After moving through cities, conversations and studios in France, the 2025 production of M.A.L.A artist’s books has returned to Brazil carrying, beyond the works themselves, layers of shared experience and attentive listening. These books arrive imbued with exchanges with French artists, journeys through libraries, and the resonances that only displacement can produce.
They now encounter a new territory at the Mário de Andrade Library — a territory that, as Milton Santos reminds us, is not limited to physical space, but is constructed through gestures, relationships, encounters and the tensions that run through it. In this context, certain questions emerge:
what happens when a work changes ground? What remains? What transforms?
It is within this horizon that the exhibitionCrossingtakes shape.
”Travessia”, or crossing, as an unfinished movement; as a state of attention; as an attempt to read the world while it is still in the making. A crossing that stitches together differences, frictions and small epiphanies, producing meaning precisely in the interval between what we can name and what still escapes us.
How does an artist’s book inhabit a new space?
What layers emerge when these works enter into dialogue with a city, a library, a different public?
What questions can a book ask of a territory, and what questions does the territory return?
These are inquiries that open small fissures over time and set us in continuous motion: carving new channels, perhaps like rivers or tributaries, allowing the waters of doubt to overflow and open other possible paths.
Throughout the exhibition, conversations continue to unfold: there will be a special meeting with Paulo Silveira, who has researched the field of artist’s books for decades, as well as the launch of the 2025 edition catalog.
More than a conclusion, this stage leaves edges open, announcing continuity. Because this is how M.A.L.A. keeps moving forward: between dialogues and new territorialities, between what we know how to say and what has not yet been named, between the book as object and the book as a living practice of traversal.
Exhibition “Travessia”
Mario de Andrade Library
Rua da Consolação | 94 | 3rd floor | República | São Paulo
Monday to Friday: 9am – 9pm
Saturday and Sunday: 9am – 6pm
Until March 14, 2026
(Exhibition recess: December 18, 2025 to January 7, 2026)
Obra de Emilia Mendes
Obra de Regina DIas
Obra de Flávia Sampaio