Surdo, cuíca, chocalho, pandeiro, agogô, repique: one does not need to know the instruments’ vocabulary by heart to enjoy Ernesto Neto’s fun. Neither one needs to be Brazilian, know how to play nor have any sense of rhythm. Since May, when the Rio de Janeiro artist premiered the installation Nosso Barco Tambor Terra at MAAT, arriving at the museum is to let oneself be carried away by the multicoloured dysrhythmia of the batuque, regardless of one’s age or nationality. Sheer joy in art form!

The opening ceremony was a collective catharsis. Brazilian musicians joined Lisbon’s samba and drum circles – there were about sixty professional and amateur percussionists – and, within the first few minutes of the exhibition, the public organically flooded into the installation and seized the instruments to add to the batucada. The work, stretching the entire length of Sala Oval, is formed by a crocheted mesh of hundreds of metres of chita (a printed cotton fabric widely popular in Brazil), forming a gigantic tent. Typical of Ernesto Neto’s work, the weights and counterweights shaped as droplets are what hold this mesh in the air. As explained by the exhibition’s curator Jacopo Crivelli Visconti, his work always emphasises gravity: the centre of the earth, the life force.

Everything inside the pavilion-hut is sensation: sound, smell, touch, welcome. Besides the dozens of instruments fastened to crochet threads, seeds and beans, corn and coffee beans fill the pots, tree bark lines the floor, and spices such as turmeric, cumin and cinnamon exude scent into the air. Neto’s artworks are all about space and collectiveness; communication between humans and non-humans transcends language and rationality. His sculptures bring the idea of art’s healing power to the fore, because they show us new ways of relating. He draws attention to the wisdom of the body, ancestral knowledge and the role of nature.

Ernesto Neto had already been addressing anthropocentrism, cosmovisions and indigenous knowledge even before it became a must-have agenda across the art world. Questions that had been part of his output for more than 30 years came to a boiling point when he encountered the Huni Kuin Indians in 2013, the 7500 people who inhabit part of the state of Acre in northern Brazil. “They led me to question my action on the land, my knowledge of plants and to understand that humanity can only find its cure through self-knowledge,” Neto said during our interview in 2019, shortly after the opening of his large-scale solo show Sopro at Pinacoteca de São Paulo. His coexistence with such shamans spawned gigantic installations such as Um Sagrado Lugar, part of the main exhibition at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, for which he invited a group of indigenous people to conduct ritual performances.

In the 1980s, Ernesto Neto’s early career centred on concepts such as weight, gravity, volume and transparency, and their relationship to the body. In the 1990s, his research broadened to include the collective body, and so his works became true architectural compositions involving several individuals in a single space. At times, as is the case with GaiaMotherTree, shown at Zurich’s central railway station in 2018, the proposal is somewhat less vigorous than batucada: a setting for passers-by to stop, relax and breathe. Rare artistic experiences in which we really let ourselves be swept away by the laid-back, gentle and enjoyable atmosphere.

Nosso Barco Tambor Terra is at MAAT in Lisbon until October 7, 2024.