Brasilina: an exhibition built on the pigment of Brazil's namesake tree (interview)

Show the country's creative exuberance and its colonial wounds in one gesture, without aestheticising the injury — and reintroduce the idea of a motherland, 'nação mátria', in place of 'pátria'.

Build a whole exhibition on brazilin — the red pigment extracted from pau-brasil, the tree Brazil is named for — where the colour that beautifies is the same that bleeds.

32 artists and designers from six states were arranged in three axes — Identity, Nature, Society — mixing art and authorial design: wooden spoons engraved with family phrases, plastic toys remade as maculelê instruments, portraits printed on leaves, hand-embroidered texts. The title conceit runs through everything: brazilin turns intense red in air and light, the same reaction that marks the violent cuts inflicted on the tree.

The show ran at the Galeria do Centro Cultural SESI in Vitória (ES) until 31 October 2026, and the curators are planning a touring circulation for 2027. No Indigenous artists made this edition — a gap the team says future editions will fix.

Brazil is the only country named after a tree. From the heartwood of pau-brasil comes brazilin, a substance that turns an ember-red pigment on contact with air and light — the same reaction that reveals the damage of the drastic pruning and violent cutting the species has suffered since colonisation. 'Brasilina: Poéticas de uma Nação Mátria', conceived by Isabela Castello and Fernando Caseira Nicolau, took that ambivalence — richness and devastation born in a single gesture — as the organising metaphor of an exhibition of 32 artists and designers at the Centro Cultural SESI in Vitória.

The subtitle makes its own proposal: 'pátria' (fatherland), which Nicolau calls worn and soaked in immorality, is replaced by 'nação mátria' — the motherland that generates, nourishes and protects, tied to nature, ancestries and the role of women in social life. And the show revisits the flag itself: the motto 'Ordem e Progresso' derives from an Auguste Comte formulation in which love was the principle — a word suppressed in the republican version. Recovering it, the curators argue, is 'a political and poetic act of urgency'.

The works were chosen to hold the paradox rather than resolve it: Mônica Pougy's wooden spoons engraved with phrases that trace kitchen lineages of women, Roberta Paiva's cheap plastic toys from Rio's Saara market reborn as maculelê rattles and instruments, Evna's portraits printed on leaves, Eulália Manual's embroidered texts. Co-curators Castello and Isabel Portella each invited 16 artists from six states, deliberately mixing art and authorial design — 'the colour that embellishes is the same that bleeds', as Castello put it in her interview with ARTE!Brasileiros.

One substance can carry an entire national argument: brazilin is literally the country's name, its first export commodity and its first colonial wound at once.

Beauty and violence are shown in the same objects instead of alternating, so the show never aestheticises the injury it depicts.

The pairing joined Castello's art-design platform Decoranea with Nicolau's decolonial research at the 1COMUM Coletivo, grounded in Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian cosmologies.

Mixing utilitarian design with fine art widens who the show speaks to — the useful object carries the same poetic research as the canvas.

A nation-scale theme lands when it hangs on one physical substance: a pigment that is simultaneously wealth and wound can carry history without a single lecture.

The exhibition ran at the Galeria do Centro Cultural SESI, Jardim da Penha, Vitória (ES) until 31 October 2026, with artists from Espírito Santo, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Pará, Minas Gerais and Paraná. Budget and production time limited the geographic spread, and no Indigenous artists were included in this edition; the curators are planning a circulating version for 2027 and say future editions will broaden both. Nicolau has also floated a new national anthem 'written and composed by many peoples'.