In Pepi Lemes’s work, learning is never neutral. It is a site of discipline, affection, conflict and invention — a room where bodies are trained, watched, corrected, but also where they scratch, howl, flirt, fail and become something else. Working across drawing, performance, critical pedagogy and public education, the Brazilian queer artist transforms the classroom into a studio of insubordination: a place where graphite, charcoal, coloured pencil, school paper, love letters and animal forms become instruments for imagining other ways to live.

Lemes’s recent works summon wolves, dogs, pirates, naked bodies, beds and letters as figures of refusal. In his work, the line is both tender and unruly: bodies stretch, snarl, hide, desire and return. These images do not simply represent queerness; they perform it as a method of escape from the “good student”, the “good citizen” and the “good boy”.

His practice grows from a sustained engagement with São Paulo’s public education system, where Lemes has worked. Rather than treating pedagogy as a separate profession, he folds it into the work itself, using the materials and tensions of the school environment to question authorship, class violence, obedience and the limits of institutional care.