For the works on show at the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, Rebeca Carapiá studied the walking palm – also known as paxiúba or by its scientific name, Socratea exorrhiza. This tree, found in the Amazon River basin and Central America, has sturdy, tangled aerial roots that are not buried but exposed above the ground, and which, over time, move around. They grow toward the sun in search of water and nutrients, while the roots that remain in the shade rot and die, serving as organic matter for the generation of new branches. Of significant visual power, the tree expands its branches throughout the space and encourages us to think about ancestral foundations that are dynamically transformed over time, embodying resilience and mobile foundations through intricate geometry.

The drawings of their roots also connect with the characteristic forms of Carapiá’s practice, focused on the formation and expansion of languages, in which abstract compositions are made with copper, iron, and solder. Their sinuous lines rehearse and perpetuate paths, wanderings, and walks, materializing the synthesis of an existence in movement – and of walking itself as an artistic, epistemic, and life methodology. Evincing dialogues that are usually neglected, such as sensitive perception, the mirrored and moved understanding of the present, and the mastery of materials that are often linked to violent masculinity, Carapiá emphasizes a desiring and liberating drive to create a philosophical body – or endowing an entity with a body in pure language.

The artist presents her sculptures as celebrations of the stages that formed them, from collective and shared production to overcoming technical challenges and socio-historical obstacles. They emphasize the ambivalent oscillation of simultaneously opening up in flourishes and retracting in formal synthesis, filling space while incorporating its voids, rehearsing a lightness of movement despite the inescapable weight of the material, or even inhabiting an integrating zone between drawing, sculpture, and installation – or between monument and filigree. Carapiá invites us to understand that there is no contradiction between being anchored to the ancestral ground and taking flight.