We begin with the work Sun of Consciousness. God Blow Thru Me – Love Break Me (2025), by Precious Okoyomon. This is a site-specific installation, commissioned especially for this edition of the Bienal.
You find yourself in the middle of a vast garden. There is a great variety of plants, mosses, scents, and sounds around you. You walk along a platform with rises and falls. You see lakes nearby. You know that this installation will not be the same when you return: it is alive and allows you to enter another time. What sensations does this place awaken in you? Can you see your reflection in the murky waters of the lakes? When you look in the mirror, do you see only yourself, or also all the other beings coexisting in this environment with you?
Precious explores times situated outside human time. They call these nonhuman times “portals.” They study plants and relate them to different types of temporality – some evoke species widely used during colonization, such as sugarcane, the basis of plantations, agricultural systems focused on the exploitation of monocultures. These times evoke dark moments. Precious works with the duality between the beautiful and the ominous, between disguised perversity and another kind of time, which flourishes in forms of life with which we must coexist – and from which we can also learn to live.
Precious works with art, but also with poetry, gardening, food, and philosophy. The sonic dimension of this work is fundamental. You hear a soundscape developed from recordings made in Ibirapuera Park itself, which can be switched on or off.
Different sound textures were stretched, twisted, and altered, rubbing frequencies together and fictionalizing listening – thus, layers that escape capture during recording emerge. A continuous high-pitched frequency functions like a curtain that separates the work from the others and, at the same time, evokes the presence of water. In contrast, low frequencies create a vibrating ground, like a sonic portal felt in the body. These manipulations alter the rhythm of reality within the work, creating a sensation of suspended time.
The installation occupies the exhibition space with an irregular topography: between blocks of stones and exposed roots, mounds of earth rise and dissolve into spiral paths. Small waterfalls and lakes appear among these reliefs, while moss-covered areas invite rest. Visitors traverse the environment along uneven passages, alternating between smooth stretches and more rugged areas, revealing different rhythms of encounter and interaction with the space.
Light also plays a starring role in this landscape. In collaboration with the artist and researcher Seth Riskin, Okoyomon creates atmospheric phenomena reminiscent of halos, rainbows, and sub-suns. They appear and disappear according to air humidity and audience movement, creating and dissolving atmospheres in ephemeral cycles. In this living garden, where stones, water, plants, and light intertwine, the experience becomes an invitation to rest and listen, but also to an awareness that the natural world operates in rhythms broader than human ones.
Among the plants present are medicinal, edible, and invasive species. They come from the Americas, the Caribbean, and especially the Cerrado – such as capim rabo-de-burro, olho-de-cabra, as well as urucum and mandacaru. The Cerrado flora is characterized by its diversity and its adaptation to long periods of drought. The trees are twisted, with deep roots. The notion of adaptability may be an important key for thinking about our coexistence as humanity.
You may also find some plush toys scattered throughout the space. They refer to the calm yet dark aspect of these spaces. For Precious, suffering and joy happen synchronously. Their version of paradise has exuberant, yet poisonous fruits. The artist situates themselves between two worlds: that of nature’s beauty and that of history’s darkness. Sometimes, the distance between them seems infinite, but the essential thing is the present.
Sun of Consciousness is also the title of the first essay by Édouard Glissant, the Martinican philosopher whose ideas inspire this Bienal. In it, he discusses opacity, mondialization, colonialism, and creolization. The notion of mondialization refers to a vision of globalization that values cultural diversity and the relationships between different peoples, as opposed to a hegemonic, homogenizing perspective.
The title of Precious’s work also evokes recent research on the possibility of the sun being conscious. Huping Hu and Maoxin Wu proposed a mathematical explanation of consciousness based on quantum spin – a property of subatomic particles. They suggest that consciousness may be a fundamental feature of the universe itself, arising from interactions between these spins. According to them, consciousness is linked to quantum entanglement and information processing at the deepest levels of reality. Could the plants and all the beings – even the most microscopic – that we encounter in this work be conscious?