Iapoti'kaba
 

Iapoti'kaba, 2024
Voile, bamboo, and fragrance encapsulated in textile fibers, with scents of soil, grass, wood, jabuticaba blossom, ripe jabuticaba fruit, and decomposing jabuticaba.

​

Interspécies – Crossing Worlds
13th Edition of the 3M Art Show | Augusta Park, São Paulo, Brazil

​

The jabuticaba tree, cyclical and ancestral, forms a bridge between times, bodies, and territories. Originating from the Tupi language, its name — iapoti’kaba — can mean “fruit in bud” or “place of the tortoise,” revealing its symbiotic nature and deep intimacy with its environment and the beings it shares it with. Its fruit ripens only to burst, embodying the vital gesture of making room for the new.

​

In the installation Iapoti’kaba, visitors walk through an olfactory spiral that stages the tree’s full life cycle: from soil to grass, from wood to flower, from fruit to decomposition. Each scent activates a sensory layer of time, suggesting that life and death are not opposites, but interdependent phases of the same flow.

​

Though absent in form, the tree becomes present through the invisible: its smells. In this way, it connects worlds — vegetal, animal, mineral, human — and invites us to reimagine how we listen to what does not speak in language.​