Tororoma: Into the Depths of the São Francisco River

At the Inhotim Institute in Minas Gerais, Brazil, davi de jesus do nascimento transforms his lifelong relationship with the São Francisco River into an immersive encounter shaped by family memory, inherited knowledge and generations of life along its banks.Curated by Deri Andrade, Tororoma evokes the histories, traditions and mysteries held within this vast waterway and the communities formed around it, moving beyond landscape.

Suzette Bell-Roberts

22 September 2026

When you step into Tororoma, davi de jesus do nascimento’s installation at Inhotim, the atmosphere shifts. The lights grow dim. Wet clay covers the floor, and its dampness, texture, and earthy smell make the ground part of the experience. The sound of flowing water fills the room. The space feels underground, almost like entering a cave. Your eyes adjust slowly; you notice each step, and the usual separation between viewer and artwork starts to fade.

The title offers the first hint of what nascimento has made. Broadly, ‘tororoma’ refers to the moment when a river is at its peak, swollen, muddy, roaring, and full of energy. Rather than presenting the São Francisco River as a scene to look at, nascimento brings its turbulent core to life. Curator Deri Andrade explains that the installation puts us at the river’s whirlpool, its deepest spot, where a vortex pulls down branches, animals, roots, stones, earth, and everything else swept up by the flood.

The São Francisco River is one of Brazil’s main rivers, stretching about 2,900 kilometres from Minas Gerais through the country’s interior to the Atlantic Ocean. For nascimento, though, the river means something personal. He was born in 1997 in Pirapora, Minas Gerais, and calls himself a ‘barranqueiro’, a word for people who live along the riverbanks. His family includes washerwomen, fishers, and woodworkers from the region, whose lives and knowledge the river has shaped.

There is a difference between making art about a river and making art from within a culture shaped by it. nascimento’s work comes from the second approach. The São Francisco River is not just a topic he chose to study, and water is not just a symbol for him. The river shapes how he understands family, work, spirituality, ecology, and belonging, and it has influenced his art for over ten years.

This background makes Tororoma‘s sensory design especially meaningful. Wet clay, dim cave-like lighting, video, sound, reflections, and carved carrancas do more than set a mood. Together, they create an environment you have to move through physically. Seeing is just one part of the experience.

The transition starts at the building entrance, where two carrancas stand on either side like guardians. Master carver Expedito Viana Rodrigues, a leading figure in this Brazilian sculptural tradition, made these especially for Tororoma. They draw on carved figureheads once placed on boats travelling the São Francisco River. Traditionally, carrancas were seen as protectors who cleared the way for boatmen. In the installation, they mark the entry, and a third carranca sits at the centre, watching over the space.

The carranca has been part of nascimento’s work for a long time. It shows up often in his drawings, objects, and performances, especially in Gritos de Alerta, a large series where the figures appear in many changing forms. Mouths open, bodies twist, and hybrid creatures gather in dense groups that suggest protection, warning, and outcry. Instead of treating the carranca as a fixed symbol of local culture, nascimento allows it to change and take on new meaning.

In Tororoma, the commissioned carvings are not old artefacts placed in a modern show, nor are they meant to prove cultural authenticity. They are part of a living sculptural tradition and were made specifically for this installation. Their presence connects nascimento’s ongoing work with the Carranca to the experience of entering the space.

The exhibition shows the São Francisco River at its most powerful and unpredictable. The whirlpool at the centre of nascimento’s installation is both a real event and an idea—a place where things vanish, collide, and change shape. Change has always been important in nascimento’s work, especially in how he sees the connection between bodies and their environment.

A key idea in his work is the ‘corpo-embarcação’, or body-vessel. Instead of seeing the body as separate, nascimento sees it as shaped by its surroundings and by inherited histories. Boats and bodies often come together in his art, while fishing nets, wood, boat pieces, and everyday objects move between use, memory, and art.

The piece Pesca-ameaça de naufrágio da barca ou ensaio para morrer com o rio (2016) was one of the first times Nascimento brought these ideas together. In it, he shows his body caught in a fishing net, linking the body, fishing, vulnerability, and water—a connection he would explore further in later works.

In Tororoma, visitors become part of this idea. The wet clay changes the gallery floor, making each step noticeable. Dim lighting slows down how people move and look around. The sound of water fills the space without a clear source. Reflections change how the walls appear. The installation is multisensory, but these features aren’t just for immersion—they change how people experience the space.

Scorpions appear on the walls, another repeated symbol in nascimento’s art. Andrade links them to the ancient way these creatures first came out of water, fitting them into the installation’s shift between water and land. Like the carrancas, they bring something both familiar and unsettling to the space.

The video created for Tororoma expands the project in both location and ideas. It was filmed in the Cavernas do Peruaçu National Park in Januária, Minas Gerais, continuing nascimento’s work in the north of his home state. The caves add a geological aspect to his practice, which often deals with what is hidden or only partly seen. For this project, nascimento also travelled further down the São Francisco River to Piranhas and Ilha do Ferro in Alagoas, taking his research beyond Pirapora.

The work also includes a literary reference. The word ‘tororoma’ appears in João Guimarães Rosa’s short story The Third Bank of the River, where a man leaves his family to live alone in a canoe, staying in a mysterious place between both banks. The story deals with absence, separation, family, and the challenge of understanding a choice that is never explained.

nascimento does not simply illustrate Rosa’s story. Instead, the reference deepens the installation’s ambiguity—the tension between what is visible and what is hidden, between the familiar and the unknown.

These themes are deeply rooted in nascimento’s work.

Family photographs have long been central to nascimento’s practice. After his mother’s death, the images he inherited became a starting point for exploring family history, memory and life around the São Francisco River. His father, a fisherman, carpenter and boatbuilder, has also been an important collaborator, connecting this personal history to the wider community of Pirapora.

This expanded in Barranca, developed through the Bolsa ZUM/IMS in 2024 and presented at Festival ZUM in 2025. With his father facilitating encounters with fishermen, washerwomen and local families, nascimento gathered photographs found in albums and, sometimes, loose inside fishermen’s toolboxes. Presented alongside a boat his father made more than twenty years earlier, along with hooks, tools, embroidered cloths, and devotional objects, these materials broadened the idea of what an archive might be and where it might reside. The shift from personal to collective memory continued in concerns explored in mau da língua (2023–24), where photography, video, sculpture, and drawing appeared alongside fishing nets, family portraits, carrancas, and a three-prowed canoe. Across these works, ordinary objects and family images become records of lives, labour and knowledge that might otherwise remain outside formal archives.

nascimento’s use of language is important on its own. Words like “corpo-embarcação, águas guardadas, and aguamentos barranqueiros” do not translate easily because they belong to a vocabulary he created through his work, rooted in Portuguese and local speech, family stories, and regional experiences. Instead of just moving the culture of the São Francisco River into contemporary art, nascimento creates a language that keeps its unique qualities.

These earlier works also show why mud is important in Tororoma. The title refers to a river in flood, when the water is thick with earth and organic material. The wet clay under visitors’ feet brings this feeling into the gallery. It is a direct, sensory experience and does not have to represent everything the exhibition addresses.

The whirlpool brings in a related but different idea. At its centre, things carried by the water sink below the surface. In a practice focused on family photos, inherited objects, and histories that are not always kept in official archives, this idea is especially powerful. nascimento’s work often asks how memory lasts when its physical traces are scattered, lost, or changed.

His answer is rarely about preserving things in the usual way.

Family photos move from private albums to become artworks. His father’s boat now sits in an exhibition. The carrancas are newly carved but still belong to an old sculptural tradition. Local sayings become part of contemporary art without losing their origins. In Nascimento’s work, keeping things going does not mean keeping them unchanged.

That is why the carrancas commissioned in Tororoma are so important. This is why the carrancas made for Tororoma matter so much. Expedito Viana Rodrigues carved them for the installation, connecting today’s art to the special skills passed down through making. They reference tradition and show that it is still alive and active today. Practices are just as closely linked. The São Francisco River is connected to work, community, family history, and how people understand their place in the area. Environmental change therefore affects the water and the cultural practices and knowledge built around it.

At Inhotim, all these ideas come together in the building itself

Galeria Nascente has a special meaning. It was once a stable on the old farm where Inhotim is now located. The building was changed and renamed Nascente, which means spring or source in Portuguese, before reopening with Tororoma. The property used to be called Olhos d’água because many springs and streams ran nearby. This connection fits well, even though the exhibition does not rely on it.

More importantly, nascimento makes sure the gallery is not just a neutral space. Wet earth changes the floor. Darkness changes how the building feels. Water comes in through sound and reflections. Carrancas stand at the entrance and inside. Scorpions appear on the walls. Video brings in the Cavernas do Peruaçu and adds another sense of place and time.

The result is a multisensory experience that does not turn into a spectacle, because its sensory features come from ideas already present in nascimento’s work. Gritos de Alerta, mau da língua, Barranca, and the corpo-embarcação are important earlier projects that lead up to the immersive environment in Tororoma.

When you stand inside the installation, with wet clay under your feet, the sound of water around you, and the carrancas watching over, it is clear that nascimento is not trying to recreate the São Francisco River in the gallery. Instead, he brings together elements that let people experience different connections to the river—physical, family, cultural, spiritual, and historical.

This difference matters. Tororoma does not try to capture the full complexity of a river that runs for thousands of kilometres across Brazil. Instead, it starts from something more personal: the knowledge of an artist born by the river, the stories of his family and community, and an artistic language built over years of working with the materials, images, stories, and practices that have shaped his sense of home.

At Inhotim, all these elements come together in nascimento’s most immersive expression of this relationship. The installation invites us to move differently, look more slowly, and notice senses beyond just sight. In this way, Tororoma lets us experience the São Francisco River not as a picture or faraway place, but through the lived and inherited connections that have shaped nascimento’s art.

Tororoma (2026), by davi de jesus do nascimento, was curated by Deri Andrade for Instituto Inhotim. The installation was conceived specifically for the newly requalified Galeria Nascente and opened on 25 April 2026.