A casa de Bené [Bené’s House] (2025) is a large-scale installation that extends across all three floors of the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion. The work is built from fragments of the artist’s great-grandfather Benedito Cândido’s old pau a pique house, demolished in Bela Vista de Minas. Remaining objects from that space, such as a piece of vine, a bullet-shaped lighter, a bamboo basket, a gourd, mulatto wood rods, and a small wooden box, are incorporated into the installation, functioning as nuclei of memory and ancestry.
Visitors encounter nine vertical columns, constructed with wooden structures and covered with textile sculptures made from fabric bindings, natural fibers, wool knits, cotton shirts, and leather strips. The columns span the three floors of the building, symbolizing the lineage of Benedito’s nine children, and create a totemic axis visible from various circulation points within the Bienal.
Scattered throughout the exhibition space, metal baskets in bronze and brass evoke, through their golden and yellow hues, the contrast between mining – the predominant activity in Bela Vista – and traditional basketry practices. From some of these containers emerge soft and flexible textile sculptures, predominantly in earthy, black, and reddish tones, projecting through the air and across the floor like umbilical cords connecting the different levels of the work. Other baskets contain raw materials from the Minas Gerais region, such as coal, stones, soil, ore, and tobacco, adding shades of deep black, gray, oxide red, and dark brown to the palette.
Among these elements, seven objects inherited from Grandpa Bené are elevated on rods, standing out as points of direct connection to family memory and, at the same time, collective memory. The result is a multilayered environment that combines weight and lightness, solidity and fluidity, projecting into the exhibition space the symbolic permanence of a house and its family memory.
According to the artist herself, “the work knows things we don’t even know yet.” Her first work was a continuous ten-year action, driven by the history of her consanguineous family, especially the journey of her great-grandfather. He was, among other things, an artist, although no one named his physical and cognitive labor as art. His works were connected to basketry, the traditional technique of weaving bamboo or vine rods. His greatest work was his house, a project that spanned decades. It is inevitable to consider the house as a site of struggle, resisting the expropriation of land by mining, the civil-military dictatorship, and the legacy of slavery and its effects. The artist’s practice is research-based and strongly connected to the notion of long-term projects. Although it stems from personal stories, it is also anchored in collective history.