Polyamide rug, foam, wood, and spices
150 x 680 x 950 cm


O tempo lento do corpo que é pele (The Slow Pace of the Body That Is Skin) is an amorphous sculpture woven in Brazil from red and sandy strips of rubbery fabric in a traditional weaving technique called "názinho" (little knot). It spreads over the floor like a carpet and resembles an island with hillocks swelling out of its surface. The title makes reference to the skin, the cell, the architectural membrane and the soft silhouette of an animal and underscores Ernesto Neto's fundamental interest in the relationship between body and space, the inside and the outside. This fantastic landscape is imbued with the aroma of spices "turmeric, cloves, pepper, and cumin" regular olfactory ingredients of his works and directs our attention from the visual to the sensual and haptic, from sculpture to environment.

"This idea of the skin is very important in all my works: the skin as the place of existence, and the skin as the place where our internal vibrations deal with external vibrations. I see the body very much as a landscape" like a sea, a field and the sculpture is a landscape. If we look inside our body, there is this new landscape, which has a very important presence in the inspiration for my work, the micro world landscape, the bio landscape. O tempo lento do corpo que é pele shows it very clearly; you can see it as a mountain and/or an animal. This transition is fundamental... The time-space in this piece is related more to the many little knots, the cells, that generate the surface. They were made by the women's cooperative Coparoca. There is something interesting to me about the time they take to make knot by knot with their own hands, so this craft-time is revealing the invisible content." – Ernesto Neto


*1964 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil | Living and working in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil