Geometric abstraction is reframed as a diasporic, racialized language through Edival Ramosa’s “new totemic construction,” positioning totemic form, vivid chromatics, and environmental scale as sign-systems forged across the Black Atlantic rather than within Brazil’s dominant (white) constructive canon. Mobilizing “imaginary diaspora,” Black abstraction discourse, and Fanon/Torres-García as conceptual anchors, the text critiques nationalist art history and Eurocentric universalisms by reading Ramosa’s reflective, spatially partitioned installations as allegories of exile, nonreturn, and the structural division of colonial modernity.

Capitalism produces “concrete abstractions” in which money, labor, measurement, and representation become real social forces, collapsing the opposition between intangible concepts and tangible objects; architecture exemplifies this condition because built form is inseparable from abstract systems of design, calculation, codes, and finance. From Renaissance perspective and the rise of the architect as intellectual labor to Cerdà’s urbanization as a total infrastructural-epistemic apparatus, abstraction is shown to materialize as spatial order, demanding an architectural practice that renders these conditions legible and contestable rather than treating abstraction as mere style.