A Forts D'Aloia & Gabriel presents How volcanoes work, a group exhibition that inaugurates the 2026 program of CarpentryThe exhibition brings together works by Amélia Toledo, Arthur Chaves, Barrão, Cerith Wyn Evans, Ernesto Neto, Ivens Machado, Janaína Wagner, Leda Catunda, Maria Manoella and Mauro Restiffe, Rivane Neuenschwander and Cao Guimarães, Rodrigo Cass, Rodrigo Matheus, Tiago Carneiro da Cunha, Valeska Soares and Yuli Yamagata.
Conceived in dialogue with the arrival of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, "How Volcanoes Work" uses the image of the volcano as a metaphor for a complex cultural formation. Far from being a visible or immediate phenomenon, the exhibition evokes processes that develop over time, accumulating pressures, desires, conflicts, and fantasies until reaching a point of liberation. In this sense, Carnival is proposed not only as a spectacle, but as the manifestation of a long gestation process shaped by social, material, and symbolic forces.
Encompassing sculpture, installation, drawing, video, painting, and mixed media, the exhibition emphasizes how meaning is produced through duration and material persistence. The works gathered deal with dynamics of accumulation, transformation, and emergence. Bringing together artists from different generations and positions, the show presents practices attentive to states of latency and eruption, suspension and excess. Materials are gathered, superimposed, stretched, compressed, or set in motion, registering tensions between control and unpredictability, structure and instability. The encounter with the works occurs between wonder and tension, between what is staged and what remains latent.
The forms suggest prolonged processes of making and unmaking, while the spatial arrangements reveal thresholds—between interior and exterior, containment and overflow, anticipation and liberation. Instead of illustrating a social or natural phenomenon, these works operate under analogous conditions of pressure and transformation.
Service
Exhibition How volcanoes work
From February 10th to April 11th
Tuesday to Sunday, from 10 am to 19 pm, Saturday, from 10 am to 18 pm
