Stroll at the Grand Palais

In the majestic northern nave of the Grand Palais, recently reopened to the public, Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto unveils a monumental and vibrant work that transforms the space into a true organic sanctuary. Until July 25, 2025, Nosso Barco Tambor Terra (“Our Boat Drum Earth”) invites visitors into a multisensory experience—visual, tactile, olfactory, and auditory.

From the very entrance, visitors are immersed in a world of suspended materials, colorful crocheted fabrics, natural fibers, and spicy aromas. Bags of seeds hang like strange fruits, cotton vines coil through the air like celestial roots, while earthy rugs invite people to take off their shoes and reconnect directly with the ground. Here, art is not meant to be merely observed: it is meant to be lived, passed through, breathed in, and touched.

True to his artistic language—deeply rooted in Amazonian indigenous traditions and holistic philosophies—Ernesto Neto offers an immersive work that feels like a collective ceremony. The title, Nosso Barco Tambor Terra, is a poetic manifesto in itself: the boat evokes journeys and crossings, particularly transatlantic ones; the drum recalls universal pulses and ancestral rhythms; and the earth represents our shared foundation, the nourishing matrix. These elements come together to form a space where colonial history, diasporic cultures, and indigenous knowledge enter into a sensual dialogue.

Suspended beneath the Grand Palais’s vast glass roof, the installation—composed of soft textiles—resonates with the iron-and-glass structure that shelters it. It is a meeting between the living and the architectural, the organic and the monumental. Far from freezing art in museum silence, Neto transforms the space into a place of passage, ritual, and gathering. Hidden drums beneath the vaults occasionally resonate, activated during musical performances or percussion workshops held throughout the summer.

Indeed, this exhibition is part of the broader France–Brazil Season 2025, and comes with a rich cultural program: concerts, sensory workshops, meditation sessions, herbalism, and even participatory crochet. Every weekend, the Grand Palais becomes a space of life, celebration, and transmission.

This art-place—at once fragile and powerful—offers a welcome breath amidst urban frenzy. It reminds us that art can still—and must—be a space for connection, memory, and care. Through this jungle of fabric and color, Ernesto Neto gently but firmly extends his hand, inviting us to slow down, to listen differently to the world, and to feel—deeply—that we are part of a whole.

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Stroll at the Grand Palais

Stroll at the Grand Palais

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