Welcome to the internet portal (under construction) of the ZENON Cultural Institute.

Here you will be able to find websites of various projects that we have been developing since 2013 in the areas of music, cinema, literature, photography and visual arts.

The Institute is named after Zenon da Cunha Mendes Barreto (1918-2002), a notable visual artist from the State of Ceará (Brazil) whose expressive skills extended from drawing to sculpture, also including painting, caricature, illustration, woodcut, scenography and mural art. He held connections with classical music, shared throughout his life with his wife - pianist and teacher Maria Helena de Melo Barreto, their son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren.

Zenon is the author of significant works on the urban landscape of the city of Fortaleza (the capital of Ceará), the best known being the one that appears in the Institute's logo - the "Iracema Guardiã" statue, installed on the seashore of Fortaleza.

Zenon was a critical and fierce artist, attentive in his time to abuses and excesses, which he denounced and fought, always with a view to collective interests. He maintained a cultural column in the newspaper “O Povo”, which he signed with the pseudonym Salvador Daki.

Zenon’s versatility inspired the formulation of the statutes of ZENON Cultural Institute, which is headquartered in Fortaleza. There is as well an International Nucleus established in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. Cultural and artistic interactions between Ceará (Brazil) and Bulgaria are a solid reference in many of our projects. From 2020 our activities have begun to expand in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.