Residency and exhibition by Fabiana Ex-Souza and Felipe Shibuya

As part of the France-Brazil cultural season, COAL and its Brazilian partner LABVERDE, the Manaus-based Brazilian center for artistic and environmental research, have come up with a joint artistic residency program focusing on the challenges of tropical biodiversity, crucial to the planet’s ecological balance and the well-being of its populations.

Two Brazilian artists will spend a month (May-June 2025) at the Jardin d’Agronomie Tropicale de Paris-René Dumont, under the supervision of COAL and Cité du Développement: Fabiana Ex-Souza, winner of the Prix COAL 2023, with special mention from the jury, and Felipe Shibuya, an artist from the Ecologie Spéculatives residency program run by Labverde in the Amazon.

Both artists share a deep interest in plant forms, which they each explore through a singular and complementary approach. Fabiana Ex-Souza ‘s artistic approach lies at the crossroads of the living archive and the ritual gesture, and is part of a constellation of decolonial and ecofeminist practices, where care becomes method, and matter a memory to be repaired. As for Felipe Shibuya, his research is at the frontier of the natural sciences, focusing on pigments and the invisible structures of the plant world. His approach pays homage to biodiversity, while revealing the power relationships and formal complexity of the living world.

Gathered in an exhibition to mark the end of their research residency at the Cité du développement durable, Fabiana Ex-Souza will focus on the physical properties of resins – their viscosity, their ability to freeze time, preserve and heal – as well as their metaphorical potential. She sees them as a material in tension: at once protective and wound-fixing, organic substance and chemical archive. Felipe Shibuya, in a tribute to biodiversity, focuses on the links between colonialism, botany and exoticism through the prism of changes in the pigmentation of tropical plants after their displacement in Europe, revealing forced modifications linked to colonial history. His work highlights the links between the exploitation of living organisms and botany, which carries ecological and cultural significance on many levels.

Afro-Brazilian research artist Fabiana Ex Souza was born in Belo-Horizonte in 1980. Combining performance, video, installation and photography, Fabiana Ex-Souza weaves an intimate dialogue with materials, particularly plant matter. With an artistic practice linked to the ecology of care, she invests the notion of the “political body” to reflect on the updating of archives, repairs, transmission and the processes of “transmutation” of what the artist calls “ghost objects”.

Felipe Shibuya is a Brazilian environmentalist and visual artist. His aim is to make nature visible, in all its amazing variety of colors and shapes. He has worked with pigmented bacteria, with the intention of understanding how the colors they synthesize could be communication signals for humans. His dual practice enables him to explore different forms of life, from bacteria to trees, using a variety of methods, from microbiological culture to video.

Discover the full program of the COEXISTENCIA Season at the Garden of Tropical Agronomy HERE.

Event organized as part of the “Brazil France 2025 Season” for the COEXISTENCIA “temps fort” program