The Octagon hosts the unprecedented installation. White flag, by Luana Vitra, developed especially for the central space of the Pina Luz building.

Luana Vitra uses iron, soot, ceramics, work, and the body as constant elements in her production. White flag The artist uses rare earth elements—a set of seventeen chemical elements crucial to the technologies that organize the contemporary world—as a starting point to reflect on the continuities between extractivism, colonialism, and the life forms that emerge from them.

Born in a state steeped in centuries of mining and extractive economies, Vitra is interested in the concrete properties of minerals—their capacity to conduct, weigh, protect, contaminate, or resist—and in the stories these materials condense. For the artist, iron, copper, and lead are simultaneously physical elements and signs of extractive, industrial, colonial, and spiritual processes.

(The exhibition is part of the annual residency program for women artists sponsored by Chanel)