O Living Anthropology and Art Boundaries (LAB) configura-se como um laboratório experimental que promove combinações inovadoras entre arte e etnografia, explorando as potencialidades de um conhecimento que transcenda os limites disciplinares tradicionais. Inspirando-se nas perspectivas das artes, das ciências sociais e das humanidades, o LAB propõe-se como um espaço de convergência e hibridização, onde colaborações interdisciplinares e indisciplinares possam dar origem a novas formas de exploração e representação das múltiplas dimensões do mundo. Estas dimensões – humanas e não humanas, animadas e inanimadas, materiais e imateriais – podem ser vividas, sentidas e imaginadas, mas raramente encontram expressão adequada através de abordagens exclusivamente textuais ou monodisciplinares.

O LAB não se limita a “ocupar as margens” das disciplinas, mas desafia as próprias linhas de demarcação, transformando os limites em espaços de troca, tensão e inovação. Este esforço não visa alcançar um equilíbrio precário entre antropologia e arte, mas antes tornar visíveis as fraturas epistemológicas, estéticas e políticas que emergem do seu encontro. Explorar as margens significa abrir novos espaços de pesquisa, aventurar-se por caminhos ainda não trilhados e avançar em diálogo constante com um panorama em contínua transformação. Este método dinâmico e processual, enraizado numa visão coletiva e socialmente engajada, promove uma antropologia viva e uma arte crítica, capazes de questionar as convenções e os paradigmas estabelecidos.

O LAB compromete-se a apoiar experimentações que unam emoções, sensorialidade e imaginação com rigor teórico e profundidade metodológica. As colaborações que emergem deste espaço não visam apenas produzir novas formas de conhecimento, mas também criar modalidades de expressão inclusivas, evocativas e transformadoras. Baseando-se na ideia de que a pesquisa não é um ato conclusivo, mas sim um processo aberto e em evolução, o LAB incentiva práticas que vão além da mera representação, abraçando a performatividade, a evocação e a materialidade como componentes essenciais do saber antropológico e artístico.

Convidamos curadores, artistas, antropólogos e investigadores de todas as áreas a contribuir com explorações metodológicas, colaborações transdisciplinares e projetos experimentais que interroguem os limites disciplinares e abracem formas de produção de conhecimento mais dinâmicas e abertas. O LAB posiciona-se como um espaço generativo, onde o diálogo entre arte e antropologia não é apenas uma ferramenta de investigação, mas também uma prática ética e política para imaginar mundos alternativos e enfrentar os desafios do nosso tempo.

A conversation with Livia Mezi

Livia Melzi - Foto: Joana Luz.

In this new article from LAB – Living Anthropology and Art Boundaries, I am pleased to present a conversation with Livia Melzi, a visual artist and researcher whose practice lies at the intersection of anthropology, critical museology, and postcolonial studies. Born in Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo, and currently active between France and Brazil, Melzi develops a visual inquiry into the colonial genealogies of images and objects, questioning the construction of alterity through Western museological dispositifs.

Trained first in oceanography and later in visual arts, her trajectory is grounded in a transdisciplinary methodology that weaves together scientific observation and artistic imagination. Her work operates within and against the institutions of conservation: photographic archives, ethnographic collections, and natural history museums become, for Melzi, not only objects of study, but also fields of performative and critical intervention.

In works such as Tabula Rasa, Tupi or not Tupi, and Vues Intérieures, the artist stages epistemological tensions between appropriation and reactivation, image and body, document and myth. The images and objects she evokes carry symbolic, affective, and political layers that destabilize hegemonic narratives and open space for other forms of presence and listening.

As becomes clear in the interview that follows, her research is animated by a critical tension toward the Eurocentric museological paradigm — not in the form of iconoclastic denunciation, but through a meticulous rewriting of relationships: between objects and subjects, between collections and territories, between memory and survival. Her reflections on the Tupinambá mantle, on the role of images in the construction of ethnographic knowledge, and on the performativity of restitution invite us to imagine the museum as a “grey zone” where power, care, and fiction intertwine.


Between Worlds: Dual Belonging and a Transboundary Gaze

1. Qu'il était bon mon petit français (2021). Fotografia, tapeçaria, esculturas de gesso, tapete. Instalação apresentada durante o Salon de Montrouge. Grand Prix du Salon. 

MMZ - Your artistic trajectory moves between two geographical and symbolic poles: on one side, Brazil, where your roots lie and where the living memory of the peoples and practices you investigate originates; on the other, Europe, where you live and work, and where those same memories are often archived, museified, or silenced. This dual belonging seems to offer you a unique position — not merely “hybrid,” but profoundly transboundary — able to inhabit multiple systems of meaning, temporalities, and regimes of visibility.

In this sense, your work could be read through the lens of what George Marcus defined as multi-sited ethnography: a mode of research that does not observe a single isolated context, but moves between different “sites” — material, institutional, symbolic — by following the movement of objects, narratives, and powers. In your case, these “sites” are not only geographical but also epistemological: the museum and the forest, the colonial archive and the ceremonial practice, the Parisian showcase and Glicéria’s body that reanimates the mantle.

How do you experience this duality? Is it a fracture, a possibility, a critical device? And how does it influence your capacity to “see through,” to deconstruct the gaze of the Other from within?

LM - I believe that today, after a few years of artistic practice, my relationship with this position can indeed be understood as what you call a critical device. This “grey zone,” where multiple meanings are organized and put into tension, began with my departure from Brazil in 2012 and finds its origin in a deeply intimate experience, shaped by a collective and often contradictory perception of my identity. It was precisely within this complexity — within the gaze of the Other — that I decided to anchor my practice, transposing personal experiences into a more universal and shared field.

Perhaps this is why my projects tend to lean towards anthropology and ethnography: I try to mobilize this duality as a critical tool to question foundational practices and institutions of alterity. Today, the museum constitutes the main field of my artistic research, as it condenses the paradigm shifts — political, social, and ecological — of our time. But this is only one side of that duality.

The other side, I seek in Brazil — or more precisely, in a constructed and projected idea of Brazil. It was within this interstice that the installation Como era gostoso o meu francês, presented in 2021 at the Salon de Montrouge, was born: a work that establishes a dialogue between anthropophagy and art de la table, through the assemblage of objects and materials.

The Origin of a Stance: Affective Genealogy and an Oceanographic Gaze

2. SN 1965 (2024). Díptico, 40x64 cm, tiragem a partir de negativo 4X5 em papel KODAK

MMZ - Your practice traverses archives, museums, rituals, ruins — but every research gesture, every artistic trajectory, is born from a subjective urgency, from a gaze that also takes shape outside the spaces of art.
Could you tell us where yours originates? What was the ignition point — the image, the encounter, the lived experience — that sparked your interest in restitution processes, in silenced histories, in displaced objects that endure?

And along this path, what role did your background in oceanography play? Has a gaze trained for slow observation, for invisible movements, for geological and biological stratifications influenced the way you now approach archives, objects, and musealized bodies?

LM - To answer your question, I need to begin with my own story. I was born and raised in a family of labor lawyers, whose lives were deeply marked by the agrarian reform struggles in Brazil during the 1980s and 1990s. Within my family, there was an almost visceral urgency to transform the country through class struggle — an impulse that profoundly shaped my worldview.

Over the past ten years, I’ve undergone an intense and transformative psychoanalytic process. Today, I can clearly see that those early years of artistic work were driven by a need for repair — a repair that operated on two simultaneous levels: external, artistic; and internal, subjective and intimate.

Oceanography is my great passion, or perhaps more than that: my artistic system is somewhat oceanographic. This science taught me to think in constellations, to work in networks, to understand that no single datum is absolute on its own. And here we return to your first question: in any oceanographic study, an isolated parameter (a physical one, for example) holds little meaning. It is only when it is articulated with others (chemical, geological, biological) that something begins to emerge. The answer is never in a single point of view, but in the intersection between them.

It was through oceanography that I learned to read the world in layers, to recognize complexity as a condition — not an obstacle. So my methodology remains the same, though it now operates within other epistemological systems.

Photography Between Appropriation and Reactivation

3. Autoportrait IV (2022). 90x120 cm, tiragem a partir de negativo 4X5 em papel KODAK

MMZ - In Tabula Rasa, the contrast between the feathered mantle recreated by a European collector — who buys feathers online to imitate Amazonian ritual objects and display them in his Parisian living room — and the gesture of Glicéria Tupinambá — who weaves a new sacred mantle for her community — enacts two opposing logics: appropriation and reappropriation. The former falls under what Arjun Appadurai calls “museological fetishism,” in which an object, once severed from its relational context, is consumed as aesthetic or decorative image. The latter is closer to what Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser define as worlding practices: gestures that not only reproduce the past, but reactivate it, re-linking the object to the territories and bodies from which it was detached.

Within this tension, photography in your work is never neutral. In one case, it functions as a tool of denunciation, exposing strategies of appropriation; in the other, it becomes a relational tool, an active mediator between worlds and subjectivities. More radically, photography appears as a form of anthropological inquiry: not a method of external observation, but a way of entering into relation, of accompanying — and at times, generating — processes of restitution, care, and embodied memory.

How do you navigate this dual function? What kind of ethics and epistemology guide your use of the image? And in your work, how does photography manage to escape the extractivist logic and instead activate transformative — social, political, affective — processes capable of restoring not only visibility but also narrative power to what has been expropriated?

LM - Let me begin by responding through the stories behind these images.
Tabula Rasa was my first solo exhibition at the Parisian gallery Salon/H. In collaboration with curator Margaux Knight, we sought to weave a narrative thread across those early artistic projects, creating a dialogue between images and materials.

Between the two images you mention, there is above all a dialectic that begins from a common gesture: weaving.
What struck me most — without passing judgment on either appropriation or reactivation — was the fact that two such different individuals performed the same gesture, employing a similar method of creation.

In both cases, photography plays a central role: both Glicéria and the French collector use images as references to relearn Indigenous techniques that had been lost.
What interested me initially were these images themselves and how they operate in processes of transmission and recreation.

The photographs of feather artifacts taken in the Parisian apartment are titled Vues Intérieures. Although often read as a form of critique, that wasn’t, in fact, my initial intention.

What struck me most upon meeting this man (whom I’ll refer to as B) was realizing how he embodies an entire history of projections and phantasms that France has cast onto Brazil.

In the images, the feather objects are always juxtaposed with elements of the Western world — old books, furniture in the style of Louis XIV, and so on. It is precisely within this encounter of temporalities, geographies, and aesthetics that the image takes shape.

And of course, there is also the presence of the character himself. B, a European man who has never been to the Amazon, possesses technical knowledge about feathers that has already vanished among some Indigenous peoples.

This situation could easily be interpreted as a case of appropriation, and yet I believe something even more complex — and powerful — is at play: the power of the circulation of images and knowledges.
It is precisely in this ambiguous zone that the true field of tension in the series lies.

Since I met Glicéria in 2020, I knew immediately that I could not photograph her — and this intuition only grew stronger over time. Glicéria has been extensively photographed in recent years, as have her mantles, often in contexts bordering on fetishization or exoticization.

As a white woman, I could not simply pick up a camera and reenact this dynamic of power between subject, lens, and observer — a dynamic so ingrained in the anthropological tradition.

In 2022, while preparing a solo show at the Palais de Tokyo, I had the chance to return to Brazil and meet Glicéria again. That was when I proposed a series of self-portraits, made by her in her own territory, using a large-format camera.

This proposal involved two fundamental layers: what the image shows, and how it is produced.
On one hand, these photographs respond to the engravings of Theodor de Bry, where the Tupinambá people (and their mantles) appear in scenes of cannibal rituals, saturated with colonial imagination. On the other, the technical choice of using large-format photography evokes its status as document — as “proof” of a certain reality — while simultaneously questioning that very status.

So, returning to your question: I try to practice a photography guided by a relational ethic — attempting to circumvent, or at least place pressure on, the extractivist gesture that is, in many ways, inherent to the history of photographic image-making.

Each subject in front of the camera prompts me to develop a specific strategy of response. Whether in the story of the mantles, the busts of Maurício de Nassau, or the feather artifacts in a European home, I seek — through technical choices or mise-en-scène — to install a tension that includes photography itself as a language and a device of power.

It’s not only about documenting, but also about making visible the layers of mediation that construct the image: who looks, who is looked at, under what conditions, with what instruments, and with what symbolic consequences.
In doing so, I try to shift the traditional locus of the gaze — historically linked to domination — and open space for more complex forms of presence and visible listening.

Restituting Worlds, Not Objects

4. Étude pour un monument Tupinambá (2018-2022). Fotografia, caixa de luz, papel de parede. Instalação apresentada durante o Festival de fotografia de Atenas, 2022. 

MMZ - In the critical text by Margaux Knight that accompanies Tabula Rasa, it is stated that today there is a need to “nurture epistemological plurality,” echoing what Boaventura de Sousa Santos calls an ecology of knowledges: an invitation to recognize and allow the coexistence of diverse forms of knowledge, often silenced by the Eurocentric paradigm. This principle seems to run through your work, where restitution is not a simple act of return, but a living process that opens spaces for confrontation between ontologies, memories, and worldviews.

The case of the Tupinambá mantle — which you accompany on its journey from Copenhagen back to Brazil — becomes emblematic: it is not merely about returning an object to the place from which it was removed, but about reactivating it as a subject of relations, as a catalyst for new possibilities, tracing the various stages of its “migration.” In this sense, your approach echoes Igor Kopytoff’s reflections on the cultural biography of things — according to which each object undergoes multiple phases of (re)definition — and the proposal of Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, who see restitution as an act of symbolic and political reconstruction capable of opening new worlds.

In light of this, how do you envision a form of restitution that returns not only the materiality of the object, but also its transformative power? What should we be restituting today — the object, the relationship, or the very imagination of a world in which the object was never separated?

LM - The issue of restitution has preoccupied my thoughts for a long time, and I believe that my relationship with the theme has evolved throughout the process of researching and creating work around the Tupinambá mantles.

In 2018, when I began visiting these artifacts in European museums, none of them were in Brazil. Even in Europe, most were kept in storage, away from public view.

Photographing that collection, at the time, was a way of making it visible — of bringing it, through the image, into the public sphere. It was a way of activating the reproductive and circulatory power of photography to question Western museums’ relationships with objects considered “of the Other.”

More than a documentary gesture, it was about initiating a critique of the ongoing practices of invisibilization and symbolic confinement that still characterize museological approaches to non-European cultural artifacts.

Today, I believe that restitution policies, though often presented as acts of reparation, can be extremely problematic. Rather than truly correcting historical imbalances, they often end up perpetuating the very same power structures they claim to challenge.

The case of the return of the Tupinambá mantle to the Museu Nacional is particularly revealing — and troubling — from beginning to end.
First, the terms of the return: it was framed as a donation, not a restitution. The Danish museum “donated” the piece to the new collection of the Museu Nacional, attaching to this gesture a series of technical conservation requirements — revealing the persistence of a custodial logic.

Then, numerous misunderstandings emerged between the Museu Nacional and the multiple Tupinambá communities — which, it’s worth noting, are not a homogeneous entity. These tensions exposed both the fragility of institutional processes of listening and negotiation with the directly involved communities, and the political fragmentation within the communities themselves.

Finally, after crossing the ocean, the mantle ends up once again in a display case — this time a double one — reinstalled within another museological narrative. The image is emblematic: the object travels from one continent to another only to be re-staged within the very device that once silenced it.

Today, I’ve been reflecting a great deal on the role of photography in the context of restitution policies. As artifacts return to their territories of origin, photography often remains the only visible representation of those objects in the museums that housed them for so long.

No reparation is ever complete. In light of this, I think of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s words when he speaks of the need to “decolonize the decolonial.” That is, to move beyond a binary logic between colony and repaired-colony, and to think about more radical ways of reconfiguring thought.

In this sense, I believe it is urgent to abandon a materialist and accumulative vision — still very present even in narratives of repair — and to turn toward what is immaterial, transmissible, what we might call the living archive: practices, gestures, knowledges, and modes of presence that escape the logic of vitrines and objectification.

Photography, in this context, can act as a relational technology. Not as a substitute for the object, but as a space of mediation capable of keeping the symbolic power of these artifacts in circulation — without imprisoning them in a new form of musealization.

Art and Finitude: Breaking the Conservation Paradigm

5. Biblioteca Ambrosiana (2022). 74,6 x 51 cm, tiragem fineart em papel Museum Etching Hahnemühle 350g

MMZ  - The Western museum was born also — and perhaps above all — from a radical inability to think of death as an organic part of life. Incapable of coexisting with decay, the West invented institutions that conserve, accumulate, and silence. It extracted objects from their relational worlds to fix them within neutral vitrines, deactivating their ritual, social, and cosmological functions. It produced an idea of heritage founded on permanence and the exclusion of the living. As Tim Ingold observed, we preferred to protect objects from time rather than accompany them through it.

In this light, the museum appears not as a space of memory, but as a device of finitude denial: an architecture of control over deterioration. Tabula Rasa seems to oppose this conservative obsession with another temporality — one made of ruins, traces, “contaminated” images that do not archive, but narrate what survives loss. Your photographs do not seek to be objective records, but rather forms of affective proximity — “remnants that breathe.”

In this scenario, how do you imagine that art might concretely contribute to interrupting — or at least suspending — the conservation paradigm? What kinds of practices, within or outside the artistic field, do you see as capable of imagining institutions that not only preserve, but also know how to let go, to dissolve, to allow for dying?

LM - Reading your question, I couldn’t help but look at my own worktable: gloves, negatives, organizational envelopes, acid-free paper... Photography is a deeply material technique and, at the same time, an extremely fragile one. At every stage of my process, I find myself preoccupied — almost obsessively — with the conservation and archiving of what I produce.

In that sense, the museum seems to reflect, more eloquently than anything else, our collective anxiety toward time — that desperate attempt to deny disappearance, to reject our own end. It embodies the desire for permanence, but also the fear of loss.

And perhaps this is why photography resonates so deeply with the museum: both operate on the trace, on what remains. Both are technologies of the interval — between what was and what still tries to be. And yet we know that, to some extent, this is the conquest of the futile: a war against time we are always destined to lose.

To relativize this anxiety, I like to think in terms of geological time — a notion I owe to oceanography. Within that deep time, which escapes human experience, everything we attempt to preserve or fix dissolves. Not from neglect, but because matter itself is in constant transformation.

I also recall a striking class I took at Paris 8 with Professor Michèle Débat, on photography and dance. We were discussing the nature of dance and music as practices that continually reactivate something immaterial. Even when there are material supports — such as scores or choreographic notations — what is transmitted is always the possibility of reinterpretation, never a definitive fixation.

That idea left a deep mark on me. Perhaps the true gesture of conservation is not to keep something intact, but to ensure that it can continue to transform — that it remains alive insofar as it is reactivated, reread, reinvented.

Museum or Organism? Anthropophagy, Digestion, and Decolonization

6. Rescue objects I (2024). 60X70 cm, tiragem a partir de negativo 4X5 em papel KODAK

MMZ - In the text that accompanies Tupi or not Tupi, Lior Zisman Zalis writes: “If our methods of conservation reflect how we politicize temporality, Tupi or not Tupi confronts eternities with vitalities.”
This statement radically inverts the museological paradigm: not conserving in order to eternalize, but digesting in order to make life possible in other forms. In this sense, your work challenges the notion of heritage as stability, proposing instead a logic of transformation and metabolization — where that which is “assimilated” is not preserved, but reinvented, as in the anthropophagic banquet, where alterity is absorbed in order to generate new potency.

This vision echoes the proposal of the metabolic museum as articulated by Clémentine Deliss: a museum not as a storage site, but as a living laboratory where objects are reactivated, contaminated, and put to use. A museum that, like the body, digests, produces, expels, and returns energy.

From your perspective, what are the most deeply rooted and insidious elements that the Western museum still perpetuates? What are the “toxins” — to continue the organic metaphor — that, in your view, still prevent the museum from becoming a truly plural, open, non-extractivist space?

LM - Lately I’ve been delving into the work of curator Jacques Hainard and his concept of a “museology of rupture.”
The more I engage with his thinking, the more I’m convinced of the validity of his claim: no ethnographic object, in itself, constitutes indisputable evidence of anything.
I now share the conviction that no object, taken in isolation, is capable of fully conveying what museums attempt to communicate through it.

This problem also manifests in the field of photography — particularly in the discussion around photographic series. Olivier Lugon, for instance, reflects on the documentary legacy and the need for multiple images to compose a true récit.
Narrative — in both museums and photography — requires articulation, context, and interpretive depth.

Today, many museological reflections are framed within the notion of “decolonization” as a way to redeem these institutions or as an attempt to purge a kind of historical “toxin.” However, I personally do not believe in the possibility of decolonizing the museum in the terms in which “decolonization” is commonly formulated.
The challenge, I think, is more profound and more structural than many proposals are willing to recognize.

The restitution of objects, the revision of narratives, and the opening of museums to plural voices capable of expanding the meanings assigned to collections are among the main strategies of “decolonization” currently being implemented in these institutions. Yet in my view, these actions — while relevant — remain insufficient in light of the historical and symbolic complexity of the museum as a dispositif of power and knowledge.

The museum, as conceived within Western modernity, carries within its very structure the extractivist and epistemologically hierarchical legacy of the Enlightenment.
As long as it remains anchored in this paradigm — one that values classification, universalization, and control of knowledge — the museum will continue to function as a device of appropriation and narrative authority.

Perhaps the most radical gesture is not simply to “decolonize” the museum, but to reimagine its very essence from other genealogies.
Returning, for example, to the Greek Mouseion — a space dedicated to the Muses, to shared knowledge, contemplation, and creation — might offer a potent symbolic alternative.

A space that does not claim to offer absolute truths, but instead seeks to inspire, provoke, and welcome multiple forms of knowledge.
In this sense, conceiving of the museum not as an authoritative space of enunciation, but as a poetic territory of listening, could represent an inaugural rupture with the colonial logic that still underpins many of these institutions.

Replacing exhibition as imposition of meaning with listening as an opening to the Other might be one way to destabilize the regimes of knowledge and power that have historically shaped the museum.
Only then can we begin to dismantle the violent legacies on which these spaces were built: legacies of appropriation, silencing, and the domestication of alterities.

Field, Body, Transformation: Ethnography as Experience

 7. Mauritshuis (2022). 74,6 x 51 cm, tiragem fineart em papel Museum Etching Hahnemühle 350g

MMZ - In many of your works, especially in Tabula Rasa, one senses that the artistic gesture is not only directed outward — toward institutions, archives, objects — but also toward an inner territory: your body, your memory, your history.
Following the return of the mantle, portraying Glicéria, witnessing the ashes of the museum... these also seem like ways of crossing personal thresholds, of negotiating your position as artist, researcher, woman, Brazilian in Europe.

In anthropology, this perspective has been central to many reflections — from participant observation to more recent practices of co-producing knowledge, which do not separate knowing from experiencing, nor the researcher from the context. This dimension also seems to run through your trajectory.

Could you share how this “field” — made of relationships, conflicts, listening — has transformed you? And how has your way of working evolved over time: from a more analytical or documentary stance toward something more immersive, situated, performative — where making art also means inhabiting the world differently?

LM - My path as an artist began relatively late. I believe that my scientific background instilled in me a strong drive toward being objective, direct, and impartial — and that has been, at once, a strength and an obstacle in my work from the beginning.
It took me some time to realize that I could not — and in fact never would — be “neutral” in the way a scientist working with numbers might aspire to be. As you pointed out, even when behind a mechanical object — heir to industrial and scientific traditions — photographic neutrality is an illusion.

This awareness developed gradually. I came to understand that it’s not just about looking at a subject through the lens or narrating a story, but also about recognizing and affirming a position in relation to my “subjects.”
This quest for positionality often places me in emotionally ambiguous situations — between privilege, white guilt, and at times even victimhood.
This first body of work on the Tupinambá mantles required a massive recalibration of my internal compass — it is a visual research that, although it speaks about Europe and its cultural mechanisms, focuses heavily on an artifact that was (and perhaps still is) entirely foreign to me.

At the moment, I’m adjusting my methodology toward a more conceptual path — though still keeping subjectivity as a tool.
I now perceive my presence within projects as increasingly conscious, and I’m also more aware of how my own identity is called into question.
I feel that I’m approaching something more politically effective, as I can see how my choices — in some way — touch the real world.
They cease to be purely aesthetic experiences confined to an elite with access and specialized cultural capital, and instead begin to seek some form of concrete impact. Even though I don’t have definitive answers, I try to use my work to produce real effects — however small — on the individuals and communities with whom it interacts.

What If We Started with a Tabula Rasa? Imagining the Impossible

8. Rescue Objets II (2024). 60X70 cm, tiragem a partir de negativo 4X5 em papel KODAK

MMZ - I’d like to end with the question that concludes Margaux Knight’s text — a question suspended between disillusionment and possibility:

“Today, as colonial statues falter, museums burn or transform, a new paradigm emerges: must we perhaps operate a tabula rasa? What are we to do with charred remains, funerary fragments, fading photographic archives, plaster casts of statues...? And how will we fill the future Museu Nacional in Rio?”

But now, I’d like to ask you this question directly. Because your work — between impossible restitutions, gestures of care, and images that breathe — already seems to offer a response that is neither nostalgic nor iconoclastic, but made of reactivations, visions, and that which persists and insists.

If you could imagine a museum of the future — not as a building, but as a gesture, a threshold, a form of relationship — what would you place inside it? What ruins would you leave on the floor? What fragments would you choose to preserve — not to conserve them, but to make them live differently? And what kind of gaze, of alliance, of world could be born from that?

LM - The gardens of Burle Marx help me imagine a possible museum of the future, for all they propose in terms of ecology, diversity, de-hierarchization, and sensitivity to place.
These gardens differ radically from classical European ones, which are marked by symmetry, control, and the imposition of rational order upon nature.
Burle Marx’s gardens celebrate organic gesture, improvisation, the encounter between native and foreign species, the coexistence of planning and spontaneity.

I think they could offer fertile inspiration for rethinking a new kind of museum — one that ceases to be a space of domestication and rigid cataloguing of knowledge and cultures, and becomes instead a living, dynamic, and affective territory.
A place where discourse does not dominate experience, but interweaves with it.
Just like in Burle Marx’s gardens, where each species maintains its singularity while participating in a broader and more harmonious whole, the museum of the future could be a space that welcomes multiple voices, multiple times, multiple narratives — without the pretense of unifying them into a single truth.
At the same time, I think it’s important for museums to find a way to remind us of their own ruins — to place their own trajectories into question.

What moves me most today, as an artist, is reimagining the museum’s very mission — its role and its implications.
This concern brings me back to a powerful conversation I had in 2019 with a Tupinambá elder, regarding the repatriation of ceremonial mantles.
At the time, I was defending the return of those artifacts with conviction — as an act of historical justice, a symbolic gesture of repair in the face of centuries of violence and expropriation suffered by that people.

But the response I received unsettled me: “The return of the mantle doesn’t repair anything.”
He went on to explain that the real cost to Europe is not in restitution itself, but in the time, money, and technology invested in trying to preserve forever an artifact that, for them, lacks meaning.
The true price, he said, is the lifetime spent by people dedicated to a conservation mission that, without emotional or spiritual ties, reveals itself to be hollow.
Perhaps, he suggested, learning other ways of building alterities and transmitting memory is the path toward the museum of the future.

Marco Maria Zanin, June 2025.