How to Create Aerial Roots

For the works presented at the 36th São Paulo Biennial, Rebeca Carapiá immersed herself in the study of the walking palm, also known as paxiúba or by its scientific name, Socratea exorrhiza. Found in the Amazon River basin and Central America, this tree has robust, tangled aerial roots that are not buried but exposed above the ground and that shift over time. They grow toward the sun and in search of water and nutrients, while the roots that remain in the shade rot, die, and become organic matter from which new networks emerge. With its striking visual presence, the tree extends its branches through space and prompts us to consider ancestral foundations that transform dynamically over time, embodying resilience and mobile foundations through an intricate geometry.

The configurations of its roots also connect with the characteristic forms of Carapiá’s practice, which centers on the formation and expansion of languages through abstract compositions made of copper, iron, and welding. Her sinuous lines rehearse and perpetuate routes, wanderings, and walks, materializing the synthesis of an existence in motion, and of walking itself as an artistic, epistemic, and lived methodology. By bringing usually neglected dialogues to the fore, such as sensory perceptions, a mirrored and shifting understanding of the present, and mastery of materials frequently associated with violent masculinity, Carapiá emphasizes the desiring and liberatory impulse to create a philosophical body, or to endow an entity with a body made of pure language.

The artist presents her sculptures as celebrations of the stages that shaped them, from collective and shared production to the overcoming of technical challenges and sociohistorical obstacles. They accentuate an ambivalent oscillation: simultaneously opening into flourishes and withdrawing into formal synthesis; filling space while incorporating its voids; rehearsing a lightness of movement despite their inescapable material weight; and even inhabiting an integrative zone between drawing, sculpture, and installation, or between monument and filigree. Carapiá invites us to understand that being firmly rooted in ancestral ground is not at odds with taking flight.