When the Museum Is a River

When the Museum Is a River

Science museums were born, in the 19th century, with the impulse to classify the world. What had previously existed as a cabinet of curiosities, an accumulation of specimens and objects from distant regions, gradually acquired method, system, and name. To classify was also a way of possessing: Western knowledge organized the natural world into categories, and museums were the places where that knowledge was deposited, preserved, and transmitted.

The Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, founded in 1866, is heir to this history and, at the same time, something distinct from it. The leading research center on the natural and sociocultural systems of the Brazilian Amazon, the Museu Goeldi was constituted as an institution that does not consider the Amazon an external object of study, but a universe of which it is a part. Over time, the museum turned inward, reexamined its limits, questioned what was in its collections, and began to review what they held through other gestures, finding that knowledge lies beyond them: it is in the territories, bodies, practices, and relations that time has woven around its walls. A museum that learns from the human and more-than-human communities that surround it is, in this sense, a museum that moves. That museum is a river.

In 2025, we presented Um rio não existe sozinho [A River Does Not Exist Alone], an exhibition curated by Sabrina Fontenele and Vânia Leal, in which nine artists and architects developed site-specific interventions in the Parque Zoobotânico [Zoobotanical Park] of the Museu Goeldi, in intimate dialogue with its living collection, with the human and non-human communities that inhabit it, and with its team of scientists. The show was conceived in the context of the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 30), held in Belém, as an opportunity to give visibility to artists, forms of knowledge, and creations that connect with ecological thinking.The exhibition Quando o museu é rio [When the Museum Is a River] is the continuation of this project and a new moment in a trajectory in which the museum becomes the main question. What does it mean, after a conference that placed the Amazon at the center of global debate, to revisit the institutions that hold its memory? How can a collection be read not merely as heritage, but as living matter, capable of being traversed by other questions, other gazes, and other knowledge? Museu Goeldi is a museum of the Amazon, but it is also a museum of Brazil, and the contemporary force of its collection lies precisely in this: in its capacity to continue being inquired and to respond to questions that did not exist when it was formed.

Instituto Tomie Ohtake celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2026, and in this trajectory that has long extended into other territories, this exhibition marks a milestone for thinking about our collective future. Founded by a family from the Asian diaspora, the Instituto built its way of being through openness to the other, through necessary approximations between territories and different forms of social organization, of life and of culture, affirming itself as a place of encounter, with an attentive eye toward the arts and their crossings with education, design, architecture, and forms of knowledge that reach far beyond the Western ones. Over these more than two decades, the crises that shake us—climatic, political, social—have made the need to forge alliances toward a more just and sustainable world all the more urgent.

Like a river, the museum only exists in movement: in what it receives, carries, and deposits along the way. Instituto Tomie Ohtake understands its own trajectory in this way: not as an institution closed in on itself, but as one that remakes itself in dialogue with other museums, other organizations, other territories, and other ways of producing and sharing knowledge. This vocation for encounter is what makes a partnership like this one possible—in which two institutions of distinct natures, one in São Paulo, the other in the Amazon, recognize in working together a form of existence that is richer and more responsible than either could practice alone.

We are grateful to the Ministry of Culture, through the Culture Incentive Law (Rouanet Law), for making Quando o museu é rio possible. The exhibition is sponsored by Nubank,  patron of Instituto Tomie Ohtake; by AkzoNobel, at the Gold level; by Aché Laboratórios Farmacêuticos, at the Silver level; and receives support from Tintas Coral.

Instituto Tomie Ohtake

Quando o museu é rio [When the Museum Is a Reaver] is the third exhibition to bring together the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi and the Instituto Tomie Ohtake. It can be considered the continuation of a curatorial process begun in 2022, which has advanced through the terrain of memory and the challenges facing contemporary museums. The theme is timely, as the new exhibition takes place at the moment when we celebrate the 160th anniversary of the Museu Goeldi’s founding, shedding light on reflections about a long-lived institution and, for that very reason, one particularly suited to the questions shared here.

This project began with the exhibition Ensaios para o Museu das Origens [Essays for the Museum of Origins], presented between 2023 and 2024 at Instituto Tomie Ohtake and Itaú Cultural, dedicated to debating the politics of memory and the instituting movements of the Brazilian museum field. Museu Goeldi was among the institutions, sites of memory, and social collectives that drew the curators’ attention. In a position of prominence, the Pará museum contributed documents, publications, photographs, and exsiccatae that evidenced the civilizatory project—with all the authoritarian weight of the term—that characterized the history of this institution in the 19th century, but also the scrutiny of the Amazonian territory and the involvement of Indigenous peoples and populations in the construction of scientific knowledge about the region. In the curators’ words, the Museu Goeldi’s collections can be read as fragments of the “history of the beings of the forest.”

Following the natural flow of an open trajectory, the two institutions built, in 2025, a powerful dialogue in the Parque Zoobotânico [Zoobotanical Park] of the Museu Goeldi—established in 1895 and recognized, nationally and internationally, as the oldest territory of Amazonian heritage and scientific production in and for the Amazon. Its 5.4 hectares offer visitors an immersion, in different senses, in the biodiversity of the region and in the history of an institution dedicated, for more than a century, to its heritage. More than a green refuge in the city, the Parque Zoobotânico is a site that brings together scientific research, environmental conservation, education, and leisure.

It was in this collective spirit that Um rio não existe sozinho [A River Does Not Exist Alone] was conceived, in 2025. Built on solid ethical foundations, on dialogue and negotiations between humans, non-humans, and enchanted beings, the exhibition brought together nine artists to debate the global climate crisis, seeking to integrate science, art, architecture, design, and traditional forms of knowledge. All of this at the heart of the headquarters of the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 30): the city of Belém. It was a singular experience for (re)thinking possible ways of relating to the world through the enchantment that knowledge and poetics can provide.

Much of the work presented in Belém and all of the artists who participated in that exhibition now arrive in São Paulo, at Instituto Tomie Ohtake, together with collections, research, and activities from the Museu Goeldi. They have been brought together with the purpose of revealing a Brazilian Amazon of yesterday (with or without humans), of today (with its research and heritage), and of the future (with its children), to once again celebrate this great encounter between the arts and science. The exhibition Quando o museu é rio seeks to bring to the great forest of concrete and steel the atmosphere of energy and synergy that only good encounters can provide. May we continue to flow.

Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi

Quando o museu é rio

Quando o museu é rio [When the Museum Is a River] is the third exhibition to bring together the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi and the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, and a further step in a process begun in 2022 that has advanced through questions of memory and the challenges facing contemporary museums. The theme is timely: the exhibition takes place as we celebrate the Pará museum’s 160th anniversary, shedding light on reflections about a long-lived institution and, for that very reason, one particularly suited to the questions shared here.

This trajectory of collaborations began with the exhibition Ensaios para o Museu das Origens [Essays for the Museum of Origins], presented between 2023 and 2024 at Instituto Tomie Ohtake and Itaú Cultural, dedicated to debating the politics of memory and the instituting movements of the Brazilian museum field. Museu Goeldi contributed documents, publications, photographs, and exsiccatae that evidenced the civilizatory project—with all the authoritarian weight of the term—that characterized its history in the 19th century, but also the scrutiny of the Amazonian territory and the involvement of Indigenous peoples in the construction of scientific knowledge about the region. Its collections can be read as fragments of a “history of forest beings.”

In 2025, the two institutions forged a powerful exchange in the Parque Zoobotânico [Zoobotanical Park] of the Museu Goeldi—established in 1895 and recognized as the oldest territory of Amazonian heritage and scientific production in and for the Amazon. It was in this collective spirit that Um rio não existe sozinho [A River Does Not Exist Alone] was conceived: built on solid ethical foundations and negotiations between humans, non-humans, and enchanted beings, the exhibition brought together nine artists and architects to debate the climate crisis, integrating science, art, architecture, design, and forms of traditional knowledge at the heart of the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 30), in Belém.

Much of this work and all of the artists now arrive in São Paulo, together with collections, research, and activities from the Museu Goeldi, to reveal an Amazon of yesterday, today, and the future—and to celebrate the encounter between the arts and science. Museu Goeldi is a museum of the Amazon, but also of Brazil, and the contemporary force of its collection lies in its capacity to continue being inquired and to respond to questions that did not exist at its founding.

For its part, Instituto Tomie Ohtake celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2026 and, in a trajectory that extends into other territories, this exhibition marks a milestone for thinking about the future of the institutions. Founded by a family from the Asian diaspora, the Instituto has affirmed itself as a place of encounter, with an attentive eye toward the arts and their crossings with education, design, architecture, and forms of knowledge that reach far beyond the Western ones. The crises that shake us—climatic, political, social—have made the need to forge alliances toward a more just and sustainable world all the more urgent, and it is in this context that this exhibition takes place.

Like a river, the museum only exists in movement: in what it receives, carries, and deposits along the way. This vocation for encounter is what makes a partnership like this one possible—in which two institutions of distinct natures, one in São Paulo, the other in the Amazon, recognize in working together a form of existence that is richer and more responsible. May we continue to flow.

We are grateful to the Ministry of Culture, which made this exhibition possible through the Culture Incentive Law (Rouanet Law). The exhibition is sponsored by Nubank, patron of Instituto Tomie Ohtake; by AkzoNobel, at the Gold level; by Aché Laboratórios Farmacêuticos, at the Silver level; and receives support from Tintas Coral.

Instituto Tomie Ohtake 

Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi

When the Museum Is a River

A river never exists alone. Its course depends on a continuous web of connections—between rainfall, roots, sediments, underground currents, and forests, between humans and more-than-humans. The river is itself an experience, and every experience is singular. By connecting distinct territories, crossing borders, and constantly reshaping the landscape, rivers produce zones of encounter, displacement, and transformation.

It was from this image that Um rio não existe sozinho [A River Does Not Exist Alone] was conceived—an exhibition held in 2025 at the Parque Zoobotânico [Zoobotanical Park] of the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, curated by Sabrina Fontenele and Vânia Leal, during the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 30) in Belém. Quando o museu é rio [When the Museum Is a River] is its continuation—not an iteration, but another moment in an ongoing process of rethinking what a museum can be, when it ceases to operate as a structure of containment and begins to exist as a shifting field of relations, exchanges, and constant renewal.

Historically, museums were constituted through a logic of collection, classification, and stabilization of the world. Collecting meant removing objects from circulation, separating them from their contexts, and reinscribing them within cataloguing systems driven by universalizing ideals of knowledge. Many of the ethnographic and archaeological collections formed in the 19th and 20th centuries emerged directly from this colonial context: objects, images, and ways of knowing displaced from their territories of origin and incorporated into institutions that erased the cosmological, spiritual, and communal relations that gave them meaning. Museu Goeldi exists in this context: founded in 1866, it became one of the leading scientific institutions of the Amazon while also participating in the circuits that shaped the region through colonial extraction.

But Museu Goeldi is also something else. In recent decades, the institution has undergone shifts in its understanding of collections, territory, and research. Rather than treating the Amazon as an object of study, its researchers have insisted on the need to understand the museum as part of the social, ecological, and cosmological networks that sustain the Amazonian territory itself. The collection ceases to be merely a repository of remnants from the past and asserts itself as a living field of relations. Embedded in networks of knowledge, memory, and care, it becomes active matter for the construction of other futures.

It is this movement that we sought to summon. In dialogue with scientific curators Sue Costa, Nelson Sanjad, and Sâmia Batista, we set out to understand Museu Goeldi as an open field of relations across territory, science, spirituality, and everyday life. From these conversations, artists Déba Tacana, Elaine Arruda, Estúdio Flume, Francelino Mesquita, Gustavo Caboco, Mari Nagem, Noara Quintana, Paula Giordano, PV Dias, Rafael Segatto Barboza da Silva, and Sallisa Rosa were invited to rethink their work for this new context—not to replicate what they had made in Belém, but to carry forward the process of transformation that experience set in motion.

The invitation was to revisit their work through a question about what the museum holds, how it holds it, for whom, and under what regimes of visibility and access. In many cases, works shifted profoundly after visits to the technical reserves, encounters with researchers, and engagement with the museum’s scientific and educational projects. What emerged from this process was less an exhibition about Museu Goeldi than a field of relations in constant transformation, in which collections, research, artwork, and territory no longer occupy fixed positions. Quando o museu é rio was conceived from this condition: from understanding the museum as a living space, traversed by flows of knowledge, imagination, and change. 

Ana Roman, Sabrina Fontenele, and Vânia Leal

Curators

When the Museum Is…

1. …a Collection

A river never exists alone. Its course depends on a continuous web of connections—between rainfall, roots, sediments, underground currents, and forests, between humans and more-than-humans. The river is itself an experience, and every experience is singular. By connecting distinct territories, crossing borders, and constantly reshaping the landscape, a river produces zones of encounter, displacement, and transformation. Its form is never completely stable: it exists precisely because it overflows. The river is also what it means to the beings along its course—sustaining their existence and the continuity of their traditions.

It was from this image that Um rio não existe sozinho [A River Does Not Exist Alone] was conceived—an exhibition held in 2025 at the Parque Zoobotânico do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi [Zoobotanical Park of the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi], curated by Sabrina Fontenele and Vânia Leal, during the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 30) in Belém. Quando o museu é rio [When the Museum Is a River] is its continuation— not an iteration, but another moment in an ongoing process of rethinking what a museum can be when it ceases to operate as a structure of containment and begins to exist as a shifting field of relations, exchanges, and constant renewal.

Historically, modern museums were constituted through a logic of collection, classification, and stabilization of the world, in which collecting meant removing objects from circulation, separating them from their contexts of use, and reinscribing them within cataloguing systems driven by universalizing ideals of knowledge. Much of the ethnographic and archaeological collections formed in the 19th and 20th centuries emerged directly from this colonial context, in which the very history of the Museu Goeldi is inscribed: founded in 1866 and reorganized in the late 19th century under the direction of Emílio Goeldi, the museum became one of the leading scientific institutions of the Amazon, while also participating in the colonial scientific and extractivist circuits. Museu Goeldi was conceived within this ambiguity: between preservation and capture, between knowledge and appropriation.

But Museu Goeldi is also something else. In recent decades, the institution has undergone shifts in its understanding of collections, territory, and research. Rather than treating the Amazon as an object of study, its researchers have insisted on the need to understand the museum as part of the social, ecological, and cosmological networks that sustain the Amazonian territory itself. In this way, the objects in its collection cease to operate as stabilized evidence of the past and become elements inscribed in living networks of knowledge, memory, and care.

1. …a Relationship

In recent decades, it has become increasingly difficult to sustain the idea of the collection as a neutral structure of universal conservation. Anti-colonial struggles and demands for restitution have called into question not only the origins of objects, but also the ways in which museums produce authority and organize memory. The problem has shifted from what museums hold to how they hold it, for whom, and under what regimes of visibility and access. The museum has come to be understood as a site traversed by negotiations, conflicts, and translations among people shaped by unequal colonial histories, and it has ceased to be a stable set of preserved objects to become a contested field of memory, representation, and authority.

Many institutions answered this challenge by opening themselves to community participation, incorporating collaborative practices and diversity discourses. This opening was necessary, but not sufficient. The language of participation was often absorbed without significantly altering structures of power: collaboration became a mechanism for managing difference, without effectively redistributing control over objects and narratives. But the problem ran deeper, since collections do not belong exclusively to the institutions that hold them: they are bound by obligations and animated by living currents that no cataloguing process can contain. Understanding this requires recognizing that museum and territory cannot be superficially related or managed apart—their connection must be constitutive of the institution.

This understanding took shape through dialogue with researchers and scientific curators Sue Costa, Nelson Sanjad, and Sâmia Batista. At Museu Goeldi, it became clear that what most needed to be brought forward was not only the institution’s scientific holdings, but above all the relationships historically built by the museum with its territory, with Indigenous, riverside, and quilombola communities, and with the different ways of knowing that traverse the Amazon. Museu Goeldi emerges, then, as a relational infrastructure built through enduring bonds across research, education, territory, and local knowledge. Its holdings reveal their power both as a record of what was and as fertile ground from which it is possible to imagine and build other futures.

III. …a River

This led us to think of the museum as a living organism—traversed by ongoing processes of exchange, circulation, and renewal—and this means abandoning the idea of the exhibition as a finished, stable form. What comes to matter is the process of change that encounters set in motion. With this in mind, the artists were invited to engage with the Museu Goeldi as  a continuous field of relations across territory, science, memory, spirituality, and everyday life.The exhibition Quando o museu é rio opens in the register of a temporality that exceeds any institution. The installation by Sallisa Rosa—which, at the Parque Zoobotânico, took the form of a circular structure of taipa and clay in which the flows of the Pará river were inscribed—unfolds here into a sphere carrying elements of the rock paintings of Monte Alegre, which are among the oldest traces of human presence in the Amazon. Beside it, a carpet in the shape of a giant sloth evokes one of the most extraordinary finds in the Museu Goeldi’s archive: in 2001, excavations for a fish farming tank in Itaituba, in southwestern Pará, revealed the fossils of three giant sloths of the species Eremotherium laurillardi and a mastodon, approximately 13,340 years old, whose material was sent to the Museu Goeldi for study and opened new possibilities for understanding Amazonian megafauna. This initial section of the show affirms that the museum’s collection is not merely a record of what was—it is living matter, open to imagination and to futures yet to come.

The first room of the exhibition presents historical images of the museum in association with the history of the Mebêngôkre (Kayapó) peoples, with whom the Museu Goeldi has maintained a continuous history of collaboration, recognized by the communities themselves as part of a shared heritage. Against this historical backdrop, the works of Rafael Segatto Barboza da Silva and Elaine Arruda take on another dimension: both depart directly from the experience of the Parque Zoobotânico but arrive here transformed. Segatto’s suspended black oars evoke the intense presence of the vultures that inhabit the park—birds associated, in candomblé, with transformation and passage between worlds. In turn, Elaine Arruda reconfigures the labyrinth of her family’s memories through journeys along the Tijuquaquara river: fabrics printed with engravings that open like boat sails reconstitute the affective and generational weave those waters sustain. In both cases, what is transported is not the work, but the process that gave rise to it.

This refusal to treat the past as something closed organizes the dialogue among Mari Nagem, Noara Quintana, Déba Tacana, and PV Dias. The Esecaflor project—which for over twenty years simulated extreme drought conditions in the Caxiuanã National Forest—gives Mari Nagem the data from which to imagine future landscapes of precarious survival. The idea of the fossil connects this work to that of Noara Quintana, who brings together dinosaurs, satellites, and mining machines to reveal how forms of colonial violence have metamorphosed into new promises of progress. Déba Tacana touches another layer of this problem: her circular ceramic forms engage with the project of archaeologists Helena Lima and Cristiana Barreto, which brings ceramicists into dialogue with the Museu Goeldi’s archaeological holdings to study and reproduce original pieces—such that, in clay, an ancient gesture and a contemporary one come to meet. PV Dias, in turn, draws on another kind of archive: Pará newspapers from the 19th and 20th centuries that documented the construction of a certain imaginary of civilization and modernity in the Amazon. By projecting these pages with the image of his own body moving across them, the artist reveals how the archive is not a neutral repository but a contested field in which the contradictions of a project of progress—one the Museu Goeldi’s own collection also carries—are inscribed.

The following room is organized around the question of how knowledge is transmitted—between generations, species, and territories. Museu Goeldi has answered this question in many ways: through its teaching collection, which circulates among schools in Belém; through the Caxiuanã Olympiad, which annually bring together students from Portel and Melgaço at the Estação Científica Ferreira Penna [Ferreira Penna Scientific Station]; and through the research of archaeologist Edithe Pereira in Monte Alegre, which sheds new light on human occupation in the Amazon and makes it accessible to diverse audiences. Paula Giordano, Francelino Mesquita, and Estúdio Flume depart from the same impulse. Giordano photographs bearers of traditional knowledge, her images attuned to what passes through generations. Mesquita constructs, in miriti, a weave that mimics spider species studied by the Museu Goeldi, making visible the intricacy and beauty of relations among species. Estúdio Flume proposes that the act of building can itself be a form of transmission, through engagement with local techniques, materials, and the ways of life bound up in them.

Gustavo Caboco radicalizes this proposition. By summoning the invisible beings of the Parque Zoobotânico to inhabit Instituto Tomie Ohtake, and by questioning naming practices as forms of colonial violence, the Wapixana artist exposes what is at stake in any system of classification: the decision about who holds the power to name, to order, to render visible or invisible. The presence of these beings displaces the very limits of the institution.

Drawing on these artists and works, Quando o museu é rio seeks to affirm the museum as a living field of relations, in which artworks are transformed, scientific research becomes poetic matter, and collections reappear as active forces of imagination and future. Like a river that shifts sediments and blends temporalities, the museum also alters what passes through it. Perhaps it can only continue to exist by accepting this condition: ceasing to operate as a structure of containment in order to remain alive, in continuous movement. 

Ana Roman, Sabrina Fontenele and Vânia Leal

Curators

Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi has been reinventing itself for 160 years. It is only possible to explain the longevity of this institution—whose trajectory is marked by moments of stagnation and others of great dynamism—by looking through the window, over the wall, and into the cracks of time. The history of Museu Goeldi can be told through the great names of science and politics—but these were certainly not the only ones who kept alive the spark first lit in 1866. Beyond them, generations of men and women believed in the essence of an idea, a project, a dream (or a utopia?). Whatever it may be, this museum was built and rebuilt by the people who made up the institution’s daily life, most of them invisible to history and to commemorative narratives. They are those whose names are not inscribed in institutional memory, but whose existence becomes apparent when we consider certain verbs that can define a museum’’s activities: to collect, classify, catalogue, store, draw, map, photograph, clean, restore, arrange, plant, prune, feed, listen, teach—and also to read, write, learn, and create.

People do this. To speak of a museum today, therefore, is to speak of people: those who take on the task of caring for what our society qualifies as heritage, whether natural or cultural, material or immaterial. And not only staff members, but all those who collaborate with the museum, use it, and make it their own—along with its collections, its buildings, and its ground. In the exhibition Quando o museu é rio [When the Museum Is a River], people take center stage, and we have chosen some of them to speak about the Museu Goeldi.

This show is, therefore, about connections: between people; between fields of knowledge; between humans and non-humans; between different territories; between past, present, and future. A museum allows, promotes, and nurtures these connections, like the roots of an immense mangrove—roots that breathe, sustain, nourish, protect, and shelter the life flowing around them, the ancestral mud that makes us one and everything. Only a museum can transform the particular into the collective, expanding the individual into the social whole, giving meaning and a horizon that can bring us together.

It is only possible to keep something alive by accepting that everything can change: yes, we have reached 160 years. We have lived thus far not as an ascending line, however interrupted, but as a spiral that moves forward, turns back, and always changes course. Or, better still, like a river—one that constantly alters its path in order to keep flowing, and in doing so transforms itself. Along this trajectory of a river-museum, the people who make it—from the inside and the outside—renew it daily, flood its banks and fertilize its ground, give voice and soul to every image and artifact the past has transmitted to us. A museum with open doors, a mangrove museum: one that sends out pneumatophores—aerial breathing roots—in every direction, drawing territories and social collectives closer together, surviving on the air and the mud that constitute us as human beings.

Nelson Sanjad, Sue Costa, and Sâmia Batista

Scientific Curators

This sentence belongs to curator Ana Roman. It appears in a thought-provoking text that examines the relationship between museum and memory through metaphors and images connecting a museum’s central mission—care—to elements of the landscape. In this exercise, she transposes the literal meaning of those elements into the world of museums, into the challenges facing these institutions at a moment when the very notion of “collection” is being transformed. From this emerges the idea of the “mangrove museum”: one that “does not impose centrality, but produces coexistence”; a “place of tactical shelter, where one can appear or withdraw, where different forms of memory coexist without hierarchy”; an institution that upholds the ethics of negotiation, that shares, that connects—the root that sustains the collective; “the mud that nourishes, the cycle that regulates, the shelter that protects without capturing.” 

This is a beautiful image through which to think about the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, which has been reinventing itself for 160 years. The longevity of this institution—whose trajectory is marked by moments of stagnation and others of great dynamism— reveals itself only by looking through the window, over the wall, and into the cracks of time. The history of Museu Goeldi can be told through the great names of science and politics—but these were certainly not the only ones who kept alive the spark first lit in 1866. Beyond them, generations of men and women believed in the essence of an idea, a project, a dream (or a utopia?). Whatever it may be, this museum was built and rebuilt by the people who made up the institution’s daily life, most of them invisible to history and to commemorative narratives. They are those whose names are not inscribed in institutional memory, but whose existence becomes apparent when we consider certain verbs that can define a museum’s activities: to collect, classify, catalogue, store, draw, map, photograph, clean, restore, arrange, plant, prune, feed, listen, teach—and also to read, write, learn, and create.

People do this. To speak of a museum today, therefore, is to speak of people: those who take on the task of caring for what our society qualifies as heritage, whether natural or cultural, material or immaterial. And not only staff members, but all those who collaborate with the museum, use it, and make it their own—along with its collections, its buildings, and its ground. In the exhibition Quando o museu é rio [When the Museum Is a River], people take center stage, and we have chosen some of them to speak about the Museu Goeldi.

Those who conceived the Parque Zoobotânico [Zoobotanical Park] in 1895, drawing on European architectural references yet populating it with Amazonian animals and plants. The Mebêngôkre people, better known as the Kayapó, who have maintained relations with the museum for more than 120 years and incorporated this institution into their social and heritage networks. A botanist who loved photography and devoted his life to documenting Amazonian plants and landscapes, blurring the boundaries between science and art. A zoologist who discovered more than six hundred spiders, naming them in honor of scientists, travelers, singers, actors, political leaders, cities, rivers, Indigenous peoples, cultural expressions, foods, fictional characters, plants, and other animals. The educators who bring the museum into schools and riverside communities, circulating scientific knowledge through artifacts, workshops, games, and play. The ceramicists and archaeologists who work together on the study, documentation, conservation, and production of replicas from the collection, combining knowledge, science outreach, and income generation through creative economy. The artist and the archaeologist who decided to join forces to save an immense archaeological site, preventing the destruction of rare rock paintings and a major center of lithic artifact production—unique in the Amazon. The residents of a small city in the region’s countryside who discovered a family of giant sloths that perished when a cave collapsed many thousands of years ago, and who managed to recover them with the help of paleontologists. The ecologists, climatologists, and forest workers who wrapped an entire forest to study the effects of prolonged drought on the Amazon—a problem merely imagined twenty years ago, but one that has since proved real and devastating. Last but not least, the many artists who—selected by curators Ana Roman, Sabrina Fontenele, and Vânia Leal, and working with diverse materials and forms of expression—offer other ways of seeing science, collections, and the environmental and social questions of the contemporary world.

This exhibition is, therefore, about connections: between people; between fields of knowledge; between humans and non-humans; between different territories; between past, present, and future. A museum allows, promotes, and nurtures these connections, like the roots of an immense mangrove—roots that breathe, sustain, nourish, protect, and shelter the life flowing around them, the ancestral mud that makes us one and everything. Only a museum can transform the particular into the collective, expanding the individual into the social whole, giving meaning and a horizon that can bring us together.

It is only possible to keep something alive by accepting that everything can change: yes, we have reached 160 years. We have lived thus far not as an ascending line, however interrupted, but as a spiral that moves forward, turns back, and always changes course. Or, better still, like a river—one that constantly alters its path in order to keep flowing, and in doing so transforms itself. Along this trajectory of a river-museum, the people who make it—from the inside and the outside—renew it daily, flood its banks and fertilize its ground, give voice and soul to every image and artifact the past has transmitted to us. A museum with open doors, a mangrove museum: one that sends out pneumatophores—aerial breathing roots—in every direction, drawing territories and social collectives closer together, surviving on the air and the mud that constitute us as human beings.

Nelson Sanjad, Sue Costa, and Sâmia Batista

Scientific Curators

The Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi occupies a singular place in the history of the Amazon and of Brazil. Founded in the 19th century, it was conceived in a period when the Amazonian region was often seen as nothing more than a distant, exotic, and inexhaustible territory. Over more than a century, however, the institution has consolidated itself as one of the most important centers of scientific research in the country and an international reference in the production of knowledge about the Amazon. More than an institution dedicated to science, the Museu Goeldi has become a territory of encounters: between past and present, between forest and city, between memory and future, between different ways of understanding the world.

In becoming a territory of encounters, the museum also came to understand itself as “Indigenous land.” To think of it in this way is to shift the traditional gaze that tends to limit this kind of institution to a building or a collection kept behind glasses. It means understanding that its existence extends symbolically beyond its walls, reaching rivers, forests, villages, ancestral territories, and the original peoples’ ways of life in the Amazon. The museum cannot be understood merely as a place that observes or records Indigenous cultures; it is also traversed by these presences, by these histories, and by the knowledges that, for thousands of years, have sustained ways of living in profound relation with the land, with the waters, and with the forest.

Over the course of its trajectory, the Museu Goeldi has developed research across diverse fields of knowledge, particularly in archaeology, anthropology, and scientific collections. These areas do not operate in isolation. On the contrary, they interrelate and help build a more sensitive and complex understanding of the Amazon as a living territory—and, for that reason, diverse and in permanent transformation. The science produced at the museum reveals that the Amazon is not a historical void, nor is it untouched nature. It is the result of continuous human relations, elaborated by societies that have transformed the forest over thousands of years.

Archaeology plays a fundamental role in this understanding. Archaeological research carried out in the Amazon demonstrates that the region has always been inhabited by sophisticated societies, capable of developing technologies, systems of organization, and their own forms of environmental management. Studies on Amazonian Dark Earths, geoglyphs, ancestral ceramics, and ancient archaeological sites reveal the presence of civilizations that modified and cultivated the forest long before the arrival of European colonizers. These discoveries help dismantle colonial imaginaries that insisted, for centuries, on representing the Amazon as an empty or savage territory.

Every ceramic fragment found, every trace of human occupation, every mark left in the Amazonian soil carries within it a narrative of permanence. These are traces that tell stories of peoples who learned to live in balance with the forest, creating elaborate forms of relation with the environment. In this sense, archaeology does not speak only of the past: it also sheds light on urgent debates about memory, territory, sustainability, and future.

Anthropology, in turn, brings the museum closer to the contemporary experiences of Indigenous peoples and traditional Amazonian communities. Through it, the Museu Goeldi builds dialogues around identity, territoriality, Indigenous languages, cosmologies, systems of knowledge, and political relations with the Brazilian state. Anthropological research helps us understand that Indigenous peoples belong to the living present of the Amazon, where they continue reinventing forms of resistance, preserving languages, rituals, narratives, and ways of existing that are deeply connected to the land.

Today, the institution’s collection brings together thousands of archaeological objects, ethnographic pieces, sound recordings, linguistic documents, botanical collections, and specimens of Amazonian biodiversity. More than mere archives of the past, these collections constitute true repositories of memory. They hold stories of peoples, ancestral knowledge, forms of creation, traditional technologies, and affective relations with the natural world.

The museum does not merely produce scientific studies; it also participates in processes of valorization and recognition of these forms of knowledge. In this context, the notion of “Indigenous land” takes on an expanded meaning. Far beyond the physical delimitation of a territory, it refers to the right to exist according to one’s own modes of life, thought, and spirituality. To speak of Indigenous land is also to speak of memory, of belonging, and of the continuity of cultures that have historically faced violence, erasure, and territorial disputes.

In recent years, the museum has been rethinking its practices from decolonial perspectives. This means questioning older models of collecting, cataloguing, and displaying, bringing Indigenous communities closer to curatorial processes and to decisions about their own collections. In many cases, objects cease to be seen merely as scientific specimens and come to be understood as living elements of memory, spirituality, and cultural identity. This movement transforms the museum into a more open space—one that listens, engages in dialogue, and builds knowledge collectively.

Above all, to think of the Museu Goeldi as “Indigenous land” is to recognize that the Amazon cannot be reduced to an object of study or a distant landscape. The Amazon is a living territory, inhabited by ancestralities, narratives, and its own ways of understanding existence, and the museum recognizes this by also becoming a space of collective responsibility, where science and memory walk side by side.

Among artifacts, research, narratives, and encounters, the voices of the peoples who, for thousands of years, have built intense relations with the forest, the rivers, and the land remain alive. In holding these stories, the Museu Goeldi helps remind us that the future of the Amazon depends on the permanence of these peoples, on the recognition of their rights, and on the valorization of their knowledge.

In a time marked by environmental disputes, climate crises, and constant threats to Indigenous territories, the museum reaffirms, together with the exhibition Quando o museu é rio [When the Museum Is a River], the importance of listening to those who have always known that the forest is not a resource: it is life, memory, and continuity.

Vânia Leal

Curator

From Scientific Colony to Indigenous Territory: Museu Goeldi’s Park 

The Parque Zoobotânico [Zoobotanical Park] of the Museu Goeldi was created in 1895 with the purpose of housing exhibitions, a botanical and a zoological garden, the research infrastructure, and the residences of the institution’s workers. Its founder, Emílio Goeldi, defined it as a “scientific colony,” in the sense of bringing together, in a single place, the entire museum staff, composed primarily of foreigners. Its construction integrated, on one hand, the urban transformations implemented in Belém during the rubber economy; on the other, it connected the Amazon to a network of natural history museums expanding across the world. This civilizatory and scientific project met with the immediate enthusiasm of the city’s population, which claimed it as its own and invested it with other meanings. Every year, thousands of people build their own memories there and confer particular meanings on that territory. Among the visitors are Indigenous peoples. There are various records of their presence in the park since the early 20th century, which makes this place all the more special. It was this immemorial bond between the original peoples and the ground we inhabit that motivated the symbolic conversion of the park into Indigenous Land in 2023. The park had already been regularly welcoming Indigenous peoples passing through Belém, offering them a place of listening and recognition. In declaring itself Indigenous land, however, a scientific institution listed as National Historical Heritage gives visibility and force to a political movement that cannot rest in the face of the daily attacks suffered by the original peoples. This is a commitment publicly assumed by the Museu Goeldi—to valorize Indigenous peoples and maintain with them an alliance in the service of the cultural and biological diversity of the Amazon.

Museu Goeldi, Heritage of the Mebêngôkre People

The relationship between the Museu Goeldi and the Mebêngôkre dates back to 1902, when the institution received a large Irã’ãmranh-re collection, from a people who inhabited the Araguaia river. An Indigenous delegation went to the Parque Zoobotânico [Zoobotanical Park] for the handover of the artifacts, a visit duly recorded in a photograph that symbolizes this first contact. Since then, generations of Indigenous peoples and researchers have kept the memory of this encounter alive. Subsequent contacts were initially sporadic, but became regular over time. In this history, the years 1930–1950 stand out, when Curt Nimuendajú, Carlos Estevão de Oliveira, Darcy Ribeiro, Napoleão Figueiredo, and Expedito Arnaud allied themselves fiercely in the defense of the Gorotire, of the Xingu river, another branch of the Mebêngôkre people nearly decimated after contact with national society. This alliance was renewed in the 1980s–1990s, through Darrell Posey and on the occasion of the struggles for the demarcation of the Kayapó Indigenous Land and against the Kararaô hydroelectric dam, which would later devastate  much of that territory. The long coexistence with certain clans of specific villages transformed the Museu Goeldi into nekrej, a good that confers prestige on the Indigenous person who holds it and is inherited from their maternal-line ancestors. This means that only certain Kayapó families have the right to interact with representatives of the Museu Goeldi, as this right, passed down from maternal-line uncles, aunts, and grandparents, is considered an immaterial wealth. For the Mebêngôkre people, the Museu Goeldi currently holds the same status as proper names, ceremonial ornaments, songs, and specific forms of knowledge that pass from generation to generation—all nekrej.

The Hybrid Images of Jacques Huber

Before moving to the Amazon, the Swiss botanist Jacques Huber (1867–1914) studied alpine microalgae. After arriving in Belém to head the Botany section of the Museu Goeldi in 1895, he radically changed his object of study: he turned to the great trees, those capable of reaching 50 meters in height or more. The botanist carried out floristic surveys and described many species well known to the Amazonian population, such as the freijó (Cordia goeldiana), the pau-amarelo (Euxylophora paraensis), the jatobá (Hymenaea oblongifolia), and the uxi fruit (Endopleura uchi). He also studied the forest from an evolutionary perspective—such as plant-ant symbiosis—and an ecological one, characterizing plant formations such as floodplain forests and campinas. To this end, he developed a distinctive visual language for documenting the landscape, which complemented the drawings frequently found in his notebooks. He appropriated photographic technology to produce, in the field, the records necessary for ecosystem analysis. And he went further: he conceived a serial publication specifically devoted to disseminating botanical photographs, the Arboretum Amazonicum: Iconographia dos mais importantes vegetaes espontaneos e cultivados da região amazonica [Arboretum Amazonicum: Iconography of the Most Important Spontaneous and Cultivated Plants of the Amazonian Region], which circulated between 1900 and 1906. The quality of the images and their graphic refinement led Huber’s photographs to transcend the scientific field and come to be appreciated as works of art. Today, his name appears on the list of the fifty most important science photographers active before the First World War—the only representative from Latin America.

Brazilian Spider-Man

He is among the three Brazilians who have described the most spider species. By 2025, he had named 528 species—equivalent to 1% of all spiders on the planet. Alexandre Bragio Bonaldo was born in Bom Jesus, in the Serra Gaúcha region of Rio Grande do Sul, but chose to live in the Amazon. The first arachnologist in the history of the Museu Goeldi, he is curator of a collection of more than 40,000 lots of preserved animals, primarily from Amazonian and South American fauna. He created a new genus to classify spiders that mimic the behavior of ants, named Ianduba—formed by combining the Tupi term iandu (spider) with the abbreviation for the state of Bahia (BA), where the type specimen was collected. His work demonstrates that classificatory systems are alive and surprising, and that classifying is not merely ordering, but producing knowledge in permanent transformation. In naming species, Bonaldo pays homage to colleagues, places, rivers, Indigenous peoples, political leaders, pop culture references, literary characters, popular traditions, and even foods, such as mungunzá, vatapá, and acarajé. This reveals how taxonomy also carries cultural and affective dimensions. By reorganizing a previously inactive collection and bringing together young researchers, making the Museu Goeldi’s Arachnology Laboratory one of the most productive in Brazil, Bonaldo demonstrates that museums are capable of reinventing themselves, connecting territories, bringing forms of knowledge together, and always acting collaboratively.

When the Museum Travels

The Coleção Didática Emília Snethlage [Emília Snethlage Teaching Collection] of the Museu Goeldi is a teaching collection born from the desire to bring people and knowledge associated with artifacts closer together. For four decades, it has circulated through exhibitions and schools, enabling cultural mediations and integrating educational practices, expanding the forms of encounter between the public, science, and material culture. Its creation responds to a question that remains urgent: how to make knowledge accessible through direct experience? Bringing together basketry, ceramics, miriti toys, geological samples, paleontological replicas, taxidermied animals, exsiccatae, and other artifacts, the collection articulates different temporalities and disciplinary fields. Beyond enabling the study of the natural world, it allows contact with ancestral techniques that remain alive in the weavings that carry histories, in cosmologies, in the subsistence practices of diverse Amazonian peoples, and in the fiber of the miriti palm, transformed into toy, identity, and local productive chain. The collection acts as a tool for the mediation and contextualization of knowledge. By bringing people and objects together, it shifts contemplation toward the experience of contact, listening, and coproduction of meaning.

Forest Olympiad

The Science Olympiad of the Caxiuanã Forest emerged from a desire to enchant, through science, students and teachers from Portel and Melgaço, municipalities located to the south of Ilha do Marajó, in a region marked by longstanding challenges of access to education. Organized since 1997 by the Museu Goeldi in partnership with local governments, the initiative takes place annually at the Estação Científica Ferreira Penna [Ferreira Penna Scientific Station], within the Floresta Nacional de Caxiuanã, bringing together around 150 participants. The program combines competitions inspired by local cultural practices—such as casquinho racing (a small single-trunk canoe), tug of war, and jumping—and educational activities on the environment and the social struggles of the Amazon. The format reveals an expanded conception of scientific outreach: the forest is not merely an object of research, but also a site of encounter, learning, and civic formation. By bringing young people closer to an active scientific station, the Museu Goeldi tests the boundaries between academic knowledge and everyday life, betting that belonging to a territory is also built through the recognition of its ecological and social complexity. At the same time, it expands horizons beyond historical visions that reduced the forest to a frontier of exploitation, valorizing the knowledge that emerges from the collective intelligence of Amazonian communities.

A Return to Origins: the Journey of Amazonian Ceramics

What if the archaeological ceramics of the Amazon were returned to the hands of the social collectives that still produce ceramics in the region? This was precisely the objective of the Replicando o Passado [Replicating the Past] project, initiated by the Museu Goeldi in 2016, following a demand from ceramicists in the Paracuri neighborhood, a traditional artisan hub in the Icoaraci district of Belém. In partnership with the school named Liceu Escola Mestre Raimundo Cardoso, run by the Belém city government, archaeologists Helena Lima and Cristiana Barreto began leading workshops inside the Reserva Técnica Mário Simões [Mário Simões Technical Reserve] of the Museu Goeldi, so that artisans could master the technologies employed by ancient Indigenous peoples, including clay mixing, coil building, and incision and painting methods. The focus is on the Marajoara, Santarém, Aristé, and Maracá cultures, all from the lower Amazonas river, which flourished from the 5th century onward and disappeared around the 17th century. The project resulted in the qualification of several studios and the creation of commercial circuits based on creative economy, which now have international reach. In 2023, the initiative was recognized as a Social Technology and, in 2025, received the Prêmio Luiz de Castro Faria, prize awarded by the Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional (Iphan). In 2026, a new phase began with the support of Instituto Tomie Ohtake: for the first time, ceramicists from Cunani, Calçoene, Mazagão, and Macapá, in Amapá, came into contact with ancient Indigenous ceramics from the state. The participants were invited to replicate an Aristé funerary urn found by Emílio Goeldi in 1895, and to take part in a reconnection workshop, which resulted in the works on display in this exhibition. Gestures such as this invert a colonial logic: the piece, once taken as spoils, returns to the hands of the communities of origin, which can reclaim knowledge and techniques previously restricted to the walls of the museum.

Archaeology and Memory in Monte Alegre

Around 12,000 years ago, human beings already inhabited the Amazon. The main evidence of this ancestral presence was found in Monte Alegre, in Pará—more precisely in the Caverna da Pedra Pintada, one of the 133 archaeological sites catalogued in the municipality. In this territory, one of the most important contributions of Edithe Pereira’s trajectory is concentrated—an emeritus researcher at the Museu Goeldi. Edithe has worked with archaeology in the Amazon for more than thirty years, with an emphasis on rock art, the conservation of archaeological heritage, and the dissemination of scientific knowledge—dimensions that, for her, are inseparable. Over the course of her trajectory, she inventoried and documented hundreds of archaeological sites with rock art in the region. Her research provided the basis for the creation of the Parque Estadual Monte Alegre in 2001. Recently, with the support of Minas Gerais-based artist Marcela Pereira Soares, fourteen new sites were identified in an area near the Park, which is to be transformed into a Private Natural Heritage Reserve. This is an unprecedented initiative in the Amazon, responsible for the preservation of the rock paintings found there and for expanding studies on the largest center of lithic artifact production documented in the region to date. But Edithe’s concern extends beyond fieldwork: the outreach project she coordinates has already produced textbooks for secondary education, children’s and young adult literature, comics, and documentaries, as well as involving artists and artisans in the production of representations and (re)readings of the archaeological heritage. This demonstrates the capacity of science to unfold into multiple languages, designed to engage different audiences in the defense of the historical legacy we have received from the original peoples.

A Giant’s Claw: the Extinct Sloth of the Amazon

This claw replica belonged to a sloth that lived in the Amazon approximately 12,000 years ago, known as Eremotherium laurillardi. But there is one remarkable detail: this sloth was the size of an elephant! The original piece forms part of a true treasure, made up of eight hundred bones found while residents of Itaituba, in Pará, were building a tank on a private property in the city. These bones were recovered and are now held at the Museu Goeldi. Their story reads like a film script. The remains belonged to a family of five sloths—adults and young alike—that suffered an accident, fell into an ancient valley, and were rapidly buried. This tragic end turned out to function as a perfect time capsule: the animals were buried so quickly that predators could not reach them, and neither the force of rivers nor the weather was capable of breaking or wearing down the bones. Thanks to this accident that occurred thousands of years ago, scientists at the Museu Goeldi discovered rare information about the behavior of these animals. Did you know that these sloths were quite sociable? They moved in groups, and females would join together to protect and care for the young, in a manner similar to what elephants do today. Moreover, the Amazonian landscape of that era was very different from today’s: where a dense forest now exists, vast areas of savanna once predominated—the ideal environment for those giants to roam.

The Forest Drought Experiment: Amazonia in Transformation

What is the reaction of a humid equatorial forest to a possible prolonged drought? This question motivated the Experimento de Seca na Floresta [Forest Drought Experiment] (Esecaflor), established in 2001 at the Estação Científica Ferreira Penna [Ferreira Penna Scientific Station] of the Museu Goeldi. A large team of scientists, assisted by technicians and resident woodsmen at the station, installed 6,000 panels over the soil of one hectare of forest with the purpose of preventing rain from reaching the roots, using a gutter system to drain the water. And so this forest lived for 25 years. The results are striking: 50% of individuals of the same species died; 85% of shrub forms, 50% of large trees, and 50% of herbs disappeared. Among the plants destined for extinction are the muirapiranga (Brosimum rubescens), the sapucaia (Lecythis idatimon), the acapu (Vouacapoua americana), and the guajará (Pouteria cladanta). The case of the shrub Faramea anysocalyx, known as taboquinha, is extreme. It disappeared completely from the experimental plot, despite being one of the most common species in the region. With shallow roots, it could not withstand the reduction in humidity and the increase in soil temperature. Among the few plants that benefited from the drought is the almecegueira (Protium aracouchini), which has physiological strategies for water conservation and heat protection. This experiment—unprecedented in the world for its long duration in this modality—showed which species are vulnerable to droughts and which are capable of surviving or regenerating. Today, we can estimate the loss of plant biodiversity should the current drought trend in the Amazon persist. We know that the forest will not collapse, but will undergo a profound reconfiguration: trees would be half their current size and 30% of biodiversity would be lost. The data generated by the experiment feed global simulation models of the impact of deforestation and climate change.

Déba Tacana

Déba Tacana (Porto Velho – RO, 1988) is a ceramicist and visual artist of Indigenous and Romani descent. Her works use ceramics to explore Indigenous and territorial bodies, as well as the transformations of borders and contexts of human rights violations, through displacements, collections, and the analysis of political fictions. In Ebyassu (2023), the artist creates an installation composed of rounded, hollow forms, suspended and woven together by nylon threads. The work forms a kind of fluid filter in space, where shadow, matter, and movement intermingle and become part of the installation’s experience. The word “Ebyassu” is an adaptation of Ebiasu and evokes the idea of suspension and great quantities, conjuring invisible landscapes traversed by physical, spiritual, and historical displacements. Suspended in the environment, the pieces seem to oscillate between presence and disappearance, like archaeological vestiges or celestial bodies. The installation transforms the space into a kind of cartography and sweep, where ceramics becomes an index of histories and collections.

Elaine Arruda

Elaine Arruda (Belém – PA, 1985) is a visual artist whose trajectory has been strongly shaped by collaborative and interdisciplinary practices. Her work moves between printmaking, installation, and public art projects. Entoar o vento e dançar marés – 2º movimento [Intoning the Wind and Dancing Tides – 2nd Movement] (2025–2026) is an unfolding of her work at the Parque Zoobotânico [Zoobotanical Park] of the Museu Goeldi and the fruit of her research journeys along the Tijuquaquara river, in Pará. Drawing on navigation and the observation of tidal cycles—high or low—the work presents the memory, encounter, and time of three generations of women in her family. Her prints on fabric invite the public to move among boat sails and to feel the spiral of emotions prompted by the meetings the river waters bring about.

Estúdio Flume

Estúdio Flume, founded in 2015 by architects Christian Teshirogi and Noelia Monteiro, stands out for its approach to architecture as a tool for social impact. The studio works from conception through execution, with a focus on projects that generate better economic and social opportunities, particularly in rural communities and those far from urban centers in Brazil, some of which are represented in this installation. This social and sustainable approach has earned them significant recognition, including a highlight at the 9th Prêmio Arquitetura Tomie Ohtake AkzoNobel [9th Instituto Tomie Ohtake AkzoNobel Architecture Award] for the Centro de Referência das Quebradeiras de Babaçu [Babaçu Breaker Women Reference Center], and the international award Call for Solutions in Italy. The duo was responsible for the pavilion that housed the Educational Space of the exhibition Um rio não existe sozinho [A River Does Not Exist Alone] (2025), in Belém, using local resources and technologies such as wood and ubuçu straw. The installation Territórios em curso: geografia como tempo acumulado [Territories in Progress: Geography as Accumulated Time] (2026), presented in Quando o museu é rio [When the Museum Is a River], reflects on how architecture can engage with local techniques and materials to promote community development in a conscious and responsible way.

Francelino Mesquita

Francelino Mesquita (Belém – PA, 1976) is a contemporary artist and sculptor who researches and works with materials from nature, such as miriti (or buriti) sponge, jupati palm strip, mututi root, cuia pitinga, wood, and others. His sculptures challenge perceptions of form and balance, and are for the most part presented as mobiles. The work Mimetismo de formigas [Ant Mimicry] (2026) stages a direct dialogue with Tapixaua callida, a spider species researched by the Museu Goeldi in the Amazon rainforest. Beyond morphological similarities, these spiders also display behaviors that ensure mimicry. Working with miriti pieces, Francelino constructs a web of threads and bodies that demonstrates the intrinsic relationship between species, underscoring the beauty of diversity and the evolutionary adaptation of Amazonian fauna.

Gustavo Caboco

Gustavo Caboco (Curitiba/Roraima, 1989) is an artist of the Wapixana people. In his works, we find devices for reflection on the displacements of Indigenous bodies, the processes of valorization of Indigenous cultures, and the right to memory. Passagem de bicho [Animal Passage] (2025–2026) is an installation that connects São Paulo to the sumaúma tree in Belém. While in Casa de bicho [Animal House] (2025) Caboco lived intensely alongside the animals of the Parque Zoobotânico [Zoobotanical Park] of the Museu Goeldi, the artist now summons the invisible beings that exist there to inhabit Instituto Tomie Ohtake: the children of the anthropologist, the biologist, the priest, the prospector, and the Swiss man. The presence of these beings represents the memory of the Pará museum and the great tree where they live. Antibatismo: Victoria regia [Antibaptism: Victoria regia] (2025), in turn, delves into the complex history of the Amazonian plant, whose name was attributed by botanist John Lindley in homage to Queen Victoria of England. The artist questions the act of “baptism”—or naming practices—as colonial violence, revealing the relations of power and erasure in the formation of Indigenous subjectivity and the Brazilian imaginary.

Mari Nagem

Drawing on investigations into environmental change, climate collapse, and the artificial construction of landscape, artist Mari Nagem (Belo Horizonte – MG, 1984) develops works that bring together science, technology, and ecological imagination. In 41°C (2025), presented at the Parque Zoobotânico [Zoobotanical Park] of the Museu Goeldi, the artist took as her starting point the historic drought that occurred at the Tefé lake, in the Amazon, in 2023, when water temperatures reached extreme levels and caused the death of dozens of river dolphins. Drawing on satellite imagery and dialogues with scientists, Nagem created thermal compositions of intense colors and abrupt contours that evoked, at once, climate monitoring and a landscape in collapse.

In this exhibition, the artist presents Flora futura [Future Flora] (2026), a work that enters into direct dialogue with the Esecaflor project, developed by the Museu Goeldi and the Universidade Federal do Pará in the Floresta Nacional de Caxiuanã. The experiment, carried out over more than two decades, simulates extreme drought conditions to investigate how the Amazon rainforest responds to prolonged rainfall reduction. The installation imagines a future landscape marked by the precarious survival of species, transforming scientific data into a sensitive and speculative projection of the future.

Noara Quintana

Drawing on earlier research into the colonial circuits of rubber and the aestheticization of Amazonian flora in the context of Art Nouveau, Noara Quintana (Florianópolis – SC, 1986) develops works that bring together ecology, colonial history, and technological imagination. In Tela d’água [Water Screen] (2025), presented at the Parque Zoobotânico [Zoobotanical Park] of the Museu Goeldi, the artist recreated, using pigmented rubber, a translucent surface inspired by records from the collection of Swiss zoologist Emílio Goeldi. Installed within Amazonian fauna and flora, the work proposed a direct relation with the surrounding ecosystem, drawing attention to endangered species and the fragility of forest ways of life. Futuro fóssil [Future Fossil] (2023), presented at Instituto Tomie Ohtake, shifts her investigation to the symbolic center of the European colonial project. The installation revisits the history of the Crystal Palace, built for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, whose structure was inspired by the giant water lily Victoria amazonica. With sculptures made of industrial rubber, graphite, silk, and aluminum, the artist brings together dinosaur fossils, Starlink satellites, and mining machines, setting the promises of technological progress against the continuous processes of extraction, extinction, and planetary control. Between the forest and the museum, her works reveal how forms of colonial violence persist and project themselves into the future.

Paula Giordano

Paula Giordano (Belém – PA, 1974) is a photographer and visual artist who lives and works in Belém, Pará. Her work brings together photography and video art in the investigation of existential dilemmas, the relations between body, image, and light, and the symbolic dimensions of lived experience. She develops long-term documentary projects on spirituality, memory, and ancestrality in Brazil, creating images as spaces of encounter and sharing. The series Constelação em curso [Constellation in Progress] (2024) forms part of a research project developed by the artist on masters of traditional knowledge and territories, which received support from Instituto Tomie Ohtake at the outset of the project that gave rise to this exhibition. The photographs are not configured as isolated records, but as an expanding body of images, attentive to the manifestations of everyday life and to the knowledge transmitted between generations, responsible for sustaining the beauty and continuity of life in the Amazon.

PV Dias

Building on research into archive, image, and coloniality, PV Dias (Belém – PA, 1994) investigates the relations between technology, territory, and historical violence in the Amazon. In Paisagem commodities [Commodities Landscape] (2025), shown in Um rio não existe sozinho [A River Does Not Exist Alone] (2025), he used video mapping to project photographs from the Museu Goeldi’s collection onto the facade of the institution, assembling records linked to mining, oil, and agribusiness. The work made visible the marks left by development projects on the Amazonian territory.

In this exhibition, PV Dias presents Correria [Frenzy] (2026), an installation that expands this investigation through Pará newspapers from the 19th and 20th centuries. The projected pages bring together news on urban modernization, commerce, science, and the emergence of the Museu Goeldi, revealing the contradictions of a project of progress tied to colonial exploitation and social inequalities. Among advertisements, scientific discourses, and accounts of violence, the artist shows how the press helped construct imaginaries of civilization and modernity in the Amazon. Overlaid with light projections and the image of the artist’s body in continuous displacement, the pages transform the archive into a flow, drawing past and present together.

Rafael Segatto Barboza da Silva

Rafael Segatto Barboza da Silva (Vitória – ES, 1992) develops works connected to waters, crossings, and forms of existence shaped by the sea. In Enquanto correm as águas [As the Waters Flow] (2025), presented at the Parque Zoobotânico [Zoobotanical Park] of the Museu Goeldi, the artist created an installation composed of wooden panels traversed by oars, whose colors evoked maritime navigations, personal memories, and elements linked to religions of African origin. Installed in an area marked by the intense presence of vultures, the work came to incorporate the symbolic dimension of these birds as well, associated in candomblé with the passage between worlds. At Instituto Tomie Ohtake, the suspension of black oars by naval ropes collected from shipyards in his hometown shifts the installation toward an aerial and ritualistic dimension, evoking the circular movements of vultures over the park and the everyday tension that organizes the coastal landscape. Between navigation, spirituality, and memory, the work draws a cartography traversed by visible and invisible presences.

Sallisa Rosa

Sallisa Rosa (Goiânia – GO, 1986) develops works that bring together memory, territory, and the imagination of futures through collective practices and organic materials. In A terra esculpe a água [The Earth Sculpts the Water] (2025), presented at the Parque Zoobotânico [Zoobotanical Park] of the Museu Goeldi, the artist created a circular structure of taipa and clay inspired by the forms of encounter between land and water in the landscapes of northern Brazil. In contrast with the canalized rivers of cities, the installation invited reflection on the interdependence between bodies of water and the ways of life that emerge from them. In the exhibition Quando o museu é rio [When the Museum Is a River], the artist re-presents the installation in dialogue with the rock paintings of Monte Alegre, in Pará, studied for decades by archaeologist Edithe Pereira. Considered among the oldest vestiges of human presence in the Amazon, these markings reveal ancestral ways of inhabiting, recording, and imagining the territory. By bringing the materiality of clay into proximity with the marks inscribed in stone, the work suggests continuities between gesture, landscape, and memory, evoking deep temporalities that traverse the forest and persist in the present.

Bepunu Kayapó, chief of the Moikarakô village, in the Terra Indígena Kayapó [Kayapó Indigenous Land] (TIK), in Pará, refers to the Nekrej as objects he received from his maternal grandfather and maternal uncle in ceremonial contexts of Mebêngôkre celebrations.

The red bandolier, known as Kadját kamrẽk, was received from his maternal uncle, Takire Kayapó.

The maraca Ngõkõn was passed on to him by his maternal grandfather, Apêj Kayapó, at the men’s celebration Memy Bijôk.

The red ceremonial cap, Me krã djê kamrẽk, was also given to him by Takire Kayapó, at the Bemp celebration.

Nekrej can be considered goods transmitted across different Mebêngôkre generations through the maternal line (maternal uncles and grandfathers), playing a fundamental role in the social organization of this Indigenous people. They denote social prestige and a sense of family belonging. As Bepunu expressed it: “the kuben (non-Indigenous) have no Nekrej, and so have no family; they may have parents, children, and grandchildren, but if they have no Nekrej, they have no family. Only we, the Mebêngôkre, have family because we have Nekrej.”

Claudia López and Bepunu Kayapó