Art forms have a lot to tell us about the environment, because they make us question the reality in which we live. And in order to question, we need to be exposed to different views on the same subject. Realizing that we are all interconnected, whether we are animate or inanimate beings, means realizing that we are different, strangers and foreigners inhabiting the same world. Thus, the subsequent visions of artists from different parts of Brazil, with different desires, ideals and ancestries, make us see the possible paths. If ecology is radical coexistence, then we need to question our sense of what is real and what is unreal, what can be considered existing and non-existing, being and seeming.

The paintings by Esther Bonder, from Rio de Janeiro, exhibited in this show speak precisely to this path between the real and the imaginary. In the series "Amazonian Self-Portraits", the artist mixes her figurative line with memories of living in the rainforest. The title of the set of paintings presented leads us to reflect on our own projection when we portray a biome or an environmental experience. Scientists call this reasoning "confirmation bias", while some philosophers call it "hermeneutic circle" and "phenomenological style". The way we interpret data depends on what we want to find. Just as the way we see ourselves depends on the type of person we are. Thus, Bonder's career has a direct influence on the approach he has chosen to take.

The windows that break and allow us to see beyond the places we inhabit, or to which we are often subjected, can be found in the forceful production of Hildebranda, also from Rio de Janeiro. Holes created by the artist in the series "Carne Viva" exacerbate the many possible layers that her work - and also our own reality - possesses. In another set, "Dobradura", the artist reconnects these sutures in an attempt to reconstruct life and, perhaps, a credible future. In her research, Hildebranda looks to her strong bond with words and her recent immersion in natural pigments for the most direct connection with the environmental universe. 

A living organism created by species that have inhabited the land on which this exhibition space stands for centuries is at the heart of the site-specific work developed by São Paulo botanist, landscape designer and visual artist Ricardo Cardim. Species are intertwined in circular formations, recreating the contours of natural fires typical of the Atlantic Forest. Bromelia, imbé, guaimbé, dicorisandra, clúsia lanceolata are some of the species from the biome that appear in both the living installation and the oil painting presented by Cardim. The artist highlights the guaimbé, an important plant in the history of the city of São Paulo, since its roots were used to tie up houses and even boats centuries ago, even before nails were invented.

If ecology is not distance but coexistence, this is also where the work of Tamikuã Txihi, an artist, poet from the Pataxó people (BA) and leader of the Jaraguá Indigenous Territory, comes to light. In her work, Tamikuã offers the intertwined coexistence of humanity and animality. The ancestral power of the jaguar appears in many of her paintings and sculptures as the personification of the life force. Art, for her, is one of the tools of resistance and reactivation of the memory of the native peoples who have converged in a more symbiotic way with the plant and mineral kingdoms over the last few thousand years. 

The truth is that what we call nature is monstrous and mutant, strangely strange to the core and in every way, as Morton defines it. And in this unpredictable wonder live the fantastic beings and their possibilities of existence, as we recognize in the instigating production of Walmor Corrêa. Fascinated by anatomy since school, when he fell in love with dissections and drawings by Leonardo Da Vinci, the visual artist encourages us to wander through countless possibilities of experience. Fantasizing about new biological species, unlikely within the evolutionary process, which could be the result of DNA mutations and their symbionts - what Darwinists would call "extended phenotypes" - results in possibilities of adaptation and, why not, of perhaps surviving the catastrophe that today is revealed as the sixth mass extinction. 

Ecological awareness is also the awareness of unintended consequences, but no less serious. Being opposed to anthropocentrism doesn't mean that we hate humans and want our own extinction. It means seeing how we are included in the biosphere as one being among other beings. 

Ana Carolina Ralston
curator