Between Nature and Algorithms: 15 Arte Laguna Prize Artists on Display at the MAMAM Museum in Recife, Brazil
In the heart of Brazil’s Northeast, where the Capibaribe River meets the Atlantic, the Aloísio Magalhães Museum of Modern Art (MAMAM) in Recife becomes, from 8 August to 18 October 2026, a key hub within a global artistic network. Thanks to a collaboration between Arte Laguna Prize, the MoCA association, SAMAM (Friends of MAMAM Association), the Italian Consulate and Recife’s Secretariat of Culture, the museum presents works by fifteen artists recognised at the 20th edition of the Arte Laguna Prize, bringing them together in an international group exhibition entitled Can Artificial Intelligence Help Save and Protect Nature?
The coincidence with the official stop of the touring exhibition of the 36th São Paulo Biennial — hosted simultaneously in Recife at Oficina Francisco Brennand — is not merely a matter of calendar timing, but a sign of a cultural geography in motion. In this context, South America emerges as the epicentre of a new critical modernity, helping to create an “art month” that attracts curators, collectors and critics from around the world.
Mamam Museum a Recife, Brasile
From Venice’s Arsenale to MAMAM in Brazil: A Prize as a Springboard
Arte Laguna Prize does not end with the selection of finalists at Venice’s Arsenale: its Special Prizes become residencies, exhibitions and site-specific projects in museums, galleries and partner institutions around the world.
What begins as recognition is thus transformed into a concrete opportunity for exhibition and exchange: an international cultural network that confirms the prize’s role as a career accelerator as well as a showcase.
Recife, in fact, is not a random destination. Founded in 1960 and named after Aloísio Magalhães — a designer, architect and key figure in Brazilian modernity — MAMAM is itself a manifesto for an idea of art as a social practice. Its home, a modern building on Rua da Aurora, engages with the urban fabric of the port city, historically open to transatlantic influences. The museum’s institutional history and programme reflect its role in promoting modern and contemporary art in Recife.
In this context, the collaboration that made the exhibition at MAMAM possible takes the form of cultural diplomacy in action: not an attempt to export a European model, but the creation of a horizontal circuit in which ideas move in both directions, from Venice to any other country in the world.
15 Artists, One Question: Can Artificial Intelligence Help Save and Protect Nature?
The title of the group exhibition does not provide an answer; instead, it raises a question: can artificial intelligence save and protect nature?
Artificial intelligence does not appear as a miraculous technology, nor simply as a tool at the artist’s service. Rather, it becomes an unstable mirror, capable of reflecting our contradictions, amplifying our responsibilities and forcing us to look at what we would prefer to ignore.
Curated by Vladimir Păun-Vrapciu together with architect and MoCA president Massimo Faranda and Sara Tortato, the exhibition does not propose a uniform aesthetic of innovation. Instead, it creates a field of forces in which different languages — analogue and computational, material and immaterial, individual and collective — meet around the same urgency.
In the galleries of MAMAM, the works form an atlas of different practices: land art, sculpture and installation, video, photography, holography and digital technologies.
In Ancestral Echoes – Wounded Trees, Gioia Maria Aloisi works on Angophora trees using handwoven white flannel and natural red resin, transforming the wound in the landscape into a gesture of care and memory. Anatomy of Posidonia by Echo Morgan shifts attention towards the marine ecosystem through sculpture and installation, while Sveva Maria Eichmann, with Ginestra – A corporal cartoon, continues a practice that brings together architecture, dance and film.
The future takes on an openly ambiguous form in El Jardín del Futuro – Brotes de una Distop-IA by Luichi Gasca, a dystopian short film that questions the reliability of predictions and restores to reality its irreducible, unpredictable capacity to deviate. Juergen Eichler presents Pinguin Society, in which a mountain landscape inspired by Humboldt overlaps with holographic penguins suspended in space, introducing a different way of imagining collective behaviour. With It’s Fantastic, Andrea Penteado creates a “book without paper” made of sound and images: an audio-experience book that gives space to the stories of women who experienced harassment, violence or censorship in Brazil during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The exhibition continues with Surface Truth II by Filip Sendal, which transforms photographed and digitally manipulated skin into a geological surface marked by erosion, scars and traces of time. The Plastic Bag by Andrzej Wasilewski stages an installation resembling a landfill, made up of bags, waste, monitors, video and ambient sounds digitally processed through morphing and generative AI.
Around these works, the exhibition expands through the coordinates, architectures and images suggested by Spatial Reality, Norway by Chang-Rong Lin, The Tomb of the Unknown Civilian by Mariana and Dominic Fantich & Young, Canal de Luz by Susana Mazzarino, Canon 3 by Rosalinda Bingül Sardoğan, Senza soluzione (Seamless) by Rudina Simicija and The Vicious Sea by Kian-Peng Ong. These works broaden the exhibition into a system of resonances between real and imagined geographies, collective memories, landscapes and immaterial flows. It is not a linear sequence, but a space to be traversed.
Completing the journey, while leaving the initial question open, is Snapshots from the Pink Planet by Vladimir Păun-Vrapciu. The work introduces a cosmic and estranging perspective: a view directed towards a planet that may be possible, real or imagined, from which to observe Earth as though it had already become an artefact.
The result is an exhibition that does not separate nature and technology, but forces them to coexist within the same field of vision. The artists do not illustrate the climate crisis; they translate its fractures, rhythms, traces and possibilities. Code can simulate the growth of an ecosystem, photography can transform an ordinary object into an original one, performance can return a body to its vulnerability, while architecture can become a mental space.
At MAMAM, technology does not solve the world: it makes it more complex, more unstable and perhaps, precisely for that reason, more difficult to ignore.
Watch the complete video reportage of the exhibition in Recife directly on the official Globoplay channel -> https://g1.globo.com/pe/pernambuco/bom-dia-pe/video/exposicoes-no-mamam-usam-inteligencia-artificial-para-alertar-sobre-mudancas-climaticas-14860791.ghtml
