Fábrica Bhering

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Located in Rio’s port zone, the Bhering Factory became, over the last decades, one of the most relevant shelters for the artistic and cultural production of Rio and Brazil.

Built at the beginning of the twentieth century and deactivated in the late 1980s, the Bhering Factory, once one of the country’s biggest, has an area of over 15,000 square meters, with unique spaces and a privileged view of the city’s scape.

The abandonment of its original activities and judicial disputes involving the factory didn’t inhibit the birth of diverse ateliers, bars, small restaurants, and even a bookstore. Despite working under conventional contractual conditions, these businesses resist the hegemonic aesthetics of shopping centers, offering artworks, artifacts, music, and food amid the factory’s old structures, which include a great number of deactivated machinery that dialogue with and impose themselves in this extraordinary environment.

At the same time it seems to affirm not to mind it, the Bhering Factory space is a feast for the sensorial appetite of its goers.