Vine

This story comes from my childhood. I heard in my family a story that said that when walking in the forest, you shouldn’t walk under a certain type of vine. I found this really intriguing because I didn’t know which vine it was, so I asked people if they had heard this story. Surprisingly, I heard the same story in different regions of Brazil.

 I’ve heard many different ways of breaking the spell of the vine. The most common is to offer tobacco to the caipora, or to take off your clothes and put them on inside out, or even to go to sleep and only leave in the morning. There’s also the technique of breaking branches along the way to mark the path back and avoid getting lost in the woods.

 In this installation, there are vines that lead us astray, but also branches that, when broken, mark the way back. There is a coexistence between getting lost and finding one’s way.

Many names

Over the years, I’ve come across “many names” for the same vine, so I started collecting some of them. So far, I’ve gathered eleven different names, such as the boa vine, aerated vine, caipora vine, mistletoe vine, earth vine…

I like this title because it doesn’t offer a definition. In terms of translation, that’s beautiful, because other people can name something that doesn’t even exist on the internet—something that comes directly from oral tradition—and oral tradition has these elements that aren’t very well explained.

Branches

A branch is unpredictable; it takes many different paths. It’s not the same as working with wood, for example, since wood is often straight, smooth, and processed. Branches, on the other hand, are each a sculpture created by nature; working with these shapes and creating new ones from them presents a challenge.

We work with a wide variety of branches from different trees. It was a powerful experience to get to know Parque Ibirapuera through the trees that live there. We’ve developed a new connection with Ibirapuera, whose name literally means “rotten wood”.

Traveling exhibition

It’s interesting to think in terms of cycles. We reused pruned branches in São Paulo, incorporated them into the installation—which spanned over ten meters in diameter—and then dismantled it. Part of it was returned to the park in the form of sawdust, and another part was taken for reassembly with the traveling exhibition of the 36th Bienal in Goiânia. It is interesting to think not only about this path of return, but also about simultaneity until complete disintegration.

That’s why this work is also about time—because it doesn’t last. Many works of art are created to be eternal; this one is the opposite.