The exhibition brings together a generous presentation by artist Caio Rosa, ranging from photography, sculpture, textile, musical instrument, to sound, articulating the artist’s ongoing exploration of rhythm and remembrance, building a space where materiality converses with storytelling and where the use of the image becomes a mode of listening. 

Music plays a central role in Rosa’s work that bridges charged territories and generational knowledge. Drawing from the sonic textures of the African continent and their resonances in Brazilian music traditions, he investigates how sound carries histories of movement, resistance, and celebration. At the heart of this exhibition lies the construction of a new marimba, made in collaboration with his father, the ethnomusicologist Spirito Santo, extending a lineage of making music. The marimba is a symbolic instrument and device, here, it is a sculpture of sound. Its wooden keys and resonant body recall migratory histories, and in the exhibition, it is a tool for transmission of knowledge across generations, from his grandfather to himself. The newly built marimba reminds us that it is shaped by bodies in constant relation. 

Sound becomes a portal through which personal and collective stories reappear in different forms beyond language. A sonic archive invites audiences into a listening session within the exhibition. The piece blends multiple sound recordings. In this mix, some emerge as distorted sounds, like echoes of histories that unfold into new collective interpretations. The archive gathers contributions by Spirito Santo, Caio Rosa, and other musicians collaborators alongside Vissungo work songs from the mines of Diamantina in Minas Gerais dating back to 1944. These crossings of time reveal how Rosa’s practice follows a history of sounds that refuses linear chronology. They all converge, reminding us that sound is always in movement, multi-layered, and always returning. 

This work with sound resonates with scholar Tina Campt’s proposition of ‘listening to images’ 1 as an attempt to decipher the quiet and fugitive frequencies through which Black life is registered beyond the visible. For Campt, listening is a method conducive to engaging with the haptic and the affective dimensions of images. Rosa’s work similarly encourages a mode of sensory attention that exists beyond seeing for seeing, it asks the viewer to attune to the resonances within the materials that structure the photograph. His practice elongates beyond traditional photographic legacies. These materials – emulsion, cotton fabric, water, paper, amongst others – also tell their own story when juxtaposed with the archives present in his works. 

In this echo, the exhibition features new and existing photographs taking diverse forms that intertwine family archives – his parents in carnival, his grandfather in military uniform, a Caixeta (Congada master) with his father’s first marimba. These images all play a role as vessels of storytelling to tell a broader history providing distinct but interrelated roles: ritual, protest, festivity, and pedagogy. Such photographs trace time and, importantly, transform personal narratives into collective testimony. In works like Couro na chuva nunca desafina (1983/2025) and Boi de Machado (2025), the blurs of memory appear through photographic serendipity and slips of movement. They are visual embodiments of how recollection behaves that are fluid, partial, away from sharp technicality. 

Other photographic works (1981/1983) document the processes of community building, these images are a documentation of Congada festivities and samba schools in Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, where the artist is from, merging dispersed moments into one living archive. Extending beyond the print is a textile piece honouring his grandfather, Posthumous Memories of São João da Chapada (2025). This work recalls the flags carried in Congada processions, activating his homage through fabric, sown threads onto the image and Sempre-Vivas flowers. The latter are also in the photo-performance series Sempre-Viva – Love Letter (2023). These flowers live forever, always alive despite their decay – they have an affective meaning connected to his grandfather in Minas Gerais too, as found in the family home. Their enduring colour and form embody a quiet permanence, where memory remains even as it changes shape. Here again, material holds resonance. 

Rosa’s practice embraces a symbolic conversation with rivers – a process of being in the water, following its flow, and allowing it to intervene in the making of the image. This thought moves away from traditional photographic processes, inviting nature itself to compose and narrate. The river becomes a storyteller, a metaphor for historical collections among communities, and a witness to the ongoing movement of bodies, of cultures, and histories. Rosa’s new steel sculptures Maps of affect – Singing to Time (2024-2025) extend this dialogue, allowing oxidation, weight, and temperature to join the works’ evolving surfaces. This experimentation continues in the series of Van Dyke photographic prints Couro na chuva nunca desafina (2025), where the organic paper and the image centralise the materials behind  history. Rust, water marks, light, and chemical staining amplify their tactility making visible the memory of each component. 

Across all of Rosa’s works runs a red thread: an engagement with natural materials and elements into his processes, where the image is dependent on a relation with materiality. Rain, sun, and light collaborate with chemical reactions to form the textures of his photographic and sculptural works, where matter becomes a living and active form in his creation. Again, steel, copper, organic paper, and photographic emulsion transform on the surfaces of the works, as they register the echo of cultural transmission of ancestral continuity. They invite us to listen not only to what an image shows but to what its material form quietly carries. The memory of traditions moves and inscribes itself in new processes of contemporary life, just like water, like rhythm, like flowers that refuse to fade with time. 

 

Cindy Sissokho 

 

1 Campt, T. 2017, Listening to Images, Duke University Press.