On view through 10 October at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona is the artistic intervention ‘Suspendre el Cel’ (suspending the sky), by the Brazilian artist Caio Reisewitz, which has been organized with the Prats Nogueras Blanchard gallery.

Nearlhy 600 plants form a vegetal mass spread throughout the pavilion. In designing it Reisewitz took from Lina Bo Bardi’s House of Glass in São Paulo, where architecture and nature are fused.

With this work, Reisewitz addresses vital issues that affect Brazil, such as the destruction of the Amazonia, the dismantling of the public machinery responsable for protecting the environment, and the cultural erasure and genocide of indigenous populations. The title of the work is inspired by the thinking of the activist chamans Davi Kopenawa and Ailton Krenak, advocates of a more harmonious relationship with the earth and defenders of interconnection among all living beings. It alludes to the Yamomami worldview, which believes that the earth arose from a piece of the sky, and that if man forgets ancestral knowledge and destroys it, the sky will fall again.

For Caio Reisewitz, the Amazonia is not only a natural wealth, but also a major cultural asset and the true foundation of Brazilian civilization. In her work, engaged art and political activism are forms of resistance or ways of ‘suspending the sky’ at a time when it is an urgent matter to draw attention to this indispensable ecosystem for the planet.