In a light rain, I climb the hill that surrounds the Art PlantOn Black Water, PernambucoAt the high meeting Glass, sculpture of Arthur Lescher, one of the most recent works installed in the park. The large metal arch does not stop the wind or the drizzle, but it frames the landscape and the buildings of the old Santa Terezinha Sugar Mill, a sugar producer that has been inactive for almost 30 years. Like a lens, the work reorganizes the view of a place where ruined industrial structures, vegetation, and examples of contemporary art have come to share the same territory.
Created in 2015, Usina de Arte now occupies approximately 45 hectares and brings together more than 50 works and installations by Brazilian and foreign artists. The businessman Ricardo Person De Queiroz and his wife, the architect Bruna, own the property and manage the project. There is no set route to follow when visiting this open-air museum. The works appear randomly among trees, lakes, old buildings, and remnants of the industrial structure, sometimes incorporating the very memory of the place.
The first curator hired, the artist José Rufino, worked directly with these traces. Scopulus, uses an old chair and pieces of wood found in workshops to construct a figure associated with the plantation owner and, in Leagues, brings together machetes used in the past for cutting sugarcane. Márcio Almeida also approaches this past in Tropical Hermitage, which touches upon the "root-producing" morphology, referring to plants that produce roots during the process of displacement. The masonry construction is gradually overtaken by vegetation, in which work and leisure appear as issues linked to the world of sugarcane.
On the facade of the old distillery building, Alfredo Jaar installed Light and Dark, an 18-meter neon sign with a quote from Antonio Gramsci about the interval between a world that is disappearing and another that is yet to be born. The location adds another layer to the work: the neon sign passes through a building that has lost its original function and is now part of a project exclusively dedicated to art.
History helps to understand what has remained in this landscape. Acquired in 1926 by José Pessoa de Queiroz, Ricardo's great-grandfather and nephew of President Epitácio Pessoa, who governed Brazil from 1919 to 1922, the Santa Terezinha Sugar Mill became a sugar complex that was once the most important in the country, bringing together thousands of workers, a workers' village, a school, a church, a market, a hangar, and its own railway spanning over one hundred kilometers.
The first major disruption occurred with the 1930 Revolution. Linked to the defeated political group, José Pessôa de Queiroz became a target of persecution. His newspaper, Jornal do Comércio, was raided, and his mansion in Recife was burned down. He left the country, and the sugar mill underwent a period of external administration and a long dispute to regain control. More than half a century later, in 1982, during the final years of the military dictatorship, an intervention linked to the SNI (National Intelligence Service) removed the shareholders from management. Production was interrupted, labor lawsuits accumulated, and in the following years, part of the assets were fragmented. Rails, locomotives, wagons, and equipment were sold. Industrial activity would never recover.
A considerable part of the factory building, however, remained standing, with sheds, grinding mills, and equipment. Over the years, land and properties were reacquired by the family, many of them through judicial auctions. It is on part of this territory that, decades later, the Usina de Arte (Art Factory) emerges; now the project is also beginning to advance into the old industrial building. The restoration of the roof and window frames has paved the way for a new phase, with interventions on the slabs and the prospect of transforming part of these large spaces into a future museum. The industrial architecture remains exposed, with straight lines, large spans, and a scale determined by the former function of the machines.
Ricardo understands that “the goal was never to restore the complex to a brand-new appearance, but to preserve its architecture and adapt it to future exhibition spaces, keeping visible the marks left by sugar, steam, and labor.” With this principle, contemporary art is beginning to occupy some of the already restored spaces inside the Usina, such as the installation [name of installation missing]. Automata (2017/2025), by André Komatsu, one of the first works incorporated into the future museum. Composed of five modules constructed with steel grids, iron, wired glass, and plastic, the work investigates the permanent processes of construction and deconstruction that shape contemporary cities. This work directly dialogues with the building, which is also undergoing a restoration process. During the same period, Rodrigo Sassi inaugurated his modular work. Fractal, Another part of the collection. In the old distillery of the Usina, with a ceiling height of 14 meters, the 12 identical interlocking pieces form various compositions that stand out against the walls steeped in history. Thus, the future museum begins to take shape without the building needing to hide what it once was.
Outside, among dozens of artists, Marina Abramović occupies the landscape with Generator, A 25-meter wall with sets of quartz cushions offers visitors a physical and concentration-based experience. The artwork's inauguration featured a performance by the artist, who interacted with visitors.
In a critical context, Diva Juliana Notari intervenes directly on a hill with a powerful work in defense of the female body. In atriumMarcelo Silveira, It recreates the structure of the inner courtyard of the old Big House. Bandeirante's Head, Flávio Cerqueira places a figure historically destined for a pedestal horizontally, while Matheus Rocha Pitta, in A Field of HungerThis addresses a fundamental issue in Brazilian society, one that was responsible for the dramatic migrations from the Northeast to the Southeast and South of the country, especially between 1940 and 1970.
Today, the Santa Terezinha area takes on a new dimension with the inauguration of Leonardo da Vinci Square on June 18th, located in the center of the workers' village, where former employees of the sugar mill or their descendants live. There, the artist Narcélio Grud, from Ceará, brings together three interactive sculptures conceived from movement and mechanical principles: Stream Wheel, powered by water, wind or a crank, Interactive Pendulums, balances that create diverse effects from the displacement of bodies and Wind Turbine PlaygroundThese are structures that respond to the action of the wind and produce movements, sounds, and visual effects. The project was born from a partnership between Usina de Arte and O Pequeno Colecionador, an initiative created by Arthur Lescher and Marianne Klettenhofer to bring visual arts closer to the world of play. Some Brazilian artists have already participated in the project in other cities. For Ricardo, Leonardo da Vinci symbolizes curiosity as the engine of knowledge. "Our intention is to awaken in young people the desire to understand how things work, inspiring them to look at the world with inventiveness," he summarizes.
Between the contemplation proposed by Lescher and the physical experience imagined by Grud, the Art Factory finds its balance: preserving memory without immobilizing it, so that it continues to produce new meanings.
