Art Park Inhotim

Sometimes my job takes me to unexpected places. This last week, I visited an enormous botanical garden filled with fantastical modern arts pieces. A reserve located in the middle of a mining state, Inhotim realizes the fantastic vision of artists and conservationists both. It's about an hour outside of a major city in the state and is situated in luscious rolling hills upon which sit large installations of various artists. Sounds great, right?


So, you may be a bit skeptical about how this relates to English language teaching, right? Well, the foundation that runs the park has an education project for kids from the public schools in the small town nearby. Their goal is to educate about the environment and the arts and to provide opportunities for workforce development for Inhotim and the industries nearby. With a large portion of the art coming from outside of Brazil and the fame of the institution, they have a lot of international visitors who require English not only to navigate the park but also in the support services such as hotels, restaurants, and other tourist services nearby. Many visitors and artists come from the United States and the area around Minas Gerais is a major economic engine for international agriculture, mining, engineering, and technical companies. So, we are discussing supporting the integration of English into their existing education and training programs... and I got to visit this magical place for a rainy morning during my trip to Belo Horizonte.

I wish I had taken more pictures, but it was raining while we were there. Here are a few shots that I snapped:

A bronze tree suspended in air will eventually grow into the posts you see pictured

Work by Brazilian artist Varejão in a building dedicated to her work

Post #61: If plants could communicate with us...

We went to this exposition yesterday that is a fusion between agriculture, art, and technology. A bunch of students and researchers planted a natural forest around a home and started to actualize the sound of plants through sensors and measure various qualities of the soil, air, and plants to create visualizations. My significant other has been involved in the back-end of this ecological smart home, and throughout the tour I was struck by the inventiveness and melting of nature and technology. Too often, we (ok, I) think of technology and nature in isolation in diametric opposition to one another. Here, one grew out of the other and created feedback loops for human consideration with an ecological message. Fascinating and heartening to see a group of students here in the national capital of Brazil innovating and sharing their message with the wider community. They do outreach to schools so that students can also combine these two aspects of life -- getting kids to learn about batteries and charges at the same time as they interact with plant life. Completely genius. Their FB page has tons of cool videos -- of plant energies being turned into LED displays and sound -- but I couldn't manage to link them (check it out!).

Part of the garden with sensors in it

An exhibition where sensors around the plants take measurements for an entire day and turn each element into sound, so you can hear nature and compare one day to another. Again, increasing human interaction with nature in a very modern way.

Receptacle for emotions

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape... Pablo Picasso

The days are rather gray here and they have been for a while. I guess the daily hours of sunshine that I shared earlier were in earnest. We don't get many glimpses of the sun and days shift from dark to gray to darkness once again. It feels cozy and exotic to be surrounded by darkness -- four o'clock in the afternoon feeling no different than three in the morning. It's rather disorienting to loose your grasp on time, and I suspect it is nearly a year-round phenomenon in northern places where summers are also affected by copious amounts of daylight. Everything in its own balance, I suppose. At the moment, the lingering darkness provides the perfect repose for cups of tea, introspection and creativity. I guess that Picasso had it right; our emotions and artistry often do fall out of the air around us.