ArPa 2026: Benedikt Wiertz, Luana Vitra, Marcos Siqueira

To open a fissure in the sky: dreaming the earth

To listen to the slow and implacable signs of the earth: the ruin of territories, the resilient  memory of biomes, the geological force that runs through bodies and landscapes. To open a rift in the sky as a metaphor for the encounter between the real  —  here and now  —  with a possible imaginary of a desired future.

Between fire, earth, and minerals, the practices of Benedikt Wiertz, Luana Vitra, and Marcos Siqueira bring into friction tradition and invention, extraction and care, and affirm art as a space where nature — both “subject of” and “subject to” constant metamorphosis — finds new ways of being perceived, felt, and elaborated. Each work emerges as both trace and omen: a listening to the earth and the sky and to their most abyssal movements. They exercise the annunciation of a future woven by forces that vibrate and believe in the extraordinary.

In Benedikt Wiertz’s work, clay — the original force of the earth — is memory in transformation: a material that recalls its geological, cultural, and affective past, and that renews itself through contact with the hands that shape it. In the Undomesticated series, the artist brings together wild clays, ashes, oxides, and discordant glazes, creating pieces that embrace the risk of the unpredictable and reveal the tension between human intention and natural forces, a kind of allegory of our own precarity and resilience before the forces of time. Fire, the decisive alchemist, crystallizes cracked surfaces, rugged topographies, and miniature geographies, where both the reactions of matter and the emotional frictions of the process are inscribed.

In Luana Vitra’s practice, textiles, copper, and iron become operators of invisible forces, equations that articulate mineral spirits, deep memory, and gestures of reinvention. Her works activate temporalities that exceed the human, bringing Afro-diasporic cosmologies into proximity with magnetic fields, metal alchemies, and subterranean pulsations.

Through a deep investigation of soils and the complex biodiversity of the cerrado — and through an attentive, participatory gaze toward the expressions of the people, whether in daily labor, festivities, or stories told by elders — Marcos Siqueira creates, with the earth that makes him a wanderer, images imbued with a singular subjectivity. In his compositions, the exuberant outer world unfolds into an inner, sensitive, intangible realm, rendering tangible the balance between expansive celebration and introspective reflection.

And perhaps it is within this fissure — opened between matter and desire — that we may glimpse the world that insists on emerging.