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Around a tree
Around a tree.
The works "Semeador" (Sower) and "Ao Redor de Uma Árvore" (Around a Tree) are by the Paraná-based artist-architect Gustavo Utrabo. "Semeador," a proposal to occupy the garden of the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, unfolds as a statement about life through the passage of time, and emerges from a raised walkway that connects the museum to the garden adjacent to it. This walkway is built through the repetition of a floor module originally designed by Niemeyer for the MON, but rather than simply repeating what already exists, the proposal sets out to blur the boundaries between the built and the natural, producing the flooring from a mixture of seeds typical of Paraná's flora combined with conventional cement, sand, gravel, and water. Working from the understanding that we are born through the places we walk, it is by looking at the ground that we learn to walk.
The path leads the visitor to the work "Ao Redor de Uma Árvore." It is around a tree — one that grows slightly tilted as it reaches for sunlight — that the installation is found. It materializes as a gesture of care, in which a binding of metal pieces, which support the work, wraps around the trunk and draws us closer to the canopy. In an intrinsically ambiguous relationship, they seek both to care for and to be protected. The intervention aims to be as light as the treetops, and in a nod of respect, looks upward and encircles them — a movement that sways between attentiveness and reverence. An ascending spiral path gives shape to the proposal, structured through a delicate interplay of forces between balance and counterweight. Contact with the ground is made through four slender pillars, and, as Ailton Krenak has said, treading gently upon the earth is what is sought.
Client: Museu Oscar Niemeyer
Curator: Marc Potier
Location: Curitiba, Brazil
Author: Gustavo Utrabo
Team: Fernanda Britto, Giulia Mirabella, Júlia Frenk, Lucas Costa.
Consultans:
Structure:Ricardo Henrique Dias
Execution: Ambrósio Construtora.
Photography: Rory Gardiner