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To think through soil is to engage with some of the most critical issues of our time. In addition to its agricultural role in feeding eight billion people, soil has become the primary agent of carbon storage in global climate models, and it is crucial for biodiversity, flood control, and freshwater resources. Perhaps no other material is asked to do so much for the human(...)
Current Exhibitions
June 2025
Thinking through soil: Wastewater agriculture in the Mezquital Valley
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To think through soil is to engage with some of the most critical issues of our time. In addition to its agricultural role in feeding eight billion people, soil has become the primary agent of carbon storage in global climate models, and it is crucial for biodiversity, flood control, and freshwater resources. Perhaps no other material is asked to do so much for the human environment, and yet our basic conceptual model of what soil is and how it works remains surprisingly vague. In cities, soil occupies a blurry category whose boundaries are both empirically uncertain and politically contested. Soil functions as a nexus for environmental processes through which the planet’s most fundamental material transformations occur, but conjuring what it actually is serves as a useful exercise in reframing environmental thought, design thinking, and city and regional planning toward a healthier, more ethical, and more sustainable future. Through a sustained analysis of the world’s largest wastewater agricultural system, located in the Mexico City–Mezquital hydrological region, ''Thinking Through Soil'' imagines what a better environmental future might look like in central Mexico. More broadly, this case study offers a new image of soil that captures its shifting identity, explains its profound importance to rural and urban life, and argues for its capacity to save our planet.
Current Exhibitions
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As a young boy, Sebastião Salgado loved exploring his parents’ farm in the forests of Brazil, always dreaming of what might lie beyond his view. When he went away to school, he met Lélia, who showed him how to use a camera. As he looked through the lens, Sebastião realized he could use photography to capture how the world fits together. Sebastião used his pictures to tell(...)
Planting hope: A portrait of photographer Sebastião Salgado
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As a young boy, Sebastião Salgado loved exploring his parents’ farm in the forests of Brazil, always dreaming of what might lie beyond his view. When he went away to school, he met Lélia, who showed him how to use a camera. As he looked through the lens, Sebastião realized he could use photography to capture how the world fits together. Sebastião used his pictures to tell the stories of people who might not otherwise be seen. But after witnessing too much destruction, he put away his camera and returned to his childhood home. The land was in ruins. So Sebastião and Lélia decided to rebuild the rainforest and photograph the beauty of the world to save it. Through art and activism, they would show that everyone was responsible for caring for the planet and that hope endures if we take action.
Current Exhibitions
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''The political ecology of education'' examines the opportunities for and constraints on advancing food sovereignty in the 17 de Abril settlement, a community born out of a massacre of landless Brazilian workers in 1996. Based on immersive fieldwork over the course of seven years, David Meek makes the provocative argument that critical forms of food systems education are(...)
The political ecology of education: Brazil's Landless Worker's Movement and the politics of knowledge
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''The political ecology of education'' examines the opportunities for and constraints on advancing food sovereignty in the 17 de Abril settlement, a community born out of a massacre of landless Brazilian workers in 1996. Based on immersive fieldwork over the course of seven years, David Meek makes the provocative argument that critical forms of food systems education are integral to agrarian social movements’ survival. While the need for critical approaches is especially immediate in the Amazon, Meek’s study speaks to the burgeoning attention to food systems education at various educational levels worldwide, from primary to postgraduate programs. His book calls us to rethink the politics of the possible within these pedagogies.
Current Exhibitions
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In "Plant life", Rosetta S. Elkin explores the procedures of afforestation, the large-scale planting of trees in otherwise treeless environments, including grasslands, prairies, and drylands. Elkin reveals that planting a tree can either be one of the ultimate offerings to thriving on this planet, or one of the most extreme perversions of human agency over it. Using(...)
Plant life: the entangled politics of afforestation
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In "Plant life", Rosetta S. Elkin explores the procedures of afforestation, the large-scale planting of trees in otherwise treeless environments, including grasslands, prairies, and drylands. Elkin reveals that planting a tree can either be one of the ultimate offerings to thriving on this planet, or one of the most extreme perversions of human agency over it. Using three supracontinental case studies-scientific forestry in the American prairies, colonial control in Africa's Sahelian grasslands, and Chinese efforts to control and administer territory-Elkin explores the political implications of plant life as a tool of environmentalism. By exposing the human tendency to fix or solve environmental matters by exploiting other organisms, this work exposes the relationship between human and plant life, revealing that afforestation is not an ecological act: rather, it is deliberately political and distressingly social.
Current Exhibitions
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This book presents the full-color prints, made by various artists, of the flora found during José Celestino Mutis' famous 1783 botanical expedition to New Granada (modern Colombia). José Celestino Mutis (1732–1808) was a Spanish priest, botanist, geographer, mathematician, doctor and professor. On three occasions he proposed a botanical expedition to New Granada, where he(...)
José Celestino Mutis: A Botanical Expedition
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This book presents the full-color prints, made by various artists, of the flora found during José Celestino Mutis' famous 1783 botanical expedition to New Granada (modern Colombia). José Celestino Mutis (1732–1808) was a Spanish priest, botanist, geographer, mathematician, doctor and professor. On three occasions he proposed a botanical expedition to New Granada, where he had arrived in order to serve as the viceroy's doctor. After many years without a positive answer from the Spanish Crown, King Charles III, who had studied botany, accepted. The expedition started in 1783 and spanned three decades. It did not generate spectacular scientific findings, but the drawing school that was created to record the flora produced prints of exceptional quality. Among the artists, Salvador Rizo and Francisco Javier Matís were the most outstanding; Matís in particular was described by polymath Alexander Humboldt as the best botanical illustrator in the world.
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In this sweeping chronicle of guaraná—a glossy-leaved Amazonian vine packed with more caffeine than any other plant—Seth Garfield develops a wide-ranging approach to the history of Brazil itself. The story begins with guaraná as the pre-Columbian cultivar of the Sateré-Mawé people in the Lower Amazon region, where it figured centrally in the Indigenous nation's origin(...)
Guaraná: How Brazil Embraced the World's Most Caffeine-Rich Plant
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In this sweeping chronicle of guaraná—a glossy-leaved Amazonian vine packed with more caffeine than any other plant—Seth Garfield develops a wide-ranging approach to the history of Brazil itself. The story begins with guaraná as the pre-Columbian cultivar of the Sateré-Mawé people in the Lower Amazon region, where it figured centrally in the Indigenous nation's origin stories, dietary regimes, and communal ceremonies. During subsequent centuries of Portuguese colonialism and Brazilian rule, guaraná was reformulated by settlers, scientists, folklorists, food technologists, and marketers. Whether in search of pleasure, profits, professional distinction, or patriotic markers, promoters imparted new meanings to guaraná and found new uses for it. Today, it is the namesake ingredient of a multibillion-dollar soft drink industry and a beloved national symbol. Guaraná’s journey elucidates human impacts on Amazonian ecosystems; the circulation of knowledge, goods, and power; and the promise of modernity in Latin America's largest nation. For Garfield, the beverage's history reveals not only the structuring of inequalities in Brazil but also the mythmaking and ordering of social practices that constitute so-called traditional and modern societies.
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Since the 1500s, scientists have documented the plants and fungi that grew around them, organizing the specimens into collections. Known as herbaria, these archives helped give rise to botany as its own scientific endeavor. "Herbarium" is a fascinating enquiry into this unique field of plant biology, exploring how herbaria emerged and have changed over time, who promoted(...)
Herbarium: The quest to preserve and classify the world's plants
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Since the 1500s, scientists have documented the plants and fungi that grew around them, organizing the specimens into collections. Known as herbaria, these archives helped give rise to botany as its own scientific endeavor. "Herbarium" is a fascinating enquiry into this unique field of plant biology, exploring how herbaria emerged and have changed over time, who promoted and contributed to them, and why they remain such an important source of data for their new role: understanding how the world’s flora is changing. Barbara Thiers, director of the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium at the New York Botanical Garden, also explains how recent innovations that allow us to see things at both the molecular level and on a global scale can be applied to herbaria specimens, helping us address some of the most critical problems facing the world today.
Current Exhibitions
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Quoi de plus iconoclaste qu’un herbier composé entre quatre murs, sans l’étendue de la nature? Comme une contradiction dans les termes. « L’herbier de prison » de Rosa Luxemburg est une archive sans équivalent. Troublante et attachante, sa fragilité et son histoire en font un témoignage de résistance et d’évasion, une fabrique de formes et de joie, un document sur le(...)
Herbier de prison : 1915-1918
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Quoi de plus iconoclaste qu’un herbier composé entre quatre murs, sans l’étendue de la nature? Comme une contradiction dans les termes. « L’herbier de prison » de Rosa Luxemburg est une archive sans équivalent. Troublante et attachante, sa fragilité et son histoire en font un témoignage de résistance et d’évasion, une fabrique de formes et de joie, un document sur le sentiment politique de la nature, fondement de toute écologie. Composé de sept cahiers datés d’avril 1915 à octobre 1918, l’herbier a pu être réalisé par la révolutionnaire emprisonnée grâce à l’amitié sans faille de quelques femmes, ses amies intimes dont la féministe Clara Zetkin. Au-delà des quelques fleurs et mauvaises herbes de la cour de la prison que Rosa glane lorsqu’elle sort sous surveillance, ce sont ses proches qui lui envoyèrent par lettres des spécimens séchés ou des bouquets fleurs fraîches qu’elle-même pressait. Aux planches de l’herbier répondent ainsi tout une correspondance où il est question de botanique, de nature, de romantisme allemand, d’amour de toutes créatures, et cela, « en dépit de l’humanité ». Rosa Luxemburg ne cesse d’encourager ses proches à garder leur joie de vivre et leur gaieté alors que les nuages qu’elle entraperçoit par une fenêtre à barreaux se chargent des couleurs de la guerre et de l’acier.
Current Exhibitions
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Joseca Yanomami (born 1971) is a member of the Indigenous Yanomami people in the brazilian Amazon. His drawings depict Yanomami culture and history and address the conflict between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. This book reproduces 93 drawings held by MASP, the most substantial existing collection of his work.
Yoseca Yanomami: Our forest land
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Joseca Yanomami (born 1971) is a member of the Indigenous Yanomami people in the brazilian Amazon. His drawings depict Yanomami culture and history and address the conflict between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. This book reproduces 93 drawings held by MASP, the most substantial existing collection of his work.
Current Exhibitions
Futur ancestral
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La crise écologique a modifié les termes du dialogue entre Modernes et peuples autochtones. À la promesse d’un futur débarrassé de la misère à grand renfort de prouesses technologiques, nous découvrons un monde diminué dans toutes ses formes de diversités, qui nous a rendu aveugles à ce qui nous entoure. Aujourd’hui des voix émergent qui font entendre des cosmovisions(...)
June 2025
Futur ancestral
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La crise écologique a modifié les termes du dialogue entre Modernes et peuples autochtones. À la promesse d’un futur débarrassé de la misère à grand renfort de prouesses technologiques, nous découvrons un monde diminué dans toutes ses formes de diversités, qui nous a rendu aveugles à ce qui nous entoure. Aujourd’hui des voix émergent qui font entendre des cosmovisions différentes, parmi lesquelles se trouve l’insistante et poétique parole d’Ailton Krenak. Dans cet ouvrage, il part en quête de la force des pensées et pratiques autochtones?: Que devient l’expérience du monde lorsque l’on considère les fleuves et les montagnes comme des entités vivantes?? Que signifie reforester nos imaginaires et réinventer la séparation entre ville et forêt?? Comment réactiver la florestania, cette idée née de l’alliance des peuples de la forêt amazonienne pour combattre sa destruction?? Pour Ailton Krenak s’il y a un futur à imaginer, il est ancestral, car il est déjà présent dans tous les milieux de vie, qu’il appartient, à celles et ceux qui les partagent, de défendre.