Proposing Strategies, Approaching Poetics, and Dreaming of Forms: Rebeca Carapiá, Pipilotti Rist, and Rivane Neuenschwander at INHOTIM

The Inhotim Institute presents the closing of its 2024 program with three exhibitions that explore the ideas of nature, memory, and materiality from poetic perspectives mobilized by Rebeca Carapiá, Pipiloti Rist, and Rivane Neuenschwander

INHOTIM, located in Brumadinho, Brazil, is not a museum, at least not in the conventional sense; it is a space where nature and art intertwine in an ongoing dialogue of reconfiguration. This environment seeks not merely to display objects, but to enable an active integration between the living and the created, where artworks coexist with their surroundings and breathe in unison with the landscape. The new exhibitions by Rebeca Carapiá, Pipilotti Rist, and Rivane Neuenschwander bear witness to this vitality, confronting ideas of nature, memory, and materiality through unique perspectives and poetics.

In Apenas depois da chuva [Only After the Rain] (2024), Rebeca Carapiá gives voice to transforming materials: iron and copper rise as witnesses to a narrative where history and ancestry reappear in the metallic echoes of each piece. This sculptural installation, consisting of twenty figures almost five meters high, emerges from Carapiá’s profound engagement with the land of Serra da Capivara. There, the artist absorbed the traces of an ancient past and the relationships between water, territory, and memory. Curated by Beatriz Lemos and Deri de Andrade, this work reveals Carapiá’s poetics at the threshold between resistance and transformation, that point where what “bends iron is persistence, not force.” Her work reaffirms that what we see is merely a surface layer, with the true message lying in how each element submits and adapts to its surroundings, as if sculpture and nature were having a private conversation with no intention of being revealed by the artist.

Pipilotti Rist, in Homo sapiens sapiens curated by  Douglas de Freitas y Lucas Menezes, expands this sensory connection in the Fonte Gallery, where she invites the viewer to an immersive, meditative encounter. Here, image and sound converge in an experience where bodies and the cosmos are intertwined. The work, accompanied by music by Rist and Anders Guggisberg, floats on a projected ceiling as visitors recline on beds and cushions, finding themselves in a limbo between the tangible and the ethereal. That Homo sapiens sapiens was filmed at INHOTIM nearly two decades ago and now returns to its origin is no coincidence—it reaffirms the museum as a space of continuity: a place where the work and its environment establish an enduring connection. This piece resonates because it proposes that art is not solely about empty monumentality, but a sensitive journey in which the viewer becomes a constitutive part of the necessary choreography, creating an experience of self-connection and kinship with the natural.

Finally, Tangolomango (2024) by the Minas Gerais artist Rivane Neuenschwander presents a profound retrospective on memory and sociability. Curated by Julia Rebouças, Beatriz Lemos, and Douglas de Freitas, it invites us to explore themes like childhood, history, ecology, and politics in a dialogue spanning decades of creation. Selected works, including V.G.T. (Ame-o ou deixe-o) [V.G.T. (Love It or Leave It)] (2023) and Andando em Círculos [Walking in Circles] (2000), navigate the intimate fabric of identity and collective memory, between the individual and the shared, weaving what could be named a politics of the mournable and the sensitive. Neuenschwander interlaces layers of meaning that return us to the question of what we choose to remember and, more importantly, what we are made to forget.

The efforts of Julia Rebouças as artistic director and the team at INHOTIM go far beyond a gesture of inclusion or diversity visibility; they represent a deep commitment to rethinking and repairing our relationship with art, to imagine an alternative to a co-opted art circuit, where value creation is instrumental rather than emancipatory. It is precisely in spaces like this, where art interrogates itself and its role, that we find possibilities to reconfigure what we understand by restitution and repair. It is a space of resistance where contemporary Brazilian art refuses to be a mere spectator and instead asserts itself as a field of poetic dispute and representation, claiming its place in history, in nature, and in the production of meaning.

Undoubtedly, these three exhibitions are the cherry on top of the 2024 program for the Brazilian institution, one of the most significant in our continent today—not only for its artistic scope but also for the relevance of its transversal programming. A prime example of this is the international seminar Transmute: Ways of Being in the World, Gestures That Sustain Life, an event held in September that brought together prominent contemporary thinkers such as Gladys Tzul Tzul, Elizabeth Povinelli, Jota Mombaça, Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, Japira Pataxó, among others. Imhotim is, by far, one of the artistic institutions to keep an eye on in the coming years.