the furniture-to-playground link physical rather than metaphorical.

The museum programmed Sunday mornings exclusively for intellectually disabled, autistic and sensory-sensitive visitors, extending the question of who play is for.

Play equipment is a curriculum: dissect a slide or a seesaw and you find the school chair's steel telling bodies what to do — designed leisure is never neutral.

Projeto parquinho opened on October 17, 2026 and runs to March 14, 2027 in the Espaço Petrobras foyer of MAM Rio in Rio de Janeiro, curated by Phelipe Rezende.