The French Situationists used to have a revolutionary slogan, ‘Under the paving stones, the beach,’ which referred to the sand found under the cobblestones thrown during the revolts of 1968. A continent and a half-century away, Sallisa Rosa’s work has a similar intent. Rosa has always lived in an urban context (which she says challenges assumptions of Indigenous identity). She was born in centrally located Goiânia, Goiás, and primarily lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. It is the territory – the history – that lies beneath the worn pavements and cracked roads of the city that is the subject of her practice. Having made her first work just five years ago, she has since produced drawings, photography, sculpture, and, increasingly, installation. A 2018 photographic series, ‘Facas Feitas’ (Knives Made), provided an inventory of knives and machetes as a symbol of power, while a watercolor series, ‘The Path’, traced ancient paths used by Indigenous people in Brazil, as well as animal tracks and those carved by rivers. Having taken part in the 2020 residency program of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, last year she had a solo exhibition at the institution. That installation, América, introduced Rosa’s use of clay and ceramics at scale, an approach the artist returns to next month with Topography of Memory, an immersive environment newly commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary, whose in-house curator collaborated with guest curator Thiago de Paula Souza for the Collins Park Rotunda in Miami Beach. The work will travel to Pinacoteca de São Paulo in March 2024 for a solo exhibition. Art Basel spoke to Rosa about Topography of Memory while she was in Amsterdam as a resident of the Rijksakademie.

Could you start by describing your installation in Miami?

I am producing over 100 pieces in ceramic, and each of these objects represents my research into collective ways of remembering, that is, extracorporeal ways of remembering – how memories can be stored beyond an individual. The intention of the installation is to create a repository for such stories. The clay objects will appear to grow like stalagmites, they will hang spherical from the ceiling, and people will be able to navigate their way around them. The space will be lit with amber light to create an underground atmosphere. We live in a world with a lot of stimuli, with light everywhere from buildings, our cell phones, computers. Here, it will be darker, quieter, more contemplative, I hope. A space to go inside yourself.

Tell me a bit about their production.

They are coiled ceramics and I think of the act of making them – in my movement as I work the clay – as a process of transferring my memories into the material. I’m thinking about how one might store memories in or on the earth. I only work with collected clay, which has a very different quality to clay you might buy in a shop. The clay I use comes with so much information already in it. Different regions might have different tones of earth, but all the clay used for this new work was dug from ground near Itaboraí, a town in Rio de Janeiro state. It has a particular materiality to it because it has stones and gravel and other dirt mixed in, even evidence of trash and plastic, because that is all part of the earth now. The kind of clay I would buy in the shop, I don’t know its story, I don’t know anything about it, it’s empty or dead for me. I work with living soil.

You fired these objects in Brazil?

Yes. Itaboraí is an artisanal town, so they already have a lot of people working with the ground there. These artisans often make objects related to the Afro-Brazilian religions, objects that have a spiritual significance or are used in ceremonies. I worked with some of the artisans and fired the ceramics in a wood kiln. The first day you are building the heat, the second day it reaches up to 800 degrees Celsius, and it takes three days in total, constantly keeping the fire going, taking care of the process. It’s not like an electric kiln, where you turn it on and leave it.

Is there a spiritual aspect to your work?

This is not how I look at it. There might be some people who consider all artworks to have a soul, but I’m interested in history. People will often make assumptions and read work by Indigenous artists – or artists from specific backgrounds or parts of the world – in this fashion, but that’s not the focus of my practice.

Can you tell me more about the meaning behind Topography of Memory?

I am working with collected soil and speaking of my right to have my memories embedded in the soil, of who has been allowed to have their memories recorded and who has not, of the fight to recover our story and have our history recorded. It is also about the creation of memories, because a lot of our past has been erased, so we need to recreate it, to create a new history. I’m in Amsterdam currently, on a residency, and I saw someone had a photograph of their great-grandfather in their home. I thought how incredible this was, because in Brazil so many of us don’t know where we came from. We don’t have that to hold on to. There is a movement among my generation to re-establish a story for ourselves, to take back what was stolen.

The work will be installed in a public pavilion in Miami, and the building, a rotunda, has an abstract Modernist relief on the side titled The Story of Man, which seems ironic given the nature of your project.

I think it’s good. It exposes how all narratives are fiction. There is that narrative, and there is the one I’m presenting. In the park where the pavilion is situated, Indigenous people lived. There’s a story that existed before the official story, a story that lies beneath the landscape of the park.

You have worked with the question of memory before, in your installation América, for which you also used clay to build two giant tree-like structures. Can you tell me how the two projects are related?

The title América referred to the continent, but it also referred to my grandmother. I started to think about memory, of when my grandma started to lose hers after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. My mother’s mother, she was called America because she was born on October 12.

The same date Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492.

That work was in her memory, but it was also about the collective memory loss of the Americas. I think it is very interesting that Topography of Memory will be first shown in North America, then come to South America, connecting those histories, or rather those lost histories – the history before this history, before the history that erased the Indigenous people from the story. I’ve created this huge installation as a means of taking back land. It is a topology I’ve made, a temporary geography, a fictional territory that is mine.

Oliver Basciano is a journalist and critic based in São Paulo and London.

Sallisa Rosa is represented by A Gentil Carioca (Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo). Her new installation Topography of Memory was commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary and will premiere at the Collins Park Rotunda during Art Basel Miami Beach. It is open to the public December 5–17, 2023, followed by a presentation at the Pinecoteca de São Paulo, March 16–July 28, 2024. The exhibition was curated by Thiago de Paula Souza in collaboration with Audemars Piguet Contemporary’s in-house curator Denis Pernet.

Audemars Piguet believes that creativity feeds culture, connects people, and gives purpose to our lives. Audemars Piguet Contemporary, the brand’s dedicated art program, embodies this spirit by commissioning international artists to create contemporary artworks. Please click here for more information about the installation.

Published on November 28, 2023.

Captions for images: courtesy of the artist and Audemars Piguet.