LUZCIDADE completes itself when light finally meets water. Unlike all others in the series, here the natural environment defeated my parametric design method — literally fell through water. How to predict the physical conditions of the place? Trees, rocks, roots, unpredictable flow of the waterfall. I brought 40 meters of electroluminescent cable to Serra da Mantiqueira without knowing what form the work would take. During installation, immersed in water, I searched for points where I could fix the cables — and these points couldn’t be established according to my will. The environment had its own organizational rules. It was nature.

I fixed the two lower vertices on larger rocks, the upper one on the trunk that guides the water flow. The cables descended submerged in the waterfall perpendicular to the ground, divided, returned to meet the lower vertices. The form built there was a tetrahedron — my original mental plans were for a simple rectangle that would frame the fall. The pyramidal form was infinitely more complex, yet appropriate to that situation. The need became evident to me, mixed with the inability, to rationalize the natural environment to feel like an integral part of it.

Twelve years later, in Floresta Utópica (2020), I returned to nature — but now I knew that you don’t reproduce the forest, you reveal its invisible networks. Mantiqueira was the seed of this understanding. On that October night in 2013, we were 12 people contemplating the illuminated waterfall in the mountains. The next day I dismantled everything. The work existed for one night only. It was enough.