Exhibitions
Carolina Caycedo: Cartographies of Water, Memory and Resistance
The Lina Bo Bardi building of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) is hosting Carolina Caycedo: Confluências , the first solo exhibition in Brazil by Colombian artist Carolina Caycedo (London, 1978), one of the most singular voices in contemporary Latin American art. Curated by Isabella Rjeille, the museum's curator, the exhibition, which runs until October 4, brings together photography, installation, video, performance, and drawing in a journey that places water, territories, and collective memories at the heart of the artistic experience.
Caycedo's work has become a space where contemporary art languages, ancestral knowledge from riverside communities, and resistance strategies driven by social movements in Latin America intersect. His practice, deeply influenced by the experience of displacement and various migratory processes, explores the symbolic, political, and affective relationships we establish with our environment. In his work, common goods—whether rivers, mountains, or urban public spaces—appear not as mere landscapes, but as contested territories, laden with memory, violence, and possibility.
Born in London and raised in Colombia, Caycedo grew up on the banks of the Magdalena River, one of the country's most important waterways and, at the same time, one of the areas most affected by dam construction and the extractive transformation of the territory. This life experience permeates much of her work, in which the river becomes both archive and wound, metaphor and field of conflict. For years, the artist has investigated the impact of hydraulic infrastructure on ecosystems and the communities that depend on them, highlighting how the promise of progress often masks forms of environmental, cultural, and social dispossession.
The exhibition's title, Confluências (Confluences ), alludes to the dual nature of water and history: the confluence of waterways, but also the encounter between people, ideas, geographies, and struggles. The exhibition offers a broad overview of Caycedo's career and incorporates recent works developed within the Brazilian context, in dialogue with other Latin American territories and their diasporas. Rather than presenting a self-contained body of work, the exhibition proposes a network of relationships between communities, memories, and forms of resistance.
Carolina Caycedo's presence at MASP also coincides with her participation in the current Venice Biennale, confirming the international reach of a practice that, nevertheless, does not relinquish its territorial roots or its political dimension. In times of climate crisis, extractivism, and forced displacement, Confluências poses an urgent question: how to imagine other ways of inhabiting the world based on caring for the commons and listening to the memories that flow beneath the surface.
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