Beatriz de Souza Lima
Trajectories

Exhibition Details

On her way to the hospital Beatriz de Souza Lima crosses a botanical garden. It is a route she has to take often, walking among Monstera Deliciosas that remind her of her mother’s house, in Brazil.

Nature in artificial space is often alienating: surrounded by fake tropical decor, the plants are almost cumbersome. Imagine getting closer and beginning to notice – after the leaves, trunks, and soil – a system of machines and wires. Humidifiers, irrigation conduits, electrical wires: an entire infrastructure that allows plants to live in that environment.

Suddenly the hospital doesn’t look so different. Every step along the way connects one place to the other. Their physical proximity becomes conceptual, their properties cross more and more. For de Souza Lima, tropical plants are a reflection in a mirror: they too, like her, are constantly observed, studied, and measured by electrodes.

Focusing on similarities between the two spaces, the images in Trajectories bring them so close that they become inextricable. Image after image, a new ecosystem is born. A hybrid place in which the feeling of being foreign, never at one’s place, coexists with a positive tension: the persistent attempt to build bonds and plant roots. A place in which care is the ultimate end, implicit in every weaving of cables, and in which an unexpected beauty eventually finds its place.