ERNESTO NETO: NOSSO BARCO TAMBOR TERRA
From June 6 until the end of July 2025, the Grand Palais in Paris will host Nosso Barco Tambor Terra, a monumental installation by Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto, created using hand-crocheted textiles, bark, earth, and spices.
Produced by GrandPalaisRmn in collaboration with the MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, the project is presented within the framework of the 2025 France–Brazil Season.
Conceived as an immersive, walkable, and inhabitable environment, the work functions as a multisensory space that expresses a profound connection with nature. It explores the continuity between the human body and the body of the Earth through manual craft, organic materials, and ancestral techniques.
Nosso Barco Tambor Terra draws inspiration from the historical impact of navigation and maritime journeys—practices that have reshaped the relationships between peoples and territories. Neto transforms the symbols and imagery associated with these shared histories into a participatory, ritual dimension through what he describes as a “porous architecture.”
The installation features a wide array of musical instruments from around the world and includes periodic activations during which the public is invited to enter and play the drums hidden within the structure. Through shared rhythms and pulses, the artist poetically evokes the possibility of a universal language founded on cultural plurality.
The project is accompanied by a public program of concerts, workshops, and thematic gatherings designed for both adults and children, offering opportunities to delve into the key themes that inspire the artist’s work—music, textiles, Brazilian history, and environmental concerns. A Brazilian café, situated within the exhibition space, will offer visitors a place to relax and connect.
Guests may choose to explore the installation freely or be guided by facilitators and artists in an experiential journey.
Ernesto Neto
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1964, where he continues to live and work, Ernesto Neto’s artistic practice centers on the exploration of relationships—between materials, physical forces, and living beings. Within this interconnected universe, gravity and balance emerge as central elements, acting as invisible mediators that guide the interaction between artwork and viewer.
Deeply influenced by the legacy of Brazilian Neoconcretism, as well as by the vocabularies of Minimalism and Arte Povera, Neto conceives of sculpture as an expanded practice—capable of incorporating time, organic matter, and the human presence. For the artist, the body functions both as a political subject and as a sensitive vehicle, a site where individual experience intersects with collective dimensions. His installations often evoke biomorphic forms or living organisms, generating enveloping environments that stimulate multisensory perception, inviting participation and contemplation.
In recent years, Neto’s work has increasingly embraced the use of natural materials—raw cotton, wood, leaves, spices—moving toward a spiritual dimension of art-making, understood as both meditative and ritualistic. Within this trajectory, the artwork becomes a device for re-establishing a deep connection between the human being and the sacredness of nature.
Neto has exhibited in major international institutions, including the Centro Cultural La Moneda in Santiago, Chile (2020), the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (2019), and the MALBA – Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2019), with the project Blow. In 2018, he presented GaiaMotherTree at Zürich’s central train station in collaboration with the Fondation Beyeler. In 2016, he exhibited Boa at Kiasma – Finnish National Gallery in Helsinki and Rui Ni / Voices of the Forest at the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg. His significant 2015 collaboration with the Huni Kuin Indigenous community culminated in the exhibition Aru Kuxipa | Sacred Secret at TBA21 in Vienna. Other notable projects include The Body That Carries Me at the Guggenheim Bilbao (2014) and Haux Haux at the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck in Remagen (2014).
He has also participated in numerous international biennials, including those in Venice (2001, 2017), Lyon (2017), Sharjah (2013), Istanbul (2011), and São Paulo (1998, 2010), establishing a sustained and influential presence in the global art scene. His works are held in many of the world’s leading museum collections, including the Centre Pompidou (Paris), Inhotim (Brumadinho), the Guggenheim Museum and MoMA (New York), SFMOMA (San Francisco), the Reina Sofía Museum (Madrid), Tate Modern (London), and TBA21 (Vienna), among others.
