Acorda, a solo exhibition by Janaina Mello Landini curated by Marcello Dantas, presents a new development in the artist's research by expanding her formal vocabulary into a more organic, sensorial, and process-driven field, in which different materials begin to operate as parts of a single system. The exhibition stems from an idea that matured over time and was finally realized under conditions that allowed the artist to develop the spatial and material complexity she had envisioned for the project.
In this site-specific installation, materials never before present in Janaina's body of work are activated. To her recognizable practice in which thread projects into space, in dialogue with the architecture, elements such as branches, stones, salt, charcoal, water, mosses, fungi, and Verdete — a type of raw potassium brought from São Gotardo, Minas Gerais, the artist's homeland — are now incorporated.
These elements form a circuit of relationships and dependencies, in which structure, decomposition, nourishment, moisture, and transformation mutually contaminate one another. The installation thus approaches a living logic, in which each material acts as part of a larger metabolism.
In the curatorial text, Marcello Dantas likens the exhibition to the image of mycelium: "A silent network that occupies the interstices of the world, capable of digesting everything that life produces, transforms, and abandons. End and beginning in the same weave. The thread that entangles us before we can even name it."
For the first time, Janaina applies the algorithm (−1) directly onto the floor of the exhibition space, through the reappropriation of an earlier work from 2019, now under a different constructive logic. The installation also summoned every thread from the artist's studio, which, at another moment in Acorda, appear affixed to the gallery walls.
Along the path, the visitor passes through different spatial and material situations until reaching a central region formed by branches and weavings that create a kind of inner environment, almost a shelter. In this core, a suspended vessel releases water drop by drop onto a mirror pool on the floor, establishing a slow and insistent temporality tied to introspection, the passage of time, and the alteration of perception.
Around this center, the presence of the different materials activates a sensitive ecology: that which sustains, that which infiltrates, that which mineralizes, that which decays, that which germinates. In Acorda, this investigation shifts from image to living matter: the artist begins to engage directly with organisms in continuous transformation. A continuous flow that traverses matter, time, and perception. Transformation as a constitutive part of the work itself. A field in which decomposition, regeneration, and interdependence are articulated within a single weave.
