The MAM Sculpture Garden is a landmark in Ibirapuera Park, an iconic place for leisure and socializing in the city of São Paulo. As a transition zone between the MAM and its urban habitat, the garden transcends the boundaries of conventional museum space and, without obstructing the passage of those who walk there, provides the public with a shared space to enjoy through art. Officially inaugurated in 1993, the history of the MAM Garden follows the development of the museum itself and its presence in Ibirapuera Park. Documents indicate that, shortly after the inauguration of the MAM headquarters in the park in 1969, the museum soon became concerned with the care of the works sparsely present there and committed to creating a “Sculpture Garden” with works from its own collection. With the renovation in the 1980s, which established the museum’s characteristic glass façade and transformed its relationship with the park and the city, the use of the Garden was intensified. The curatorial organization was consolidated in 1993, when the works were repositioned, and the space between the Oca, the Bienal pavilion and the MAM received landscaping designed by the office of Roberto Burle Marx, in partnership with Haruyoshi Ono.

Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994) was one of the great names of Brazilian modernism, with a body of work that, through various mediums, contributed to the fields of landscaping, urbanism and ecology. His contributions were essential to consolidating gardens as forms of artistic expression capable of redefining spaces of circulation and, especially, of public importance. Between 1992 and 1993, Burle Marx carried out a landscaping project for Ibirapuera Park that included, in particular, the external area of ​​the MAM and the works from his collection exhibited there. The Sculpture Garden had already been part of two previous versions of Burle Marx's project for the Park, in 1953 and 1974, but it was only in the 1990s that it was fully completed. Conceived by the author as “a space to encourage the practice of artistic coexistence within the community”, the landscaping in the MAM Garden introduced new plant species – grouped together to highlight their common features and, at the same time, explore their different textures and colors – and established paths made of gravel, pebbles and grass, which lead visitors to the works.

At a time when MAM is away from its headquarters due to renovations to the Ibirapuera Park marquee, we propose a kind of reenactment of the MAM Garden at Sesc Vila Mariana, but without any intention of literally reconstituting its plant elements or presenting the same works that make up the original space. Influenced by the voluminous production of Burle Marx, especially the drawings and paintings created during the design process of many of his landscape projects, we have created an exhibition design whose architecture is based on the spatialities, colors, shapes and lines of two important projects: the MAM Sculpture Garden, in Ibirapuera Park, and the garden of the Gustavo Capanema Palace, the former headquarters of the Ministry of Education and Health, in Rio de Janeiro. The former project produced the “islands” that group the works in the exhibition and the topographical variations of the MAM Garden terrain, reflected in the different heights that configure these “islands.” The colors and designs of the bases were inspired by a painting by Burle Marx, created as a study for the garden of the Gustavo Capanema Palace in 1938, which projects an area delimited by sinuous contours and represents different plant species with a variety of colored spots, equally sinuous.

The exhibition at Sesc Vila Mariana includes works that are part of, or have been part of, the set on display at the Ibirapuera Park Sculpture Garden and works from the MAM collection that relate, in different ways, to nature, the body, the city, materiality, and to languages ​​that express some of the inescapable tensions in society. Similar to the activations routinely carried out by MAM Educativo in the Sculpture Garden, the museum's educators will carry out actions during the exhibition period that will highlight various ways of relating to Burle Marx's landscaping that we reinterpret here.