From Shelter to Spotlight: MEXA’s “Reality Show” Hits Brussels

With “Reality Show”, Brazilian collective MEXA turns the aesthetics of reality TV into a fierce, tender portrait of their decade-long struggle for housing, visibility, and recognition. Live at Zinnema as part of Kunstenfestivaldesarts, ten performers transform the stage into both home and film set, blurring fiction and survival. For Brussels’ queer and allied audiences, it’s a chance to experience a show born in São Paulo’s shelters, now claiming space in the European theatre circuit. It’s not just theatre – it’s a collective coming-out of stories usually kept off-screen.

From Homeless Shelter to Radical Stage

MEXA is a São Paulo–based artistic collective that emerged in 2015 from a homeless shelter where up to thirty people lived together under constant surveillance. In that context of control and precarity, the group began experimenting with performance as a way to talk about life on the margins, gender expression, and everyday survival.

In Brussels, “Reality Show” is the continuation of this journey: after two acclaimed works at Kunstenfestivaldesarts, MEXA returns with a project they’ve been dreaming of for years. Their presence at Zinnema connects São Paulo’s shelter system with Brussels’ own conversations around housing, migration, and queer and trans lives under pressure.

More info: Kunstenfestivaldesarts – Reality Show

Inside the “Reality Show” House

In “Reality Show”, ten performers inhabit a mutable space that feels like both a home and a TV set. Furniture and cameras appear on stage, while live projections are edited in real time, creating a constantly shifting frame between intimacy and spectacle.

The piece borrows the recognisable codes of reality TV – confessionals, eliminations, a shared house – but twists them to tell stories of those who rarely get to speak on screen. Through games of elimination, MEXA shows how they’ve sometimes had to exaggerate their own precarity to access funding and stages, asking: what narratives are expected from artists shaped by instability?

More context:

• Event page on Bruxelles sur Scènes
• Dutch info via Uit in Vlaanderen

Queer Struggles, Precarious Realities

“Reality Show” is explicitly about housing, but it’s also about who is allowed to be visible, lovable, and “marketable” in a world obsessed with formatted narratives. Many members of MEXA come from experiences of homelessness, queer and trans marginalisation, and institutional violence – realities that echo strongly with parts of Brussels’ LGBTQIA+ community.

By using the language of reality TV – a genre that often exploits vulnerability – MEXA reclaims it as a tool of critique and survival. The show asks whether we all use fiction to be accepted, and what it means when marginalised people must turn their pain into content to be seen at all. For queer audiences, it’s a raw, generous reminder that chosen family, shared living, and mutual care are political strategies as much as emotional ones.

A Transatlantic Conversation in Brussels

Brussels meets São Paulo through this collaboration between Kunstenfestivaldesarts and Zinnema, two venues that regularly platform experimental and politically engaged work. For the local queer and activist scenes, “Reality Show” offers a rare, direct window onto Brazilian grassroots struggles around housing and LGBTQIA+ rights, without exoticising or simplifying them.

The performance also fits into a broader Brussels ecology of spaces where art, social justice, and queer questions intersect – from community centres to houses of culture and activist collectives. Watching MEXA in Zinnema is not just attending an international show; it’s entering a conversation about how cities manage poverty, desire, and who gets to feel at home.

Practical Info

• Title: MEXA – “Reality Show”
• Where: Zinnema, Brussels – presented by Kunstenfestivaldesarts
• Dates and times:
  • 28 May – 20:00 (sold out, ticket alert possible)
  • 29 May – 20:00 (+ aftertalk in English moderated by Nicolás Lange, last tickets)
  • 30 May – 16:00 and 20:00
• Duration: About 2 hours
• Language: Portuguese with surtitles in Dutch, French, and English
• Tickets: €22 / €18 (reduced) via the festival website
• Presentation: Kunstenfestivaldesarts, Zinnema
• Created by: MEXA (São Paulo)
• Performers and co-creators include: Aivan, Ale Tradução, Dourado, Laysa Elias, Lucas Heymanns, Ph Verissima, Podeserdesligado, Suzy Muniz, Tatiane Arcanjo, alongside director-dramaturg João Turchi.

If you’re into adventurous theatre, collective storytelling and unapologetically political art, this is the kind of show that will stay with you long after you step out of the “house” and back into Brussels.

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