Ana Elisa Egreja (Brazil, 1983)

The artist recreates rooms in the now vacant house where her grandparents used to live, incorporating elements from memory, imagination, and the universe of art history, such as decorative animals and objects. The scenes are photographed and used as model for the painting. The resulting work restores to the real its original dimension of strangeness. The paintings are part of the series Jacarezinho, 92, in which the artist revisits, recreates, and charts her grandparents’ home.

Bárbara Wagner (Brazil, 1980) and Benjamin de Burca (Germany, 1975)

In four acts, dancers combine steps of frevo, a traditional Carnival dance of Pernambuco State, with others typical of contemporary rhythms like funk, swingueira, electro, and vogue. Challenging the purity ascribed to frevo by governments that promote it as a primitive popular expression, the work puts a strain on categories such as folklore, popular culture, and mass culture, besides addressing issues of race, class, and gender.

Cristiano Lenhardt (Brazil, 1975)

Situated between design and sculpture, the work consists of wooden bars that occupy the space and challenge the notions of presence and absence, as well as the temporal aspects implied in those processes. It thus invites the audience to experience different notions of existence.

Elvis Almeida (Brazil, 1985)

In the former work, the coating of acrylic paint applied to the wood fades the colored areas, revealing pictorial layers that drive the circular composition. In the latter, two regions of distinct composition give spectators the impression of a visual fold on the flat surface. The disharmony between both parts breaks the perception of wholeness. In a powerful dialogue with graphic arts, the paintings refer to a popular visual language used in posters and the media.

Felipe Esparza Pérez (Peru, 1985)

Everything seems to be moving towards the Peruvian city of Ayabaca, the destination of pilgrims who walk for months in search of miracles. Water, wind, and mud are part of the strenuous trek to the feet of the Señor Cautivo [Captive Lord]. The footage gains color once the penance of the outward journey is over and the faithful prepare to return home. The video is part of the series Espacio Sagrado, which investigates the country’s different manifestations of spirituality.

The video explores and links elements of the Virgin Carmen Cult, the main celebration of Paucartambo in Peru. Plants, domestic animals, colonial houses, and ritual masks recreate the diversified setting of this experience of the sacred, in which human and avian voices are joined in song. The work is part of the Espacio Sagrado series, which investigates different expressions of Peruvian spirituality.

Shamanic chants and evangelical cults integrate into daily life in the Amazon region. The forest is the thread that binds all of its beings to death and life, and ayahuasca is the vine used by humans to move between different planes. A poetic essay on the Amazonian cosmovision, the video is part of the Espacio Sagrado series.

Graziela Kunsch (Brazil, 1979)

The afro percussion group, exclusively composed of women, makes open performances that temporarily transform the face of public spaces in São Paulo, engaging the excluded population of the city. Made from a single plan, the video shows the face of this change, showing a dancing group of transgender women and men who live under a bridge: to the sound of the drums, their bodies create a place of celebration and dignity.

In 2015, a student uprising occupied more than 200 public state schools in São Paulo to protest against the decision of the São Paulo government to close several educational institutions. The video is made up of a sequence of 26 filmed photographs, each with eight seconds of duration, of occupations and protests that turned buildings neglected by the state government into living, powerful spaces. Similar to a school homework, the presentation (on slides and with no sound) hints at what we can learn from the high school uprising.

The images that make up the video were made by the artist in occupied schools in São Paulo in November and December 2015 alongside photographs downloaded from the internet, published without author credits. These images were on the Facebook pages of the self-called Struggle Schools or Occupations E. E. Ana Rosa, Dica (E. E. Emiliano Cavalcanti), E. E. Fernão Dias Paes, E. E. João Kopke, Mazé (E. E. Maria José), E. E. Rachid Jabur, E. E. Salvador Allende and/or on the page of collective O Mal Educado.

Karo Akpokiere (Nigéria, 1981)

The work proposes a tour of the two cities in the title and the social, political, and personal experiences they offer. Making use of drawings, paintings, and texts—which refer to graphic design in a broad sense, from hand-drawn typography to everyday objects—it brings forth stories that blend real and fictional events.

Mabe Bethônico (Brazil, 1966)

Drawing on three characters in Swiss history—the geographer Aubert de la Rüe, the ufologist Billy Meier, and Pierre Versins, founder of the science fiction museum Maison d’Ailleurs—the work overlays boundaries between geography, ufology, and fiction, and takes on the format of a lecture and debate event.

Manuela de Laborde (Mexico, 1989)

Creating virtual spaces and mutant figures, the video invites viewers to adopt a contemplative gaze capable of identifying the subtlest changes. Using lighting variation, overlaid images, and editing resources, among other devices, it makes way for a shapeless world in constant transformation

Miguel Penha (Brazil, 1961)

In the first painting, a red vine, wrapped around a tree, stands out from the cold background colors, cutting the landscape in half while blending in perfectly with the vegetation. The second portrays a forest rich in details that merge and individualities that traverse each other. Both are part of the Cipós series, stemming from the artist’s search for his indigenous origins and an immersion in the Brazilian Mid-Western region.

Monira Al Qadiri (Senegal, 1983)

A spiral-shaped, 3-D printed sculpture floats on a purple background. The work stems from the investigation of the impact of the discovery and exploitation of oil, in the first half of the 20th century, on the environmental and geopolitical landscape of the Arabian Gulf. Before the fossil fuel arrived to define the region’s future, its main product was pearls. Coincidentally, pearls and oil occupy opposite poles of the same color spectrum.

Oil rig drill bits, sculpted in plastic, emerge from a purple wall toward the audience, as if it were the extracted fuel. The work is part of an investigation on the changes brought about by the discovery and exploration of oil in the environmental and geopolitical landscape of the Arabian Gulf in the first half of the 20th century.

Pakui Hardware (Lithuania)

A garden-laboratory combines silicone, grass, wooden panels, and LED lamps. Exploring the relationships between materiality, technology, synthetic biology, and nature, the installation undermines the so-called ideal natural balance and investigates how technology transforms our physical reality.

Pedro Barateiro (Portugal, 1979)

In the installation, two sounds come in through the window simultaneously: the felling of a palm tree infected by a disease and a protest against austerity measures. The palm tree is of a species imported from Portugal’s former African colonies; the austerity measures are demanded by the European Union from southern European countries, considered responsible for the economic crisis. The events relate to each other, linking the natural and the social.

Rodrigo Hernández (Mexico, 1983)

Illustrations by the Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias in the book El Arte Indígena de México e Centroamérica, stylistic aspects of Italian futurism, and the color theory of the Japanese avant-garde painter Sanzo Wada are reference points that make up the installation. Creating paradoxes with Amerindian forms and the speed of European avant-garde, the work wavers between abstraction and formalism, homage and parody.

Tatewaki Nio (Japan, 1971)

A photographic series whose subject is a new phenomenon in Bolivian architecture: the cholets, sumptuous and colorful buildings spread throughout El Alto, on the outskirts of La Paz. Fashionable among the Aymara population that rose economically in the last decade, the houses celebrate the chola identity and have become a symbol of the political and cultural changes the Andean country is undergoing and, therefore, of a new ethnic identity.

Thiago Martins de Melo (Brazil, 1981)

A union of two incarnations martyred by the greed of the powerful, bárbara balaclava roams the country with her jaguar and thirst for justice, crushing the usurpers of the land, the heirs of those who murdered her in past lives. Over four thousand paintings and drawings compose this animation, an anarchic and shamanic narrative of anticolonialist struggle.

Viktorija Rybakova (Lithuania, 1989)

That which is left behind projects itself into the future. Walking through shadows, spectators experience the inability of the senses to embrace the totality of the space. The work produces the experience of a non-place, while making room for creative imagination and intensifying the experience of time.

The voice-over by Cristobal Alcibiades guides us through Huayllay, a stone forest near Cerro de Pasco in Peru. The 16th-century city is being swallowed up by the country’s largest mine. While he describes the geology and culture of his birthplace, we witness the devastating effects of mining. The kilometer-wide hole tragically links the affectionate voice and the desolating images.

The artist weaves a carpet with an ancient technique, using copper threads rather than straw. The product bears a strange relationship with tradition: it expresses domesticity and comfort, but is actually hard and cold. It evokes predatory mining, which opens craters in the future, and human capacity to know and respect the Earth. One of the earliest metals worked by mankind, copper serves here as a link between memory and the future.