FOUR WORKS BY FOUR ARTISTS AT THE SÃO PAULO BIENNIAL

Moffat Takadiwa, Marlene Almeida, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, and Antonio Tarsis dig into their own territories, rescuing objects, fabrics, paths, and stories. They mix it all. They rewrite.

“Portals to Submerged Worlds” by Moffat Takadiwa
A textile corridor built from thousands of post-industrial remnants—particularly toothbrushes—meticulously arranged. It is a new ritual for what has been discarded. That tunnel, walked through almost with shyness, careful not to step on anything, evokes a passage.

Zimbabwean artist Moffat Takadiwa constructs a meditative path where consumerism, inequality, and contamination intersect. Waste becomes re-encrypted into colorful patterns, into objects, into an installation that invites to consider beauty emerged from what has been cast aside.

“Macuto” by María Magdalena Campos-Pons
The installation by the Cuban-born artist rises in a spiral form. It hangs at the pavilion. It creates its own microclimate. The sensory bubble isolates and contains, allowing time to open through layers. One walks toward the center through delicate, colored fabrics that wrap the flower sculpture like rings.

That flower-sculpture is surrounded by petals. A sacred nucleus that anchors the artist’s practice: memory, body, spirituality, healing. Reaching that treasure is, ultimately, like getting to know someone. Through her use of self-portraiture, Campos-Pons summons symbols, energies, and family inheritances.

“Terra viva” (Living Earth) by Marlene Almeida
Almeida’s structure is raised with mineral-toned strips that fall from the ceiling. It behaves like a breathing creature inside the pavilion. A set of bands, textures, and natural pigments transported from the land the artist has studied for decades.

What stands out most: the samples of her meticulous laboratory. The process of tireless work and exploration. Jars of soil, rocks, dyes, sketches, notebooks, and tools function as a living archive of materials that the Brazilian artist gathers, catalogs, and translates into color. Low-impact techniques are restored to imagine modes of creation that respect natural cycles.

There is precision. The treated fabrics hold the hues extracted from the artist’s own surroundings. The lights and shadows they cast evoke the passage of time, like a sundial recording slow transformations.

"Catástrofe orquestra #1 (Ato I)" (Catastrophe orchestra #1 [Act I]) by Antonio Tarsis

A patched composition of recycled materials. A manifesto, a curtain, a burst of red, an exercise in layering. Patches, fabrics, and layers intertwine to guide viewers through the various pieces, and through the work as a whole. Its minimum unit is a scrap on the verge of being discarded; its maximum composition is this monumental installation.

Using found materials, Brazilian artist Antonio Tarsis crafts an unstable topography that speaks of labor, survival, and memory of the social and ecological tensions embedded in these materials. In the assemblage appear consumption and inequality, but above all, wear.

The work highlights consumption and inequality, but ultimately, the passage of time.