ORE: Sound, Stone, and Deep Time at Fondation CAB Brussels

The Tupi-Guarani word for “being,” as writer and ecologist Kaká Werá has explained, is rooted in sound: Tu meaning sound, Pi meaning tone. A being, in this understanding, is an incarnated sound. This is point of departure for ORE, the new collaborative exhibition by Paloma Bosquê and Roberto Freitas, currently on view at Fondation CAB in Brussels. This concept also sets the philosophical tone for the work on view in the exhibition.

Paloma Bosquê, who lives and works between Brazil and Europe, has shown recently at Karin Guenther in Hamburg and Mendes Wood DM in São Paulo and Brussels. Her practice understands Earth as body and geological processes as sculptural gestures, bodies as permeable matter in continuous transformation, establishing and dismantling connections within and beyond the visible. Brazilian artist Roberto Freitas, now based in Brussels, has built a practice since 2002 that moves fluidly across cinema, dance, music, sculpture, performance, and installation. Bosquê invited Freitas to collaborate with her on this exhibition, which began with an invitation from Van Den Weghe stone atelier. Bosquê, whose research into geological time and material memory anchors the collaboration, with Freitas developing work that complements their two practices.

The exhibition centres on two monumental site-specific installations. Oco (Hollow) comprises five hybrid sculptures, sewn collagen casings holding wool-felt eggs embedded with rare-earth magnets, suspended above marble bowls filled with iron and copper. A custom-built system captures radio waves and urban electromagnetic noise, converting them into electrical pulses that generate a magnetic field around each bowl. The magnets respond, setting the sculptures in perpetual, unpredictable motion. The result is a living seismograph of our invisible electromagnetic environment, something between organism and instrument.

Canoe consists of a fossilised tree trunk, its original wood entirely replaced by silica over millions of years, which has been vertically excavated to become a resonance chamber. A carbon fibre drumstick strikes its surface at intervals, releasing frequencies shaped by the density of the fossil and the geometry of its newly hollowed form. Where Oco is tuned to the present, Canoe opens onto geological time: the sound of deep history, made audible now. Alongside these installations, Bosquê’s Fracture series presents individual stone sculptures made in oak grey, Belgian bluestone, and Rosso Levanto marble; each cleaved to reveal an interior rift, the gap between what a material was and what it has become.

Bosquê and Freitas have made something genuinely immersive in this exhibition, presenting a powerful resonance and an archive of Earth’s pressures and transformations that you can hear as much as see.

ORE runs until 18 July 2026. Fondation CAB Brussels