Underground waters: narratives in confluence

Born in 1994, in Angoulême, France. She lives in Barbezieux-Saint-Hilaire, France. Barbara Kairos’s work, rooted in the Charente region, explores notions of play, investigation, and material experimentation. In 6.52 μg/l (2025), an installation presented at Frac Poitou-Charentes, the artist experiments with organic substances by extracting chromatic variations from vine shoots (the plant from which grapes grow) and exploring the motif of the buoy. Heir to early lifesaving floaters and now a symbol of leisure, the buoys emerged in an oversized scale with a “plastic-like” appearance produced by hide glue—a water-soluble binder—and coexisted with containers and demijohns filled with juice extracted from vine shoot decoctions. The set contrasted the playful lightness of the surface and the suggestion of altered and polluted depths, shifting the buoy from a resting accessory to a warning sign. At Instituto Tomie Ohtake, Barbara uses the same materials and processes to critically revisit the story of the “Tietê alligator,” known as Stubborn, whose appearance on Marginal Tietê in August 1990 captivated the city for weeks and became a symbol of the urgency to clean up the river. In her installation, buoy-like forms emerge as alligators breaking through the floor, severing their association with leisure and installing a state of alert, turning the exhibition space into a crossroads of urban memory, water policies, and public imagination.

Born in 1986 in Paris, France, where she currently lives. The Pearls of the Garonne (2025), a new piece by Capucine Vever, follows the sailing journey of a boat, from the heart of Bordeaux to the threshold of the Atlantic. The camera drifts with the current and with the voice of Bénicia Makengelé, who gives voice to the archives of Bordeaux Métropole. These documents bear witness to the commerce en droiture—the direct trade developed between Bordeaux and Saint-Domingue from the 17th to the 19th century. In this navigation, the body experiences the dissonance between the violence it hears and the rhythm of the water. It is a temporal as much as a geographical displacement, where the artist evokes the origins of globalization that have shaped the world’s landscape. A polyphony of voices is interwoven with breaths and swallows—those remainders of speech that unsettle, as much as the stories the archives tell. It becomes impossible to ignore the oppressions upon which the city of Bordeaux was built: from the cruise ships that tear through the city, to the port and its storage zones stretching toward the horizon, the film celebrates slowness amidst industries that praise speed and performance. Through the lens of a long focal distance, we watch micro-narratives of a humanity reduced to mere material contingency—to finally hear the voice of the freed enslaved person. From whisper to full voice, the sound composition by Valentin Ferré follows the sailboat’s heel and inhabits the landscape.

Founded in 2008, based in São Paulo, Brazil. Founded in 2008 in the eastern suburbs of São Paulo by Toni Baptiste and Flávio Camargo, Coletivo Coletores conceives territories both as the medium and subject of their artistic productions. Through insurgent cartographies, they use memory, street art, video mapping, and the aesthetics of hip-hop to activate the city as a living archive, projecting images that reference Afro-diasporic heritage and historically persecuted and vulnerable communities that resist dominant powers. Since 2020, the collective has focused on the Pinheiros and Tietê rivers—waterways which have been channeled, polluted and subjected to major urban transformations—investigating how the city of São Paulo has shifted its relationship with water toward a logic of concrete development. In the exhibition, Coletivo Coletores presents Águas duplas: várzeas/marginais [Double Waters: floodplains/margins] (2025). A large drawing on the wall maps the Tietê river, its confluence with the Pinheiros river, and their tributary streams, charting expressways, overpasses, and the near absence of floodplains. Over this cartography, a mapped video projection reveals layers of straightening and erasure, evoking the rivers’ natural courses, riparian vegetation, and the paths and characters of their margins. The surface comes alive with images such as the mill, the canoeists, the araucarias, the Chafariz da Misericórdia, and the stilt house rising from floods in microcycles of self-construction. The installation also includes flags that interact with the graphics, marking cartographies, toponyms, and knots between past and present, along with a core section featuring monitors and oratories that gather documents from the actions carried out between Angoulême and São Paulo. By blurring scales and temporalities, Águas duplas: várzeas/marginais does not merely expose absences but calls for a renewed encounter with the rivers as cultural and political subjects, and for the reimagining of rights to water, territory, and collective memory.

Born in 1987, in Boston, USA. He lives in São Paulo, Brazil. Daniel de Paula’s artistic practice critically investigates the material and symbolic structures that sustain contemporary life. His works stem from complex negotiation processes with individuals, institutions, and corporations, in which the conditions for obtaining, moving, or installing materials become part of the artwork itself—revealing connections between infrastructure, politics, and economics. Mãe [Mother] (2025) begins with the artist’s encounter with a decommissioned turbine from the Henry Borden Hydroelectric Plant in Cubatão, Brazil. After long negotiations with a local scrapyard, the rotor—a piece weighing over 25 tons—will be transported and installed on the banks of the Pinheiros river in São Paulo. The act of moving this fragment from its original context to a body of water within the same system that once set it in motion reveals a historical chain of extraction, transformation, and circulation spanning centuries of urbanization and environmental exploitation. By reintroducing the turbine into a river now depleted and channeled, the artist creates a short circuit between the forces that once powered São Paulo’s industrialization and the ensuing ecological collapse. The title Mãe suggests a symbolic shift—from the machine as an emblem of technical progress to the ambiguous image of that which generates, sustains, and also consumes. The work turns gravity and water—the physical elements that gave rise to the power plant—into a metaphor for the continuous cycle of energy and exhaustion that structures urban life. Installed along the Pinheiros river, the turbine ceases to be industrial waste and becomes both testimony and offering: a mineral memory of a modernity that drained the very rivers that once sustained it. Mãe was made possible with the support of Galeria Yehudi Hollander-Pappi, Brasil Sucatas Ltda., Consórcio Parque Novo Rio Pinheiros, and Farah Service. The work can be visited throughout the exhibition period at Parque Linear Bruno Covas, near the Itapaiuna bridge.

Born in 1997, in Pirapora, Brazil, where he currently lives. Born and raised on the banks of the São Francisco River, in northern Minas Gerais, davi de jesus do nascimento is an artist whose practice is anchored in ancestry, traditional knowledge, and his spiritual and familial relationship with the river. Raised among fishermen, washerwomen, and master boatmen and carranqueiros, his works intertwine body, territory, and spirituality. The carranca—a sculpture traditionally fixed to the bow of São Francisco boats—is a constant presence in his work. Hybrid—half-human, half-animal—its function is to spiritually protect boats and their navigators. It is through this figure that davi formulates the idea of the body-boat, understanding the body itself as a boat that needs protection and guidance. In the video titled gemer carranca naufragada [moan of the shipwrecked carranca] (2023), davi gives voice to the conversation between the carranca and the river: in a gesture of blessing, he washes it with fresh water. The work is part of a series started in 2019, when he carried a twenty-kilogram carranca for months in Belo Horizonte—a gesture that, more than a performance, became a spiritual crossing that flowed into subsequent works.

Born in 1986, in Le Blanc-Mesnil, France. He lives in Paris, France. Julien Creuzet’s work weaves together poetry, moving image, installation, sculpture, sound, and choreography without hierarchy. Raised in Martinique, the artist repeatedly invokes the landscape and culture of the Antilles, in dialogue with the thought of Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant. As the first resident of the Édouard Glissant Art Fund, hosted in the poet’s home, Creuzet develops an “archipelagic thinking” that connects geographies, temporalities, and emotions of the Afro-diasporic history. For this exhibition, distinct works were commissioned for Frac Poitou-Charentes and Instituto Tomie Ohtake. The works share a common family of materials and procedures but respond specifically to each context. At Frac, using drawings and motifs found in historical archives, the artist cut Corten steel sheets to create three large floor sculptures referencing the Charente river and the connections between its navigation and the colonial history of Nouvelle-Aquitaine. At Instituto Tomie Ohtake, the work articulates maps and images of the Tietê and Pinheiros rivers. By combining cartography, technical references, and everyday elements, it examines how urban engineering guides, diverts, and silences waters, shaping memory and territory. In both contexts, Creuzet treats the archive as a presence and the river as a historical and political infrastructure—an agent that transforms lives and territories. By bringing together elements that are a priori distant, the work investigates how memory, violence, and time shape and silence the materials that make up the world.

Born in 1995, in Contagem, Brazil, where she currently lives. Raised in Contagem, Minas Gerais—a region marked by mining activities—Luana Vitra structures her practice around the direct relationship between body and matter. She works with ceramics, copper, glass, and iron, observing the temperature, weight, conductivity, and memory of each element. From this attentive listening emerges what the artist calls the “trance of matter”: a state of awareness in which gesture guides form, and form, in turn, directs gesture, keeping technique, environment, and history inseparable. In 2023, a self-directed residency in South Africa expanded this vocabulary, as the artist engaged with metal and bead weaving techniques common to Zulu and Xhosa cultures. Repetition, the turn of the lathe, and the rhythm of the hands are approached as both prayer and method, without separating spirituality from making. Her work incorporates the cycle of mineral extraction and transformation that shapes her hometown—inscribing traces of industrial violence—while also including devices of protection, displacement, and connection. In installations and sculptures, materials and weavings organize fields of force in space, engaging both architecture and audience while reflecting, on the surfaces of the pieces, the social and environmental tensions that traverse them.

Born in 1983, in Bogotá, Colombia. He lives in Paris, France. The work of Colombian artist Marcos Ávila Forero delves into the complex and sometimes violent reality of the specific political and social situations in which he is personally and artistically engaged. His works, deeply contextual, bear the imprint of encounters, stories, and journeys. In his video Atrato (2014), he focuses on ancestral traditions that sustain social bonds in a territory marked by years of armed conflict. Supported by a team of researchers, Marcos Ávila Forero carried out an action in this territory with an Afro-Colombian riverbank community living along the Atrato river. The artist invited them to revive an ancient tradition that consists of striking the surface of the water to produce a low-pitched sound that resonates over long distances. From this sound, the artist and local percussionists created music inspired by traditional rhythms of the region. The final composition incorporates sounds resembling the whistles of bursts and bullet impacts that regularly echo over the river, thus expressing the experience of the “accustomed violence” of the armed conflict that has plagued the region for several decades.

Born in 1988, in Basse-Terre, Guadeloupe. She lives in Saint-Claude, Guadeloupe. Minia Biabiany lives in Guadeloupe, a territory whose history, culture, and language deeply nourish her research. Her work explores Caribbean narratives, processes of decolonization, and the links between language, body, and territory. Her artworks are made from humble materials or those derived from vernacular practices. The artist participated in the exhibition at Frac Poitou-Charentes with the installation J’ai tué le papillon dans mon oreille [I have killed the butterfly in my ear] (2020/2025), whose title echoes the last sentence of a previous film by the artist, Toli Toli (2018): “Butterflies cause blindness when they blow into your ears.” The artist reminds us of the necessity to transform our state of consciousness in relation to our body and the world to better apprehend history, by questioning the mechanisms of internalizing a shared colonial and slavery-related past. The geometric lines and motifs created on the ground with earth materialize the design of fishing traps, traditional instruments used in the Caribbean. The basin of dark water refers to the chemical pollution generated by agriculture, particularly the use of chlordecone until 1992 for banana cultivation in the Antilles, a substance that still affects ecosystems and local populations today. At Instituto Tomie Ohtake, the artist participates in the exhibition A terra, a água, o fogo e os ventos – Por um Museu da Errância com Édouard Glissant [The Earth, the Water, the Fire, and the Winds: For a Museum of Errantry with Édouard Glissant], simultaneously on view with Águas subterrâneas: narrativas de confluências [Underground Waters: Narratives in Confluence].

Born in 1994, in Mamanguape, Brazil, 1994. She lives in Niterói, Brazil. Mixing fabulation, ecology, and ancestral cosmologies, the Brazilian artist Rastros de Diógenes constructs visual narratives that function as speculative devices about possible futures. Her practice is anchored in symbolic images and archetypes that evoke other ways of inhabiting the world beyond colonial and extractivist logics. Developed during a Travesías Terremoto residency in the Sonora Desert (Mexico), this work presents a trilogy of figures—the Messenger, the Farmer, and the Healer—who inhabit the Zona de imaginação climática [Climate Imagination Zone], a speculative space where climate is thought and cared for based on ancestral knowledge. Each figure is accompanied by a fictional narrative: the Messenger appears when all the planet’s lights go out, translating solar messages; the Farmer protects soil knowledge and cultivates from these traces; the Healer creates remedies and counter-spells with herbs and symbols from the other two. Together, they form a cosmogram—a sensitive map of a world governed by forces that imagine and make climate. The artist is the founder of Terreiro Afetivo [Affective Terreiro], a collective creative space focused on ecological and decolonial practices, from which Sementeira radical [Radical Seedbed] also arises—a collectively-built living structure.

Meta Being born in 1993 in the body of Justine Pannoux. The artist works between Paris, France; Nouméa, New Caledonia/Kanaky; and the digital sphere. Crossing time and space, the creations of Shivay la Multiple blend worlds and universes, dream and reality, the physical and the digital spheres. Their artistic research stems from the shaping and volumizing of an initiatory tale rooted in rivers—entities that are simultaneously political, economic, spiritual, and poetic. For the artist, who has worked on the margins of the Maroni, Congo, Senegal, and Nile, each river is a living being with its own personality that they seek to know. A plural object discovered by the artist in French Guiana, the gourd (a domestic, ritual object and musical instrument) appears recurrently in their creations. For the exhibition, Shivay la Multiple created a new installation and a performance that connects several rivers, including the Charente, the Tietê, and the Pinheiros.

Born in 1976, in Bazas, France, in 1976. She lives in San Francisco, USA. Suzanne Husky operates at the intersection of art, landscape, ecofeminism, and ethnobotany. Her work engages with contemporary disputes over care for the living and the use of natural resources, bringing together artisanal techniques—ceramics, tapestry, watercolor—field research, and social activism. In 2016, together with Stéphanie Sagot, she founded Le Nouveau Ministère de l’Agriculture [The New Ministry of Agriculture], an artistic initiative of institutional critique that invites the public to question the industrialization of the countryside and advocate for biodiversity. In addition to her series of object-based works, Husky produces films and public programs in dialogue with scientists and fellow artists. Present exclusively at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake edition, Husky—drawing inspiration from the 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—produced two works focused on wetland restoration and the return of engineer species such as the beaver. Les leçons du peuple des marécages [Lessons From the Swamp People] combines watercolors and maps, based on observations by Canadian naturalists recontextualized in France. The project documents the historical presence of the beaver in Europe, highlights its role in regulating waterways, and produces maps tracing its memory in toponymy, connecting place names, hydrography, and practices of care.

Born in Fortaleza, Brazil, in 1978 and 1976, respectively. They live in São Paulo, Brazil, and Lisbon, Portugal, respectively. Starting from the frictions between ecology, public policies, and local cosmologies, Vitor Cesar and Enrico Rocha explore the narratives that shape the Caatinga—the only entirely Brazilian biome, a mosaic of dry forests that “hibernate” during droughts and turn green with the first rains. This irregular rainfall regime shapes the landscape of the sertão: a word of unknown origin, introduced by colonizers to designate what escaped the coastal gaze. Between forest and open space, abundance and scarcity, the sertão has become, in the Brazilian imagination, sometimes a landscape of plague and abandonment, sometimes the stage for literary epics, popular religiosity, and technical innovations that reinvent coexistence pacts with the land. The installation DNOCS appropriates the acronym of the Departamento Nacional de Obras Contra as Secas [National Department of Works Against Droughts], created in 1909—a federal agency responsible for building the country’s largest dams. The artists reorganize the acronym into four polyphonic acrostics that contrast ideas such as “inside/nothing” and “desire/sufficiency.” Printed on aluminum sheets—the typical material of bus stations and official signs—these words transform the rhetoric of struggle into critical poetry, revealing how reservoirs designed to democratize access to water often divert it toward large agricultural estates, industries, and hydroelectric plants, reproducing the inequalities that this state service claims to mitigate. The video, a result from successive immersions in the sertão, denounces the drought policy that impacts both visible scarcity and underground flows that feed agro-industry and mining exploitation. Water, language, and territory intertwine, challenging the boundaries between necessity and excess.

If, as the British philosopher Timothy Morton asserts, all art is ecological because it operates within networks of interdependence among matter, technique, time, and feeling, then an exhibition is an ecosystem of curatorial, material, and relational choices that adapt to its environment. Águas subterrâneas: narrativas de confluências [Underground Waters: Narratives in Confluence] emerges from this understanding as an alliance between the Instituto Tomie Ohtake and the Frac Poitou-Charentes. Presented in two stages, the exhibition started in Angoulême (May to September 2025), in dialogue with the Charente river, and is now in São Paulo, between the Pinheiros and Tietê rivers. This movement across watersheds, cities, and calendars requires a mode of collaborative practice, in which the partnership itself becomes a work and cooperation method. Integrated to the France-Brazil Season 2025, the show carried out in partnership with Frac Poitou-Charentes consolidates a long-term collaboration. More than an exchange, it establishes a protocol of shared work: co-production of artworks, circulation across contexts, formation of teams, and co-developed public programs. Working together meant sharing research, curatorial, and mediation practices; opening processes between teams; and jointly assuming spatial, technical, and educational decisions. For more than two decades, the Instituto Tomie Ohtake has connected art and public life to address contemporary challenges. With Águas subterrâneas, we renew this commitment alongside artists, researchers, communities, and the Frac Poitou-Charentes. The São Paulo stage, coinciding with the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 30) held in Belém do Pará, reaffirms culture—understood here as a space for listening, translating complexities, and testing care policies subject to public verification—as part of the response to the climate emergency. We thank the Ministry of Culture, which through the Culture Incentive Law (Rouanet Law) made the realization of Águas subterrâneas possible. The show is part of the France-Brazil Season 2025, a co-production of the Instituto Tomie Ohtake with the Institut Français and the Frac Poitou-Charentes, and is supported by Nubank—patron of the Instituto Tomie Ohtake—, the Instituto Guimarães Rosa, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Federal Government’s Asset Manager Company (Emgea).

The Frac Poitou-Charentes is a dynamic institution where artists, their works, and the public interact to create new processes based on dialogue and the sharing of knowledge and skills. Far from being a simple exhibition space and with a collection of over a thousand works, the Frac is a true catalyst for artistic creation—a laboratory of ideas where artworks engage with the social, environmental, and political issues of our time. Águas subterrâneas: narrativas de confluências [Underground Waters: Narratives in Confluence] is a project born from the desire to work collaboratively and to create confluences between distant contexts. To that end, we turn to the questions that bind us to rivers and water, considering them both vessels and witnesses of the history of peoples and of human infrastructure’s impact on the environment. The Frac is committed to offering programming that fosters connections between art and the social urges of our time, through initiatives that encourage creativity and exchange across diverse contexts. This project is part of a multiyear program focused on water, through which we are pleased to present works by French artists—including pieces from the Frac Poitou-Charentes collection—in dialogue with Brazilian artists at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake. We are deeply grateful to the Institut Français for its support during the France-Brazil Season 2025, which has enabled us to develop this shared synergy with Instituto Tomie Ohtake. Frac Poitou-Charentes

The exhibition Águas subterrâneas: narrativas de confluências [Underground Waters: Narratives in Confluence] emerges from the approach and encounter between two institutions, two countries, and two rivers—the Tietê-Pinheiros in São Paulo, and the Charente in Angoulême. Resulting from the collaboration between Instituto Tomie Ohtake and Frac Poitou-Charentes, the show was first presented in Angoulême, France, from May to September 2025, and now arrives in São Paulo, proposing a dialogue that extends beyond banks and borders. More than a dialogue, it is a confluence—in the words of Antônio Bispo dos Santos, known as Nego Bispo. Confluence, for the quilombola thinker, is an encounter that adds without subtracting: when one river meets another, it does not dissolve—it simply flows on, wider and stronger. Two riverbeds that recognize each other must learn to carry foreign sediments, to regulate their currents, to endure whirlpools. Confluence requires elasticity and memory, and it is also an antidote to the cosmophobia manifested in gestures of separation – dams, straightened courses, and technologies of isolation that seek to discipline the flow of life. Against that, Bispo proposes sharing as a political practice: “one gesture yields another gesture, one affection yields another affection.” Thus, two territories come closer, marked by distinct histories and yet traversed by both contrary and shared layers of colonial violence, industrial transformation, and cultural imagination surrounding water. In Brazil, the Tietê and Pinheiros rivers were straightened, polluted, and channelized in the name of “progress,” their pasts as landscapes of leisure and water supply erased. In France, the Charente, now bucolic and touristic, conceals beneath its surface its role in the triangular trade—carrying salt, cognac, weaponry, and enslaved people—in industrialization and in the contamination of its waters. Bringing the Charente closer to the Tietê-Pinheiros means connecting the margins of a shared hydrocolonial cartography—a geography of dams, straightened courses, and invisible marks that still shape the life of rivers. The exhibition invites us to see water beyond its visible course—to understand it as an overflow of geographic boundaries and geological layers, as well as a foundation for ecosystems, cosmologies, and ways of life. To that end, it brings together the works of six Brazilian artists and six artists from France and overseas territories, in a dialogue that explores the political, territorial, geographic, spiritual, cosmological, and infrastructural dimensions of water. The exhibition Águas subterrâneas does not dwell on the rivers themselves, but on the currents that run through them—flows of memory, violence, resistance, and desire for future. Ana Roman and Irene Aristizábal (curators) Catalina Bergues (associate curator)

If, as the British philosopher Timothy Morton asserts, all art is ecological because it operates within networks of interdependence among matter, technique, time, and feeling, then an exhibition is an ecosystem of curatorial, material, and relational choices that adapt to its environment. Águas subterrâneas: narrativas de confluências [Underground Waters: Narratives in Confluence] emerges from this understanding as an alliance between the Instituto Tomie Ohtake and the Frac Poitou-Charentes. Presented in two stages, the exhibition started in Angoulême (May to September 2025), in dialogue with the Charente river, and is now in São Paulo, between the Pinheiros and Tietê rivers. This movement across watersheds, cities, and calendars requires a mode of collaborative practice, in which the partnership itself becomes a work and cooperation method. Integrated to the France-Brazil Season 2025, the show carried out in partnership with Frac Poitou-Charentes consolidates a long-term collaboration. More than an exchange, it establishes a protocol of shared work: co-production of artworks, circulation across contexts, formation of teams, and co-developed public programs. Working together meant sharing research, curatorial, and mediation practices; opening processes between teams; and jointly assuming spatial, technical, and educational decisions. To think of ecology today involves climate, infrastructure, norms, language, and an agency that exceeds the human. Water courses are not a backdrop: they are living bodies that shape margins, carry sediments and memories, and sustain economies and cosmologies. When rivers are recognized as rights-bearing subjects, care extends to surfaces and depths, including riverbeds, floodplains, aquifers, and geological layers, affected by channelization, landfilling, sealing, and extraction. In this context, the works in this show activate archives, make urban operations legible, and experiment with listening between human and nonhuman agents. Art does not illustrate—it organizes attention, produces situated knowledge, and safeguards the right to the opacity of each narrative and subject. For more than two decades, the Instituto Tomie Ohtake has connected art and public life to address contemporary challenges. With Águas subterrâneas, we renew this commitment alongside artists, researchers, communities, and the Frac Poitou-Charentes. The São Paulo stage, coinciding with the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 30) held in Belém do Pará, reaffirms culture—understood here as a space for listening, translating complexities, and testing care policies subject to public verification—as part of the response to the climate emergency. We thank the Ministry of Culture, which through the Culture Incentive Law (Rouanet Law) made the realization of Águas subterrâneas possible. The show is part of the France-Brazil Season 2025, a co-production of the Instituto Tomie Ohtake with the Institut Français and the Frac Poitou-Charentes, and is supported by Nubank—patron of the Instituto Tomie Ohtake—, the Instituto Guimarães Rosa, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Federal Government’s Asset Manager Company (Emgea).

By Ana Roman and Irene Aristizábal (curators) and Catalina Bergues (associate curator) This is an exhibition in two stages. Flowing between Angoulême, in France, and São Paulo, it operates like a river in flood and ebb: it changes course, adjusts rhythms, and rearranges encounters. The first stage took place between May and September 2025 at the Frac Poitou-Charentes; the second unfolds at Instituto Tomie Ohtake. As it traverses contexts, the show does not merely circulate—it actively transforms itself. New works, a different display, and new relationships become part of it. In this rhythm, we draw closer to the idea of confluence as formulated by Antônio Bispo dos Santos, known as Nego Bispo. For the Brazilian quilombola thinker, confluence is a meeting that adds without subtracting: when one river joins another, neither ceases to be what it is; they become wider, deeper, stronger. The image demands elasticity and memory, whether to carry foreign sediments, regulate different flows, or withstand unpredicted whirlpools. Bispo calls “cosmophobia” the fear of recognizing oneself as part of a whole that includes living beings, minerals, waters, deities, technologies, and capital. Such a fear manifests itself in acts of separation: dams, course straightening, and isolation policies. Against this impulse, confluence as a practice proposes sharing, redistributing, listening. With this spirit, Águas subterrâneas: narrativas de confluência [Underground Waters: Narratives in Confluence] was born—a partnership between Instituto Tomie Ohtake and Frac Poitou-Charentes, in Angoulême. The show unfolds like a vast river with many branches, connecting territories, archives, and riverine voices between not only the Charente and Tietê-Pinheiros but also the Garonne, San Francisco, Atrato, Maroni, Congo, Senegal, and other water systems. The two exhibition spaces start from radically different landscapes, yet are shaped by analogous problems. In São Paulo, Instituto Tomie Ohtake rises just a few meters from the valley of the Pinheiros river – reversed, straightened, and channeled, it is now a dark river buried beneath avenues and overpasses. Meanwhile, the Tietê river crosses the city in a narrow riverbed, beneath layers of chemical foam and hardened banks. Once used for leisure and supply, these rivers, between the 1930s and the 1960s, became vectors of modernization, serving power plants and industrial infrastructures that continue to shape the city today. In Angoulême, the Charente river, winding and seemingly calm, flows into the Atlantic south of Rochefort. The bucolic landscape coexists with an archive that safeguards a colonial and industrial past: canals and ports that sustained the triangular trade; paper, chemical, and cognac-producing industries; accidents and spills that have altered the riverbed. Currently promoted as a tourist destination, the Charente still bears marks that ask for careful observation. Bringing these rivers closer is to overlap engineering and power cartographies: beneath the surface lies a shared vocabulary of interventions that dam, straighten, drain, accelerate, and silence the waters. These parallels help situate what we propose. The exhibition is organized as a field of forces where histories intersect, strain, and reconfigure. There is no single narrative, but rather a combination of artistic poetics that, as they move across territories, renew their meanings. Along this path, we work through three interwoven axes: archives—as a form of critical activation of documents, maps, and memories; infrastructure—as the techniques, norms, and language that shape our relations with bodies of water; and human and nonhuman listening—as a method of attention, care, and co-agency with the rivers. In this sense, Coletivo Coletores reopens the listening of urban rivers with Águas duplas: várzeas/marginais [Double Waters: Floodplains/Margins] (2025). The installation weaves together historical cartography, images of the expressways, and signs of riverside devotion into an architecture of memory that layers scales and temporalities. The former floodplains appear as corridors of concrete; the river is read as a double—a flow that nourishes and threatens, both archive and erasure—reinstating the right to water and to territory as a public concern. Julien Creuzet, in turn, treats the archive as material for a montage: at Frac, cutouts in steel brought the Charente river closer to colonial routes and to an Afro-Atlantic geography; at Instituto Tomie Ohtake, maps of the Tietê and Pinheiros rivers merge with technical iconographies and aquatic forms and beings to compose a walkable cartographic fiction on the floor—an invitation to read with one’s feet, from the ground up. In her work, Capucine Vever focuses on the invisible currents of the Garonne: in The Pearls of the Garonne (2025), the crossing adopts drift and trades the panorama for the detail, with tides setting the rhythm of the image; documents from Bordeaux and Saint-Domingue emerge as vocal presences (reading, whispering, singing), making audible the circuits of goods, people, and memories. The infrastructural dimension emerges when language, regulation, and engineering shape the flow of waters, define access, and distribute risk. Vitor Cesar and Enrico Rocha take the acronym DNOCS as a critical device: through signs and video, they confront the rhetoric of “combating drought” with the concentration of water resources in Brazil’s Semi-arid region, revealing water as a vector of power both in visible reservoirs and in the underground layers that sustain production and extraction. Barbara Kairos, in turn, reenacts—through buoy-shaped sculptures that evoke alligators—an emblematic episode of the Tietê river, articulating and fabulating urban memory, water politics, and public imagination. With Daniel de Paula, infrastructure takes corporeal form: in Mãe [Mother] (2025), the turbine rotor transported to the bank of the Pinheiros river system exposes chains of extraction, transformation, and consumption on an urban scale, shifting the idea of the machine of progress toward an ambiguous notion of origin, sustenance, and exhaustion. Meanwhile, Suzanne Husky follows the recovery of wetlands and the return of the beaver as an engineer species, asking herself what changes when a nonhuman agent resumes its operation in a territory. Finally, listening and care emerge not as themes but as methods, and the works unfold from one another. In Atrato (2014), by Marcos Ávila Forero, the act of striking the surface of the Atrato river functions both as a technology of long-distance communication and as an instrument for reading the territory: it marks community presence, follows the currents, and makes audible the conflicts tied to the extraction and circulation of goods. In the work of davi de jesus do nascimento, listening occurs through the encounter between body and river: the notion of body-boat stems from his experience with boatmen and carranqueiros of the São Francisco river. In the video, the act of blessing with fresh water creates a dialogue between river and sculpture, renewing protection and guidance as present-day practices and asserting an ethics of care. Rastros de Diógenes turns this ethics into operational protocols by organizing a cosmogram around three figures—the Messenger, the Farmer, and the Healer—and by creating the Sementeira radical [Radical Seedbed], a living plot for planting, maintenance, and sharing that synchronizes the artwork with the time of cultivation. Luana Vitra shifts listening to the realm of matter: ceramics, copper, glass, and iron respond to heat, weight, and conductivity. From continuous making arises the “trance of matter”—when gesture and material guide one another. Her works expose tensions of extraction and exhaustion while proposing devices of protection and connection. To bring the Charente closer to the Tietê-Pinheiros is to connect the margins of a shared hydrocolonial cartography—one made of dams, straightened courses, and invisible traces that continue to shape the lives of rivers. The show invites us to see water beyond its visible flow: as an overflow of geographic borders and geological layers, as the foundation of ecosystems, cosmologies, and ways of life. Águas subterrâneas does not dwell on the riverbed itself, but on the currents that run through it—flows of memory, violence, resistance, and desire for future.

By Nádia Matioli Yazbek Bitar A hydraulic turbine over three meters in diameter and weighing around 25 tons moves against the direction of its original installation: it climbs the Serra do Mar. Deposited on the artificially constrained banks of the posthumous meandering Pinheiros river, it documents and gives meaning to an intricate relationship between the city of São Paulo, its waters, and electricity. This hydraulic logic begins at the sea. In 1766, the first governor of the province had already recognized the urgency of improving the old Cubatão road, in order to facilitate the flow of gold and diamonds between the town and the port of Santos. In the following century, Auguste de Saint-Hilaire, during his journey through the Serra do Mar, conveyed a similar message: it was necessary to overcome the limits imposed by nature. In 1876, the inauguration of the São Paulo Railway (Estrada de Ferro Santos-Jundiaí) effectively ended the province’s isolation and spurred the expansion of São Paulo’s coffee-based economy. Vast natural areas converted into farmland in the Brazilian countryside began to orbit the village of São Paulo to the rhythm of railways, ports, and means of communication. Still, the modern ideal of a rupture with the past never materialized: the emerging industrial center along the Tietê and Pinheiros rivers continued to bear colonial traces, as it remained oriented toward serving the foreign market. Industrial advances accompanied both demographic and urban growth, but in doing so led to the disappearance of professions such as boatmen, fishermen, toll collectors, and stone, gravel, and sand extractors. There is a social dimension to the term industrialization that involves not only the expansion of consumption through the introduction of new habits, but also the adaptation of places to the dynamics dictated by productive forces. Although these processes gave rise to social conflicts, the oligarchies remained indifferent to popular demands. Tied to the centers of international capitalism, they accepted the foreign control of essential services – such was the case of the São Paulo Tramway, Light & Power Company Ltd. (Light), financed by Canadian, English, and American capital. The company’s investments could only be justified by the prospects of a captive consumer market. Through Light’s operations, the production of electricity engulfed the floodplains of São Paulo’s old city center. At the beginning of the last century, when electricity inspired curiosity and awe, the alliance between these two elements – water and light – was realized through the use of hydraulic power. The polytechnic engineers of São Paulo defended it as “a matter of real national interest.” Also of national priority was the year 1922, a symbolic milestone in the shaping of Brazilian memory for celebrating the centenary of Independence. As the “aesthetic of rupture” emerged, proclaimed during the Semana de Arte Moderna [Modern Art Week], Oswald de Andrade observed, beyond anthropophagy – a manifest destiny – the euphoric progress, the mechanical marvel: “It was announced that São Paulo would have electric trams [...]. How would the new trams, moving magically without external propulsion, look? […] The city took on the aspect of a revolution.” The Light company built electric tram tracks in every direction of the city. The lines reached Santo Amaro to support the hydraulic works of the Guarapiranga river dam, carried out for the company’s own benefit. The infamous 1929 flood was allegedly caused by Light itself, which, by controlling the waters, expanded its dominion over the floodplains, supported by the land concession established in an agreement with the Government of the State of São Paulo in 1928. Along with the flooded plain, areas once used for grazing, sports, and leisure were also condemned. Thus segregation took shape: the city was now driven by speculation and the appropriation of public land by private capital – first productive, then administrative and financial. Light established itself in São Paulo in 1899, building the Parnaíba Hydroelectric Power Plant (now Edgard de Souza) and, in 1926, inaugurating the first generating unit of the Henry Borden I Hydroelectric Plant – the largest hydroelectric facility in South America in terms of generation capacity until the mid-1970s. On the mountainside, a hall over 120 meters deep was carved to house its operation. Asa White Kenney Billings, responsible for the project, introduced not only new habits and the wage labor system but also a new way of living, with the construction of a company town – Vila da Light. On the hills of Piratininga, works at two specific points reversed the natural course of the Pinheiros river, which had once flowed toward the Tietê. The river came to host pumping and lift stations, such as the Traição Power Plant, still visible today in the Marginal Pinheiros landscape. Due to the Traição stream – and to the betrayal of the river’s original course – the name stuck, but the structure was recently renamed São Paulo SPE S/A Power Plant, this time betraying – or rather erasing – both the river’s natural history and that of the company’s monopoly or trust. From the Billings Reservoir to another dam on the Pedras river, the waters flowed toward the turbines. The project also included a guesthouse and a lookout point with a view of the sea, serving as a mise-en-scène for Ramos de Azevedo’s office. Nowadays, the building is listed for its historical and architectural value, even though its style has been classified as a hybrid between the Indian bungalow and English colonial architecture in India. The Henry Borden Hydroelectric Plant, or Cubatão Power Plant, is located on Bernardo Geisel Filho Avenue, named in honor of the dictator president’s brother, who received this tribute for his role as director of the emblematic Presidente Bernardes Refinery. The city’s transformation into a petrochemical hub – paradigmatic for its episodes of fire, pollution, and acid rain – owes much to the electric power produced at Henry Borden. In this case, the personification encapsulates political, economic, and cultural processes and gestures toward an explanation of totality, though not of Henry Borden himself. To reproduce his biography here would only be a mere alienating act that adds nothing to an understanding of Brazilian contradictions. Each generator at the plant is powered by two stainless-steel Pelton turbines, fed by waters that descend the slope through massive penstocks until they reach the generators in Cubatão, covering a distance of 1.5 kilometers. Just like landslides, the plant’s pipes are scars on the hillsides. Currently, this entire system of interconnected watersheds, artificial lakes, and hydroelectricity is considered a backup for the Sistema Interligado Nacional [National Interconnected System] (SIN). The use of water for electricity generation came to be regulated in order to prevent pollution from the Tietê and Pinheiros rivers from contaminating the Billings-Guarapiranga system, which began supplying water to the metropolitan region. The deactivation, even if partial, is the result of civil society’s struggle. At the Henry Borden Hydroelectric Plant, Swiss, German, American, and Canadian turbines compose the generating unit. Pelton turbines trace back to the old São Paulo, while their technical description suggests a play on words: they are designed to operate for long periods without efficiency loss. According to a news article from July 2025, the plant remains ready for operation but only in case of high demand. However, recent changes in the Brazilian electric sector have made this scenario more complex, as environmental regulations are being relativized and plants converted into financial assets may be operated according to other logics of interest, challenging the operation entity itself. The article also recalls that, during the 1932 Constitutionalist Revolution, the complex was bombed. Here, the plant becomes a symbol of the conflict between liberal ideals and authoritarianism, and forms part of the memory cultivated by São Paulo’s elites and middle classes. Yet, while “vital infrastructure” is always a target in war, power plants can also serve as spaces for counter-narratives. In the former floodplain and lowland areas – Berrini and Faria Lima – large capital established its dominion, power, and exclusivity. The urban environment, reduced to a technical and symbolic instrument, reinforces a city shaped by dominant interests. At the level of everyday life, the insertion of new transport corridors – another facet of urban production – compresses time, quantifying it. Space becomes distance, and the journey a burden for the resident; now abstract, it challenges the creation of identity and collective memory. The space remains, witnesses, rests, there where a hydroelectric turbine lies. Note: this turbine is listed as heritage.

By Nádia Matioli Yazbek Bitar A hydraulic turbine over three meters in diameter and weighing around 25 tons moves against the direction of its original installation: it climbs the Serra do Mar. Deposited on the artificially constrained banks of the posthumous meandering Pinheiros river, it documents and gives meaning to the intricate relationship between the city of São Paulo, its waters, and electricity. This hydraulic logic begins at the sea. The first governor of the Province of São Paulo in 1766 expressed it as follows: “There is between this city (São Paulo) and the Port of Santos a very frequent commerce, so great that through it the Captaincies of Goyaz and Cuiabá, and much of Minas Gerais, are supplied with goods and merchandise: the traffic being so frequent and the need for a public road so pressing, the people in this province have been so neglected, that the law of nature would exceed all human explanation.” Morgado de Mateus was concerned with improving the Cubatão road, which connected the sea to the mountains and the plateau of the old village of Piratininga. It is clear that technical progress to overcome the tropical mountains – driven by the expansion and advance of gold and diamond mining – was indeed imperative, even for a village of little significance. At the beginning of the following century, the French nobleman Auguste de Saint-Hilaire visited the Serra do Mar and recorded: “The path leading to its summit is solidly paved but narrow, and although it is laid out entirely in one hundred and eighty-degree curves, it is so steep that it can only be traversed on foot, by horses, or by donkeys. It was cut into a sort of outcrop formed by the mountains, and on both sides a stream plunges into a deep ravine. At certain points, looking upward, the rocks that jut forward, over which the paths make a thousand turns, give us the impression of a threatening fortress. Looking downward, our sight is lost in a terrifying abyss.” Here, the description of a warlike and menacing escarpment contrasts with the precarious technical appropriation. Yet the meaning is always that of overcoming the limits imposed by nature. In 1867, the inauguration of the São Paulo Railway, or Estrada de Ferro Santos-Jundiaí – which ran through the valley of the Moji river and ascended nearly 800 meters of mountain – marked the end of the region’s historic isolation and paved the way for the unbridled material progress driven by São Paulo’s coffee economy. However, one of the myths of modernity is that it constitutes a radical rupture with the past. The dynamic hub or flourishing industrial district, to be delineated first by the contours of the Tietê river and later by the Pinheiros river, did not entirely break with colonial traces, even with the advent of the Republic, since the national economy revolved around the external market. Vast areas of forest converted into agricultural land in the countryside of Brazil – including the South region and the states of Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro – began to orbit the village of São Paulo. At the pace of railroad engineering, port improvements, and the creation of new means of communication, industrial advances accompanied both demographic growth and the expansion of the city itself. Occupations such as boatmen, toll collectors on bridges, stone, gravel, and sand extractors, or fishermen were gradually disappearing. There is a social dimension inherent in the term industrialization, which involves, for example, the expansion of consumption driven by the introduction of new habits, or the adaptation of spaces to new dynamics dictated by the acceleration of productive forces. These new contours of industrialization and urbanization unleashed intense social conflicts, yet the oligarchies did not turn their attention to addressing the population’s needs. Brazilian society as a whole, including that of São Paulo, seemed to follow a single imperative: dependence on the centers of international capitalism. Here, Brazilian history books mention terms such as “exchange rate manipulation,” “external debt,” and “inflation”; while, in real life, essential services such as electricity, water, and transportation were controlled by foreign companies, such as the São Paulo Tramway, Light & Power Company Ltd., formed in Canada with British and American capital. Just as a turbine is engineered to optimize its power, society itself seemed subjected to processes of adjustment. Investments, however, were justified only by the prospects of a captive consumer market. As a mechanized territory began to take shape, or as the natural environment was replaced by a technical one, electricity production engulfed the floodplains of São Paulo’s old city center. In this way, land price speculation acted upon and inscribed itself into the social fabric, intertwined with the very formation of the future metropolis. Richard Morse observed areas awaiting valuation as follows: “Before 1913, vast areas of land were bought at low prices for private purposes, or were simply taken over by the ‘grilos’ system. They were divided into streets in a ‘checkerboard’ style […] and sold in lots. The ideal was to subdivide a given area into as many lots as possible, all of identical size. Frequently, a speculator would leave an area vacant or a house semi-built […], while waiting for its value to increase […]. When sold, many plots were still virtually unimproved and without adequate connections to the rest of the city.” A close association between the State and private capital would produce both the consumer market and the city, leaving no room for leisure. At the beginning of the last century, when electricity still inspired curiosity and awe, the alliance between these two elements – water and light – was realized through the use of hydraulic power. The polytechnic engineers of São Paulo could not have expressed it better in 1900: “The use of the hydraulic power of our numerous waterfalls for the production of electric energy, which in many and various industrial applications can replace, with great economic advantage, the calorific energy provided by the coal we import, is a matter of real national interest.” Also of national priority was the year 1922, a symbolic milestone in the shaping of Brazilian memory for celebrating the centenary of Independence. In that year, the “aesthetic of rupture” emerged at the Theatro Municipal de São Paulo, proclaimed during the Semana de Arte Moderna [Modern Art Week]. Oswald de Andrade, focused on anthropophagy as a sort of manifest destiny, described the euphoric progress, the mechanical marvel: “It was announced that São Paulo would have electric trams. The timid vehicles drawn by donkeys, which traversed the languid provincial city, were to disappear forever […]. A fever of curiosity seized families, houses, groups. How would the new trams, moving magically without external propulsion, look? […] The city took on the aspect of a revolution. Everyone moved about, eager to see. And the most daring wanted to venture into the audacity of boarding the tram, to ride the electric tram!” The Light company built electric tram tracks in every direction, even beyond the floodplain areas, extending across the Tietê river to Casa Verde, and southward to the old village of Santo Amaro, incorporated into the city of São Paulo in 1935. The lines reached Santo Amaro to support the hydraulic works of the Guarapiranga river dam, carried out for the company’s own benefit. The infamous 1929 flood was allegedly caused by Light itself, since the company controlled the dammed waters of that river. For the company, it was crucial to secure a significant portion of the floodplain – the largest possible area – over which it could claim land rights, guaranteed by the concession it had signed with the Government of the State of São Paulo in 1928. Folha da Manhã newspaper, February 15, 1929: “The neighboring town of Santo Amaro experienced yesterday a great, indescribable emotion before the dreadful sight of the invasion of waters from the two ‘Light’ reservoirs. Early, in the first hours of dawn, the residents of the Socorro neighborhood, alarmed, saw the waters entering their yards. Little by little, they entered the houses, taking on a frightening magnitude; by daybreak, the road was already impassable.” The Pinheiros river – the most transformed mid-sized river in São Paulo, and perhaps in the entire tropical world – would soon give way to major and profitable enterprises. The floodplain, characterized by recurring floods and waterlogged soils, had restricted the city’s urban expansion (or Light’s business expansion); thus, this landscape, once a site for grazing and sporting practices, was ultimately condemned. Until it consolidated as the São Paulo Tramway, Light & Power Company Ltd., Light had established itself not only in São Paulo, where it began operations in 1899, but also in Rio de Janeiro in 1905, when it took over the management of public electricity services. In just two years, it built one of Brazil’s first hydroelectric plants: the Parnaíba Hydroelectric Power Plant, now known as Edgard de Souza, located on the Tietê river. At the time, it was the country’s largest in terms of dam height. In 1926, the first generating unit of the Henry Borden I Hydroelectric Plant came into operation, a milestone that will soon reach its centenary. The plant finally put an end to São Paulo’s electricity shortage at the time, and it remained the largest hydroelectric facility in South America in terms of generation capacity until the mid-1970s. Indeed, a sophisticated system of dams and reservoirs supported the intrinsic advantage of the Pelton turbine type, chosen and installed for precisely this reason: its reduced wear extends its lifespan and lowers maintenance costs. To inhabit the cosmopolitan city – the future metropolis and new quilombo of Zumbi – the bonds of kinship and neighborhood, the riverside dwellers, the floodplain soccer fields, and the rowing clubs had to dwindle. Segregation was taking shape. Engineering works such as the straightening and channeling of the Pinheiros river – promoted by the public authorities but in the interest of the Light company – opened up areas for layouts and designs through which urban life could exist. The city would now be driven by one of its most characteristic and defining forces: land valorization. Combined, speculation and the appropriation of public land by private capital – first productive, then administrative and financial – ultimately shaped the new contours of urban life. The construction of the Henry Borden Hydroelectric Plant (known as the Cubatão Power Plant until 1964) can be read as an underground chapter in the modernization and chronology of Brazil’s electrical energy. Excavated into the steep slope of the mountain range, a hall or cavern was opened more than 120 meters deep, 21 meters wide, and 39 meters high to house the generating units. The works began in the 1920s and dragged on until the early 1960s, when the last generating unit went into operation in 1962. It is worth recalling that the turbines selected were precisely those best suited for conditions of great elevation differences and relatively modest flow rates. Engineering disciplined that territory. Asa White Kenney Billings, who designed the Serra Project, also introduced new ways of inhabiting: not only the regime of the modern waged worker, but of everyday life itself, with the construction of a company town – the workers’ village known as Vila da Light – which would channel both the waters and the domestic customs of family life. Meanwhile, on the hills of Piratininga, works at two specific points reversed the natural course of the Pinheiros river, which had once flowed toward the Tietê until Barra Bonita. To that end, the river came to rely on pumps and lift stations, including the Traição Power Plant, still visible today along Marginal Pinheiros. Because it was located at the mouth of the Traição stream and also betrayed the Pinheiros’ original course – in Portuguese, “traição” means “to betray” – the name stuck. Yet the structure has recently been renamed São Paulo SPE S/A Power Plant – this time betraying, or rather erasing, both the natural history of the city’s rivers and that of the monopoly, or trust, of a company. From the Billings Reservoir, these waters converged with another dam that also held back the waters of the Grande river and the Pedras river. Finally, the infrastructure included a guesthouse and a lookout point with a view of the sea, serving as a mise-en-scène for the renowned Ramos de Azevedo office (later occupied by Severo and Villares). The house is listed for its historical and architectural value, even though its style has been classified as a hybrid between the Indian bungalow and English colonial architecture in India. The Henry Borden Hydroelectric Plant is located at 2606 Bernardo Geisel Filho Avenue – a tribute to the brother of the dictator president who would bring Brazil’s so-called anos de chumbo (years of lead) to an end, and who for many years directed one of Petrobrás’s emblematic units: the Presidente Bernardes Refinery in Cubatão. The city’s transformation into a petrochemical hub – paradigmatic for its episodes of fire, pollution, and acid rain – owed much to the electricity produced at Henry Borden. Here, the personification of history in a single individual highlights how the articulation of multiple processes (political, economic, cultural) attempts to explain a totality. However, as for this Mr. Henry Borden, there is no depth. The insistence on personalizing history, turning it into a heroic biography, repeats the alienating gesture that adds nothing to an understanding of the contradictions of Brazilian modernization. Each generator at the plant is powered by two stainless-steel Pelton turbines. These turbines are fed by waters that reach the Valve House, pass through butterfly valves, and descend the slope through penstocks until they reach their respective turbines and generators in Cubatão, covering an athletic distance of 1.5 kilometers. Just as landslides leave scars on the hillsides, the plant’s pipes – technological scars – can also be seen from afar. Currently, this entire system of interconnected watersheds, artificial lakes for power generation, and a hydroelectric plant embedded in the mountainside is considered a backup for the Sistema Interligado Nacional [National Interconnected System] (SIN). The use of water for electricity generation came to be regulated in order to prevent pollution from the Tietê and Pinheiros rivers from contaminating the Billings-Guarapiranga system, which began supplying water to the metropolitan region. The polluted waters had been contaminating the mangrove ecosystems of the Baixada Santista, so this partial deactivation is part of a history of civil society’s struggle. At the Henry Borden Hydroelectric Plant rest generating units equipped with Swiss turbines by Charmilles, German ones by Voith, American ones by Allis-Chalmers, as well as generators by Westinghouse and Canadian turbines by Dominion. Pelton turbines trace back to the São Paulo of the Campos de Piratininga and play with their own technical description: they are designed to operate for long periods without significant efficiency loss. According to a July 2025 news article, the units remain connected to the national grid, ready for operation but not always generating power. The plant is activated seasonally – for instance, in cases of high electricity demand, such as during peak consumption hours. But there is another reading of this scenario: with recent changes in the energy sector, the situation has become more complex. Environmental regulations appear to be increasingly relativized, and in cases of necessity (that is, the logic of profit through sales), these units may be activated. Generating units, now converted into financial market assets, have triggered a series of problems for the Operador Nacional do Sistema Elétrico [National Electrical System Operator] (ONS), the entity responsible for meeting the energy needs of – finally – the people. Regarding the energy complex, the article mentions another problem: “it blends into the landscape of the Serra do Mar mountain range” […] and “helped boost the industrial development of the state of São Paulo” […]. “During the 1932 Constitutionalist Revolution, an armed movement in the state of São Paulo aimed at overthrowing the Provisional Federal Government of Getúlio Vargas and promoting the enactment of a new constitution for Brazil, the Henry Borden complex was bombarded.” After the civil war ended, a narrative emerged around the Constitutionalist movement presenting it as a defense of liberal ideals against authoritarianism. Through commemorations promoted by São Paulo’s elites and middle-class participants in the conflict, this version of events was also shaped over the years. Vital infrastructure is always a target, but history also includes counter-narratives. In terms of control, it is precisely in these floodplain and lowland areas – such as Berrini and Faria Lima – that large capital establishes itself in contemporary São Paulo. Former riverbeds and flood zones give way to the persistent celebration of power and wealth, or to the exclusivity and sophistication of new real estate developments. In these spaces, the urban environment beyond the technical-operational apparatus takes on a potentially skewed character, serving primarily to consolidate a city captive to the aspirations of the dominant classes. At the level of everyday life, the advancement of urban techniques and production by capital compresses time, quantifying it. Space becomes distance. Now abstract, it challenges the creation of identity with the city and its collective memory. The space remains, witnesses. It rests beneath the course of a straightened river, where a Pelton-type hydroelectric turbine lies. Note: this turbine is listed as heritage.