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Reading time 3 min

The Garden of All Senses

Equipe de mediadores

Vision, hearing, taste, touch and smell. These are the five senses we use to relate to and experience the world around us. Inhotim has created the Garden of All Senses as a way to explore these capabilities.  Located in the Educational Plant Nursery, it is a space intended to build knowledge through practice as well as through the exchange of information among visitors and the Institute’s environmental education team.

 

The project includes three mandala-shaped flowerbeds, each one dedicated to aromatic, medicinal and toxic plants.  In this space, visitors are invited to interact with the species and touch them, observing their specificities and even tasting them.  

 

Stevia (Stevia rebaudiana), used to make a natural sweetener, is among the most interesting plants there, together with the white chamomile (Matricaria recutita), with soothing and anesthetic properties.  During the guided tours, we encourage visitors to taste its leaves, which may cause tongue numbness.  

 

Those who visit the garden also find out about the uses of species on display and are able to relate them to practices that have been lost with time, such as the cultivation of medicinal species or the production of vegetable gardens in our own backyards.  It is also an opportunity to show appreciation to things learned from past times and traditions of our grandparents.  

 

Opened in June 2011 during the Environment Week, the space has increasingly become important to bring science closer to the general public. The activities and educational actions carried out in this Garden play a key role in raising environmental awareness as well as in biodiversity preservation.  

 

The Garden of All Senses was accomplished through a partnership between the Environmental Education team, the Friends of Inhotim program and institutions specialized in people with visually impairment. 

 

Written by Diego Pimenta, environmental guide at Inhotim.

Reading time 4 min

Building spaces: the museum and the sky

Equipe de mediadores

Thinking about the relationship the museum has with the sky is a relatively easy task at Inhotim, famous for displaying part of its collection outdoors.  The way the galleries are arranged throughout the park and the pathways built to get to these galleries encourage new flows and discussions on the encounter between contemporary art and the botanical garden.

 

Building Spaces theme tour:  the museum and the sky propose a discussion about this environment of encounters, offering other ways to look at works on display outdoors.  If the interaction between art and nature creates a new space, new positioning is also created, one which is free of limitations and open to the unknown.

 

Among the countless possibilities at Inhotim, we can find works and artists that question this balance between meanings and experiences.  With his Escultura para todos os materiais não transparentes (1985), Waltércio Caldas forces the look itself to “take another look”.  The apparently incomplete sculpture encourages you to think about empty spaces, silences and rhythm.

 

Waltercio-Caldas
Waltércio Caldas, Escultura para todos os materiais não transparentes, 1985.

 

On the other hand, Vegetation Room Inhotim (2010), by Spanish artist Cristina Iglesias, proposes an optical play with images reflected on a mirror and the place’s landscape.  Conceived specially for a clearing in the woods of Inhotim, the work consists of a mirrored structure immersed in nature, promoting sensorial encounters.  

  

These artists have chosen to incorporate the space in which their work is inserted as an element of their own existence and, thus, they weave relationships with the bodies of those observing these works.  The meaning we give to them happens as a result of this encounter, but the provocations tend to differ in each space, each day, depending on time, mood, how tired the body is, stupor of the mind.

 

I invite all of you to have a new look towards the museum spaces and perceive that which I consider the true role of art:  the creation of movement.

 

Written by Marília Balzani, Art and Education guide at Inhotim

 

 

Feeling like taking part in the Building Spaces: the museum and the sky theme tour? Then, click here to learn about the days and hours the activity takes place. 

 

 

Reading time 4 min

Simply Marepe

Equipe de mediadores

Marcos Reis Peixoto, or simply Marepe, was born in Santo Antônio de Jesus, a small town in the Recôncavo Baiano region.  His works at Inhotim are related to the northeastern cultural identity and to the simplicity of his place of origin, however, these works go way beyond this.  Rather than emphasizing on the drama of social problems, and perhaps even of the draught, Marepe potentiates discussions on the very stigmas created for the northeastern region.

Obra "A Bica" (1999), de Marepe
Obra “A Bica” (1999), de Marepe

A Bica (1999), Cabra (2007) and Olê ô picolé (2007), the three works by the artist currently on display at Inhotim, allow visitors to experience aspects of the everyday life ennobled of meanings, which is common in this work.  Marepe constantly uses materials that are not noble ones such as cardboard, rubber, beer cans and other everyday objects, building matter from ideas, from a form he likes to refer to as intuitive, despite the many influences present.  

Obra "Olê ô picolê" (2007), de Marepe
Obra “Olê ô picolê” (2007), de Marepe

By reutilizing products that gain new meanings when out of context, Marepe is constantly associated with French artist Marcel Duchamp, connected to Dadaism, an avant-garde modernist movement that started in the early 20th century. When conceptual art was decomposed and unfolded into philosophy, information, linguistics, mathematics, autobiography, and social criticism, it left a legacy in art history, and the artist uses this legacy to create works that translate his ideas, experiences and memories.  

Obra "Cabra" (2007), de Marepe
Obra “Cabra” (2007), de Marepe

His works are not appropriations of objects that acquire new symbolism; they are rather confections of objects similar to those used in the everyday lives of many people which, as art pieces, acquire new meanings.  Marepe calls these symbolic recreations nécessaire, while Duchamp refers to them as ready-mades.

 

At the park, Marepe’s simplicity if often perceived with a certain degree of awkwardness.   His works propose a dialog, cultural acknowledgment and reflection on recurring issues in contemporary art, with a Brazilian and northeastern twist at the same time.

 

 

Written by Beatriz Alvarenga, Daniela Rodrigues, Marília Balzani and Pedro Vinícius, Art and Education mediators at Inhotim

 

 

In February, the artistic theme visit proposes reflections on the works of Marepe on display at Inhotim.  Check out the program here.