"Material Cartographies"

curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah

Aura has long championed artistic practices that privilege process over spectacle, material engagement over representation, and inquiry over resolution. Material Cartographies extends this commitment by bringing together twelve artists from Brazil and beyond, whose works function as maps—not of fixed territories, but of lived experience. These artists chart how space is sensed, recalled, and reshaped through contact. Their cartographies emerge through touch, layering, gesture, and duration rather than predetermined coordinates.

Presented in Miami—a city defined by thresholds, where geographies intersect, and identities remain in constant formation across the Americas—these practices resonate with contemporary conditions of displacement, transformation, and provisional belonging. Here, meaning does not arise from mastery or control, but through sustained negotiation with material, space, and time. Individually and collectively, the artists delineate mutable zones between body and environment, recollection and matter, structure and collapse.

Together, the artists gathered here prompt a reconsideration of mapping itself: not as a neutral instrument of measurement, but as an embodied, lived activity. Their works register relationships rather than routes, attending to movement, density, and transformation rather than to fixed points or final destinations. What emerges is a cartography of experience—tactile, contingent, and psychological—inviting viewers to navigate ambiguity and discover meaning through encounter rather than depiction.

Body as Archive, Material as Continuance

Across the exhibition, the body becomes a central site of cartographic inquiry. Several artists treat it not as a subject but as an instrument and repository—a means through which experience is inscribed onto matter. Leandro Júnior’s clay works retain the literal imprint of gesture, where touch operates as a mode of ancestral transmission. Each mark carries labor, intimacy, and embodied knowledge, producing tactile registers of presence that exceed individual authorship and extend into shared inheritance.

Uýra expands this logic through performance and ritual, dissolving boundaries between human and ecological systems. Their work charts porous exchanges between body and environment, asserting the inseparability of identity and ecosystem. In both practices, presence is political—an insistence on visibility and the right to occupy and define one’s own terrain.

Érica Magalhães approaches vulnerability as a method. Her precarious constructions examine the threshold where structure gives way, revealing fragility as a condition of form rather than its failure. Similarly, Marcela Crosman attends to the pressures that shape both bodies and objects over time. Through compression, tension, and material resistance, Crosman maps force itself—the weight of sustained contact and the aftereffects of interaction. Together, these works reject fantasies of permanence, offering instead a cartography of precarity grounded in ongoing negotiation.

Surface as Site: Deposition and Excavation

Other artists approach the surface as a terrain for material and temporal inquiry. Fernanda Valadares constructs paintings through the gradual build-up of wax and pigment, creating surfaces that register duration rather than depict imagery. These works function as temporal fields, where meaning emerges through layers of making—each stratum a record of attention, labor, and care.

Bruno Weilemann Belo and Cecília Costa similarly transform landscape into psychological and perceptual terrain. Belo’s paintings hover between recall and erasure, mapping the fragility of perception itself. Costa’s subtly distorted forms unsettle the familiar, rendering landscape as something continuously shifting beneath one’s footing. Together, they propose landscape not as a stable view but as a projection—one onto which individual and collective histories are repeatedly inscribed, altered, and reconfigured.

Architecture as Language: Power, Pattern, Interference

Several artists extend cartographic inquiry into the structures we inhabit. Leonardo Damonte treats architecture as a diagram of power, revealing how built forms encode hierarchy, regulate movement, and preserve institutional legacy. His work underscores that every structure is also a map of access—of who belongs, who circulates freely, and whose presence is restricted.

Helô Sanvoy investigates how spatial arrangements produce emotional and social topographies. His installations oscillate between invitation and estrangement, charting how proximity, material, and orientation shape the conditions of encounter. Renan Teles unsettles geometric and representational systems to generate perceptual friction, asking what occurs when established maps fail—when systems designed to clarify instead induce dissonance.

Rommulo Vieira Conceição works within repetitive systems to explore the tension between pattern and deviation. His practice demonstrates that structure and improvisation are not oppositional but mutually constitutive. Each gesture both adheres to and resists the grid, proposing cartography as a space of discipline and release—a framework that enables navigation while remaining open to drift.

Narrative as Fragment: Open Configurations

Fernanda Pacca’s assemblages extend these inquiries into narrative form. Working with objects, images, and material remnants, she constructs constellations that resist linearity and closure. Her cartographies operate through association and interruption, acknowledging fragmentation not as lack, but as a condition of meaning-making. Gaps, ruptures, and unresolved paths become active elements, emphasizing relational thinking over totalizing coherence.

This refusal of closure runs throughout the exhibition. None of the artists offers a complete map or final destination. Instead, they create conditions for continual recalibration, inviting viewers to move through moments of attentiveness, adjustment, and discovery alongside them. These material cartographies remain contingent and responsive—shaped by context, encounter, and change.

Charting Transformation

What unites these diverse practices is a shared understanding of cartography as an active, generative process. Material, body, environment, and space are not discrete categories but interdependent forces that continuously reshape one another. Clay records gesture; landscape mirrors perception; architecture encodes authority; fragility sustains form; repetition yields difference. Transformation is not illustrated—it is enacted.

In Miami, where multiple worlds coexist without resolution, Material Cartographies resists the impulse toward a singular or unified map. Instead, it presents a constellation of approaches—overlapping, contradictory, and complementary—that reflect the complexity of navigating the present moment. These are cartographies for unsettled terrain: hybrid, unresolved, and continually negotiating competing forces.

Ultimately, the artists gathered here suggest that art’s value lies not in fixing meaning, but in sustaining attention to what remains in motion. Their works chart territories that are physical and psychological, historical and speculative, personal and collective. They map not destinations, but processes of positioning—the ongoing act of locating oneself in relation to matter, inheritance, others, and the world.