Contemporânea

Three women—an elderly one, an adult, and an adolescent—are joined mouth to mouth by a thread. A powerful and iconic image from Anna Maria Maiolino’s oeuvre serves as the point of departure for Terra Poética at MAAT, curated by João Pinharanda and Sergio Mah, the first exhibition dedicated to the Italian-Brazilian artist in a Portuguese institution.

Por um fio (1976) is the title of this black-and-white photograph, in which the artist herself, then thirty-four years old, stands at the centre, between her mother (to her right) and her daughter (to her left). Framed from the waist up, the women gaze directly into the camera lens, yet they seem to communicate through a deeper dialogue—wordless, almost visceral—as suggested by the thread that binds them together. Like an umbilical cord, it makes the intimacy of their connection visible. The thread traces a matrilineal line, a horizontal genealogy.

With its rich polysemy, the image offers a lucid, condensed introduction to many of the recurring themes that run through Maiolino’s practice—time, the body, the line and the thread, memory, the simplicity of gesture, the domestic sphere—each unfolding throughout an exhibition that spans five decades, from 1975 to 2025.

A modern iconography of the allegory of the three ages of life—or, more precisely, of womanhood—the subject of time is distilled here into a single photograph that contains past, present, and future within three female bodies traversed by the line of time. Distinct yet inseparable, they form part of the same living organism, like a tree—more than a genealogical metaphor—whose physical presence simultaneously reveals its history and its becoming: roots, trunk, and foliage, sustained by the same circulating sap.

It is no coincidence to speak of roots. Born in 1942 in Scalea, a small town in Calabria, Italy, Maiolino experienced the upheaval of the Second World War before emigrating with her family to Venezuela in 1954. In 1960 she settled in Brazil, in Rio de Janeiro, where she would put down lasting roots, apart from a brief interlude in New York between 1968 and 1971.

Reflecting on her arrival in Brazil in a conversation with Helena Tatay, the artist recalls: “I arrived in 1960. I was eighteen. It wasn’t my decision—my parents had decided to move to Rio de Janeiro, and I found myself being an immigrant again, without speaking Portuguese. I felt as though I was on shifting sands, permanently anxious; what kept me going was my obstinate search for a language, my obsession to become an artist.”1 Eighteen years old in a foreign land, Maiolino found in visual art a language of her own—one capable of transcending the barriers imposed by different tongues.

Por um fio sketches an imagined map of migrations: a mother from Ecuador, a daughter from Italy, and a granddaughter from Brazil. The thread running through their mouths is also Ariadne’s thread: within the labyrinthine experience of migration, it leads back to the self, to the body. It charts both ancestry and descent, reaffirming origins and strengthening the bonds of family.

The thread is also a formal element, as the artist notes in conversation with Helen Molesworth: “The thread is a line. Kandinsky spoke very well about the line. Like in music, visual artists use the segment, continuity, the point. For me, it’s about spatial ambivalence. And if one has spatial ambivalence, one also has temporal ambivalence. For example, in Por um fio, I’m talking about the continuity of time, which is also continuity through generations. I exist because my mother exists; Veronica, my daughter, exists because I exist. And therefore, the continuity of humanity, the infinite. Each one of us is a point along the line.”2

The idiomatic expression contained in the title, Por um fio (“by a thread”), ultimately evokes the fragility of life itself. The photograph belongs to the series Fotopoemação, initiated in 1973, in which a performative action carried out before the camera gives rise to a visual poem crystallised in a single, potent image. The title itself is a portmanteau, merging photograph, poem, and action into an inseparable whole. Active in Brazil during the military dictatorship, Maiolino frequently turned in the series to the motif of the mouth and to actions related to eating, speaking, and silence. These works may be read as metaphors for obstructed communication and for the need to invent alternative forms of language when speech is censored—an urgency that becomes even more acute when the voice in question is that of a woman.

On the eve of the exhibition’s opening at MAAT, the artist presented an updated version of her celebrated performance Entrevidas, first realised in a public space in Rio de Janeiro in 1981. Participants were invited to make their way through hundreds of raw eggs scattered across the ground. Entrevidas was conceived at a moment when Brazil’s military dictatorship, already in power for more than fifteen years, had begun to loosen its grip on society, although a genuine process of democratisation had not yet begun. This condition of uncertainty and precarity materialises in the tension generated by the field of eggs, a kind of minefield whose symbolism is deliberately ambivalent. The eggs evoke the fragility of life while simultaneously embodying a sense of threat, calling into question the atmosphere of danger that permeated everyday existence under the dictatorship.

A manifesto against authoritarianism and in favour of democratic openness in Brazil, the performance was restaged at MAAT under the title KA, introducing a new element that opens an additional layer of interpretation in light of the contemporary insecurity generated by ongoing wars and growing threats to global stability. The title refers to the Egyptian hieroglyph ka, a symbol of vital force represented by a figure with raised arms. Maiolino incorporated this gesture of uplifted hands into the path traced among the eggs. It is not a gesture of surrender but, as the artist herself has explained, a poetic and political appeal for peace and disarmament—one that renews the ethical commitment that has always animated her practice.

This dimension is already suggested by the exhibition’s title, Terra Poética. The earth is clay, the primordial material from which humanity is shaped: matter that, through gestures and actions, becomes poetic language. It is a poem without words fully spoken, a language in which ethics can take form.

The exhibition, installed within MAAT’s oval gallery, is essentially divided into two sections. Works on paper and predominantly two-dimensional pieces unfold along the walls of the ramp, while sculptures punctuate the oval arena below. They create a choreography of presences and absences, solids and voids, inviting visitors to discover their own path, their own thread—much as one navigates the labyrinth of eggs in the performance staged outside the museum.

Along the ramp, the works on paper unfold as pencil and ink sketches, a constellation of visual notes accumulated by the artist under the title Tempestade de ideias (1991–2017). They are assembled not according to any strict logic or chronological order, but in a manner that emphasises their spontaneous nature and the immediacy of the annotated page. At times, the drawn forms are directly related to sculptures on display, such as the rolinhos; at others, they seem to materialise a flow of thought through marks and gestures. Certain motifs recur throughout: the sinuous line, the spiral, the oval, the chain, the circle, the tree, the ring-shaped form; organic and biomorphic configurations, geological stratifications, constellations of symbols, asemic writings, and investigations into the relationship between void and fullness.

Interrupting these visual “pages,” several works from the Desenho objeto series aspire to a spatial presence. In Espiral (1975), for instance, the surface of the paper is incised and cut, while works from the Nova paisagem series negotiate a tension between two- and three-dimensionality. One such example is É assim (1989), a compound of oil, plaster, and cement moulded by the artist into an amorphous form. The traces of her fingertips remain impressed in the material, transforming it into a living landscape that recalls the dense, organic accretions of Max Ernst’s forests. More recent works such as Linha e ponto (2013), composed of ceramic elements, inscribe space like a form of punctuation or a message written in Morse code, yet liberated from the latter's rigidity and linear structure.

Tempestade de ideias, physically encircling the arena and conceptually introducing the sculptural works on display, offers clues rather than explanations. It transmits forms, signs, and processes that reappear in the sculptures without ever fully describing them. In Maiolino’s sculptural practice, form, gesture, and matter emerge together; they coexist and shape one another, none taking precedence over the others. The sculptures of the Hilomorfos series make this principle explicit in their very title, which references the Aristotelian concept of hylomorphism, according to which every physical being arises from the union of matter and form.

These sculptures are organic, amorphous entities made either of plaster or cast metal, the latter supported by slender vertical metal structures. The contrast between the apparently corporeal softness of the forms and the geometric rigidity of their supports generates hybrid beings, suspended between totemic presences and human figures. In both cases, Maiolino seems uninterested in representation as such; rather, she allows form to emerge from the act of shaping matter, making transformation itself the true subject of the work.

In the untitled cement works from the series Da Terra – Errância Poética (2014–2018) and Entre o Dentro e o Fora (2013), the artist excavates the block of material. Here, form is produced through subtraction rather than accumulation, reversing the gesture of kneading and moulding. Matter organises itself around the hollow choreography of the artist’s action. The material appears almost disfigured, formless—unsurprisingly, Georges Bataille’s name often recurs in discussions of Maiolino’s practice. These works reveal a secret anatomy of matter, establishing an evocative correspondence between the entrails of the earth and those of the human body.

The most imposing sculptural works in the exhibition belong to the Terra modelada series, expansive sculptures in unfired clay modelled in situ—the largest the artist has produced to date. They are composed of rolinhos, small hand-formed cylinders of clay created through a repetitive gesture: rolling the material between the palms until it assumes an elemental shape, resembling a thread, a worm, or a strand of pasta. The gesture recalls kneading bread or making pasta, a memory that resurfaces from the artist’s childhood and remains deeply connected to the domestic sphere, women’s labour, and ancestral rituals.

Each rolinho preserves the trace of physical contact and becomes a testimony to labour, a record of the body that shaped it. Through their multiplication and aggregation, Maiolino constructs sculptures that resemble living organisms, ever-growing networks, marine creatures, or intestinal villi. Destined to dry and harden over time, the clay changes throughout the duration of the exhibition. The sculptures continue to transform as they dry, crack, and settle, often developing a delicate craquelure across their surfaces. In this way, the process of creation extends into one of ongoing transformation. The work remains vulnerable, and it is precisely this vulnerability that makes it profoundly human.

Through natural materials, essential forms, chromatic restraint, manual gestures, and ancestral rituals, Maiolino articulates the central themes of her poetics: memory, transformation, and vital processes such as nourishment, digestion, and expulsion; the relationship between individual experience and collective existence. For from the multiplication of simple elements emerge complex structures; from an everyday gesture, from a humble action performed by the hand, arises an installation of universal resonance.

This is the “family lexicon” in which Maiolino’s practice is rooted and which permeates Terra Poética—a lexicon of resilience: the repeated gesture, modest yet enduring; the ability to continue living, creating, and becoming, despite displacement and in the face of hostile political and cultural conditions.

Anna Maria Maiolino

MAAT