The Earth Shaped By Art
Adriana Xavier, Alice Ribeiro, Ana Ribeiro, Anisia Lima, Andréia Andrade, Augustto Ribeiro, Conceição, Durvalina Gomes, Glória Maria Andrade, Irene Gomes da Silva, Maria Pereira, Mariete Santana, Rita Ferreira, Salvina Gomes, Terezinha Barbosa, Valdete Fernandes, Vera Lopes
September 8 - 18
Clay Expresses The Essence
The Jequitinhonha Valley, in the northeastern region of Minas Gerais, constitutes one of Brazil’s most emblematic cultural landscapes. Long before the area was identified as a center of artisanal production, it functioned as a living school: women shaped the local clay with gestures refined over centuries, transmitting a body of knowledge that responded to daily needs while simultaneously producing symbolic worlds.
The Valley Collective emerges today as the contemporary face of this continuum. Adriana Xavier, Alice Ribeiro, Ana Ribeiro, Anisia Lima, Andréia Andrade, Augustto Ribeiro, Conceição, Durvalina Gomes, Glória Maria Andrade, Irene Gomes da Silva, Maria Pereira, Mariete Santana, Rita Ferreira, Salvina Gomes, Terezinha Barbosa, Valdete Fernandes, and Vera Lopes embody a lineage in which clay becomes memory, testimony, and invention. Their works do not replicate formulas; they extend a cultural thread. Each figure, each doll, each polished surface colored with natural engobes is a gesture that both preserves and reinvents tradition.
The exhibition The Earth Shaped By Art introduces European audiences to objects of striking presence and, equally, to a subtle lesson about Brazil’s interior territories: the depth of ancestry, the slow temporality of clay, the resilience of sertão women, and the collective intelligence that transforms limited resources into enduring cultural force.
This show is an initiative of the State of Minas Gerais and Sebrae MG — the Brazilian Service for Support of Micro and Small Enterprises of Minas Gerais. For years, Sebrae MG has developed a program to support crafts and the creative economy of the Jequitinhonha Valley, working directly with the Valley Collective to strengthen the ceramists of the region: training, productive organization, market access, and enhancement of the territory’s cultural identity.
The Scenography as a Curatorial Device
The scenography conceived for this exhibition stems from a deliberate choice: to place the sculptures of the Jequitinhonha Valley within a French white cube — a space of white walls, silent, cold, where architectural neutrality functions as a field of amplification. In this minimalist environment, each work breathes, each gesture of the material becomes visible, each texture gains presence. The white cube, here, is not merely a backdrop; it is an instrument of reading that suspends noise and allows the ancestral character of the Valley to manifest with clarity.
Within this refined space, the introduction of a set of historical objects — the metal library ladders from the Banque de France, all original pieces from the 1920s — shifts the scenography toward a more complex symbolic territory. These ladders, once tools for accessing institutional knowledge, carry the memory of French administration: they were used to reach books, archives, documents, and records that shaped the country’s economic and cultural history. They are objects that materialize order, research, bureaucracy, modern rationality.
By receiving the sculptures of the Jequitinhonha Valley, these ladders produce a poetic and political inversion. The European, industrial object, designed to organize archives, becomes a support for works born of the earth, of manual gesture, of oral transmission. The French institutional world comes to physically sustain the ancestral Brazilian world. It is as though France itself were offering its steps — literally — to elevate this production, acknowledging its cultural and symbolic strength.
The steps of the ladders also introduce the idea of layers of reading. Just as one climbs to reach a book or a file, the public is invited to ascend levels of understanding: from matter to form, from form to culture, from culture to ancestry. The ladders suggest that the art of the Valley demands approach, study, and care — that it is not merely an aesthetic object, but a bearer of knowledge from a profound Brazil, often unknown.
Inside the white cube, these ladders reveal their modernist geometry: vertical lines, diagonals, metal structures that dialogue with the minimalism of the space. They cease to be functional tools and become sculptures in their own right, creating a bridge between European modernity and Brazilian organicity. The scenography, thus, does not illustrate; it creates tension. It does not explain; it provokes. It does not neutralize; it activates.
Taken as a whole, the project affirms something essential: the art of the Jequitinhonha Valley deserves to be elevated, studied, contemplated, and this exhibition inscribes this gesture onto French territory by using France’s own historical objects as support. The scenography makes visible an encounter between worlds, a negotiation of memories, and a reconfiguration of symbolic hierarchies — where the land of the Valley meets the archives of France, and where the ancestral leans on the institutional to be seen, recognized, and celebrated.