TERRA, Linguagem da Serpente 五 by Rodrigo Garcia Dutra (mixed media on wood, 2025).
The artwork’s textured surface and geometric ideogram fuse gestural abstraction with a precise visual language.
Gestural Earth and Geometric Legacy
Rodrigo Garcia Dutra’s TERRA, Linguagem da Serpente 五 presents a richly layered, textured surface splashed and dripped with pigment—an all-over field reminiscent of Jackson Pollock’s gestural mark-making. This painterly ground swirls in earthen tones, as if evoking soil, lava, and cosmic dust all at once. Upon this vibrant, chaotic “terrain,” a central ideogram emerges: a crisp configuration of sharp-edged geometric cuts, assembled into a sigil-like form. The contrast is striking. The background is organic and turbulent, while the foreground shape is exacting and crystalline. It is as if two art historical lineages meet here: the wild freedom of Abstract Expressionism and the disciplined order of geometric abstraction. Dutra, a Brazilian artist, knowingly bridges these worlds. The central motif recalls Brazil’s legacy of Concretism and Neo-Concretism – one thinks of Hélio Oiticica’s bold colored forms, Lygia Clark’s interactive geometric sculptures, Lygia Pape’s layered patterns, or Willys de Castro’s planar constructions. Those mid-20th century artists sought a new “universal language” of form, using geometry to spark spiritual and bodily awareness. In TERRA, Linguagem da Serpente 五, the geometric ideogram carries that legacy forward, appearing as a kind of totemic sign planted in a field of painterly matter. It invites us to read it not just as shape, but as symbol – as language. Dutra’s practice often “revisits moments in time that influenced the world’s aesthetics… reworking found elements and symbols”, and here the symbol he generates is rooted in both the past and future of painting.
This ideogram, with its interlocking facets and voids, might resemble an impossible letter or an ancient glyph. Its sharp geometry is born from precise cuts into painted wood, literally incising meaning into material. We can imagine Dutra in the studio layering pigments in a trance of gestural improvisation, then intervening with knife or laser-cut shapes, excising and assembling a new form. The result is a painting that is also a low-relief sculpture – a painting that writes. In Brazilian Neo-Concretism, the separation between painting, sculpture, and viewer was often dissolved; here too the painting-object blurs boundaries, suggesting both a surface and a sign, both an image and a portal. The floating geometric figure has a presence like an ideogram or glyph of power, calling to mind indigenous petroglyphs or mystical diagrams. It stands on the canvas as if it were a sacred geometry – a fragment of some larger cosmic script.
Serpent-Tongue at the Threshold of the Visible
Dutra’s title, “Linguagem da Serpente” (Language of the Serpent), and the serpent-like quality of the ideogram guide our interpretation. The central form can be seen as a serpent-tongue – bifurcated, flickering, sensing. A snake’s tongue is a liminal organ, flickering between inside and outside, tasting the air. Here, the serpent-tongue ideogram operates as a symbolic and material interface between the visible and the vibrational. It is as if the painting’s geometric sigil is translating unseen energies into a communicable sign. The artist has described A Linguagem da Serpente series as inspired by the idea that the universe is composed of vibrating strings – an allusion to string theory – in resonance with indigenous myths of a cosmic serpent as creator. “According to the artist, the universe is made of sinuous forms that vibrate and create matter, light, sound and color,” and indigenous cosmologies similarly revere the serpentine form as a divine creator. In the artwork, the sinuous vibrations of the background (splashes of color and texture) seem to coalesce into the serpent ideogram, suggesting that this sign has crystallized out of the vibrating field of reality. It stands at the threshold: part chaos, part code.
We might think of this ideogram as a kind of geomantic glyph – geomancy being an ancient practice of divining meaning from patterns in earth or sand. The painting’s speckled, granular background indeed resembles stratified earth or Amazonian clay, and the serpentine sign inscribed upon it evokes a ritual mark or a compass of energies. In many ancestral traditions, the serpent is a guardian of thresholds and a mediator between worlds. The Cosmic Tree – a world-axis connecting heavens and earth – is “often marked by the form of the serpent” in numerous mythologies. The serpent coils at the roots of the world tree or spans the rivers and mountains, a sentinel of the liminal. Here, Dutra’s serpent-tongue ideogram could be seen as just such a cosmological marker: a pathway between worlds. It is geomantic in that it resonates with the earth (terra) and also with something beyond, the unseen vibrations (“línguagem” or language) that the serpent conveys.
Importantly, the serpent in this work is not merely a symbol to be looked at – it is an active agent. The title implies a language, suggesting the serpent-sign speaks. Imagine the central ideogram as an oscillating antenna or a mouth emitting silent frequencies. It operates at a register beyond human sight, yet the artist has made it visible through art. This aligns with an expanded view of painting: no longer a static image, but a dynamic interface. What we once called painting now burns with life, its scales flickering, to paraphrase the artist’s own poetic notes. The gestural field behind the ideogram feels alive with movement – layers of drips and splatters overlap like sediment, each color a different mineral or frequency. The serpent-sign gathers this energy, focusing it. In this sense, Dutra’s work acts as a sensorium: we, as viewers, are invited to feel the frequencies it depicts. The painting, situated between the visible pigment and the vibrational idea, attunes us to what we might call a geomantic consciousness – an awareness of the living earth as full of signs and signals.
Chthulucene Cosmology and Autopoietic Life
To further unfold the speculative cosmology behind this work, we can draw on contemporary theories that blur the line between biology, physics, and myth. Donna Haraway’s idea of the Chthulucene is especially resonant. Haraway proposes the Chthulucene as an epoch of entangled multispecies storytelling, an era of “tentacular” connectivity in which humans are not central but part of an ongoing web of life. She contrasts it with the self-contained nature of autopoietic systems, emphasizing instead sym-poiesis – making-with, rather than self-making. “The earth of the ongoing Chthulucene is sympoietic, not autopoietic,” Haraway writes, meaning that earthly life forms do not make themselves in isolation; they continuously spin out connections, “loopy tendrils”, in a open-ended network. The serpent-tongue ideogram in Dutra’s painting could be seen as one of those tentacular tendrils – a reaching feeler connecting domains, much like Haraway’s spiders and cephalopods that weave the fabric of the Chthulucene. Its very form is tentacular: sharp points and looping zig-zags that hint at movement along a surface. It is as if a tentacle of the earth has inscribed a message in this artwork, reminding us that we exist in a web of relationships, not in isolated spheres.
At the same time, the painting engages with the concept of autopoiesis, formulated by biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Autopoiesis refers to a system capable of maintaining and reproducing itself by its own processes – literally a self-creating network. Living cells are autopoietic; so are, arguably, cultures and artworks in their symbolic order. The Linguagem da Serpente series itself can be thought of as an autopoietic exercise: Dutra generates a new symbol (a new “organ”) from the iterative gestures of painting, and that symbol in turn suggests an entire world (or organism) that could sustain itself. The painting is rife with self-similarity – the splattered patterns of the background echo in miniature the larger fractal logic of the serpent form. This recalls the notion in complexity science that life is composed of repeating patterns, scales within scales. Indeed, the artist explicitly connects his serpent motifs to the idea that fundamental vibrations create matter. We might say the painting presents a world in which matter and sign co-produce each other: the material textures give rise to the sign, and the sign reorganizes our perception of the material textures. This is a kind of autopoietic loop – the painting generates the meaning that in turn animates the painting.
Yet, as Haraway would remind us, autopoiesis alone is not a sufficient model for the living earth. The painting’s symbol is not a closed system; it reaches out to the viewer and the environment. In the glow of the Chthulucene, we see the serpent-tongue ideogram as a call for sympoiesis – a making-with across species and scales. It stands as an invitation to “become-with” the earth, to join in the conversation of soil, plants, ancestors, and spirits. The artwork’s cosmology is thus one of partnership: the human artist collaborating with nonhuman forces (paint’s materiality, gravity’s drips, wood’s texture, the archetype of the Serpent) to produce something new. It is a humus-oriented vision, to borrow Haraway’s pun of human as humus. We are reminded that “human” is rooted in humus (soil) – that we are part of the earth’s flesh. The serpent’s language might then be another name for what Haraway calls the “ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with” in the Chthulucene. In Dutra’s speculative cosmos, a geomantic serpent glyph mediates between autopoietic selfhood and symbiotic entanglement, suggesting that our world is both self-organizing and radically interdependent.
Black Earth: Terra Preta and Kemet’s Fertile Soil
The title TERRA foregrounds earthiness – not just earth as planet, but earth as soil, ground, terra firma. The artwork’s palette of blacks, ochres, and greens conjures soil and moss, a feeling of geological time accreting on the surface. This invites us to consider the cultural and ancestral dimensions of soil, particularly the idea of human-created fertile earth. One profound example is Terra Preta do Índio, the Amazonian Dark Earth. Terra Preta is an anthropogenic soil found in the Amazon basin, famously rich in nutrients and carbon. Unlike the typically poor rainforest soils, terra preta was intentionally cultivated by indigenous peoples between 500 and 2,500 years ago (and perhaps as far back as 8,700 years). Charcoal, organic matter, and pottery were worked into the earth, creating a living substrate so fertile that it remains agriculturally productive even today. This black earth sustained expansive ancient communities and stands as a testament to an intimate reciprocity between humans and land. In Dutra’s work, the dark speckles and charred hues feel like an echo of terra preta, as if the painting’s very materiality is laced with charcoal and ash. The concept of a human-made soil resonates with the artwork’s layered process: just as terra preta is a palimpsest of human and non-human inputs (kitchen middens, vegetal carbon, microbial action), the painting is a layering of gestures and cuts that yield something generative. We can imagine the serpent ideogram as a signal growing from a fertile matrix – a bit like a crop emerging from black earth.
Black earth also links to African epistemologies, particularly ancient Egypt – known by its people as Kemet, “the Black Land.” The name Kemet literally referred to the dark, alluvial soil of the Nile floodplain. In Egyptian cosmology, black was the color of fertility, resurrection, and life, precisely because of this life-giving Nile silt. Each year the river’s inundation renewed the land with a layer of rich black mud, without which civilization could not thrive. By invoking Kemet, we tap into an ancestral notion that soil is sacred, that the color black is the color of potential and rebirth. There is a deep symmetry between the Amazonian dark earth and the Nile’s black soil: both are examples of humans and earth co-creating fertility. In one case, people intentionally craft the soil; in the other, they honor and depend on the soil’s natural renewal. Both represent a kind of earthly memory – terra preta contains centuries of cultural detritus and knowledge (literally, remnants of meals and hearths), while Kemet’s black earth carries millennia of flood cycles and agricultural rites.
In Linguagem da Serpente 五, we can sense these layers of black earth knowledge. The serpent itself is a potent symbol across African and indigenous American traditions. Could the ideogram be read as a stylized snake shedding its skin – an Ouroboros-like cycle of death and rebirth? In African diasporic cosmologies, the serpent often signifies healing and wisdom (for example, the Dahomey and Haitian loa Damballah, the sky-serpent who bridges realms). The painting’s serpent-tongue, emerging from an earthy chaos, suggests a voice of the soil speaking forth. It is as if the terra preta beneath the forest, or the rich Kemet soil beneath the desert, had risen up in serpentine form to deliver a message. The message might be simple yet profound: that the earth is alive and communicative. An indigenous epistemology would concur – many Native Amazonian cosmologies regard the forest soil and its creatures as imbued with spirit and intent. Thus, the serpent ideogram can be seen as an embodiment of ancestral land consciousness: a sign that carries the wisdom of those who have cultivated, revered, and become kin with the land. The black soil in the painting is not mere background; it is the precondition of life and meaning, the canvas of history. Dutra’s art, by integrating these references, becomes a bridge between Amazonia and Kemet, between black earth of the Americas and black earth of Africa – a decolonial linkage affirming that ancestral knowledge of the land is a form of language as rich and vital as any written text.
Syntropy and Decolonial Growth: Seeds of a New Future
The idea of terra as something we shape and that shapes us leads naturally into contemporary discussions on sustainable agriculture and ecological regeneration. Figures like Ernst Götsch and Vandana Shiva come to mind – practitioners and philosophers who treat soil not as inert dirt but as a living, auto-organizing system, much as this artwork implies. Ernst Götsch, a Swiss farmer in Brazil, pioneered Agrofloresta Sucessional (successional agroforestry), a farming practice that works with the natural succession of plant species to heal land and produce food. Götsch’s approach embodies what he calls syntropic agriculture, aligning human cultivation with nature’s tendency to build complexity (the opposite of entropy). On degraded lands in Bahia, Götsch managed to recreate thriving forest-farms with no chemical inputs, no tilling, and no irrigation – a feat that has been described as turning “desert into rainforest.” He famously asserted, “There is no such thing as a poor soil,” after transforming even barren soil into abundant agroforest using only biodiversity and clever planting. In other words, given the right relationships and care, the land can regenerate itself. Götsch’s method “produces its own fertilizer, creates abundant black soil and nutrients, retains water” – essentially an autopoietic agriculture, where the farm ecosystem continuously enriches and maintains itself. This recalls the Terra Preta phenomenon, and indeed Götsch’s work can be seen as a modern, consciously designed analog to that ancient indigenous soil alchemy.
In Linguagem da Serpente 五, the principles of syntropic, successional growth are echoed in paint. We see layers upon layers, each new gesture not wiping away the previous but building atop it, like leaf litter accumulating to form humus. The cuts of the ideogram are precise but they do not destroy the painting; rather, they reveal new relationships between the layers (just as pruning in agroforestry, one of Götsch’s key techniques, stimulates new growth rather than killing the plant). The painting, like a syntropic garden, has no waste: every splatter and incision serves the emergent form. The very notion of a serpent tongue “tasting” the air and ground is analogous to how a regenerative farmer constantly reads the land’s feedback, adjusting and adding diversity. The artwork thus metaphorically aligns with Götsch’s agroecological philosophy – it is art as agroforest, cultivating cultural meaning in a way that regenerates rather than depletes.
Dr. Vandana Shiva, an Indian eco-philosopher and seed activist, provides another crucial context. Shiva advocates for what she calls Earth Democracy – a vision of a just and sustainable world rooted in respecting the earth’s plurality of life. She foregrounds the importance of seeds, soil, and traditional knowledge against the onslaught of industrial monocultures and corporate control. In her book Soil Not Oil, Shiva argues that “rebuilding soil fertility is the very basis of sustainable food production and food security… There is no alternative to fertile soil to sustain life on Earth”. This statement underscores the same truth that TERRA, Linguagem da Serpente whispers through its layers: soil is life. Shiva often phrases it succinctly: “Soil, not oil, holds the future for humanity.” In ditching oil (the extractive, fossil-fuel paradigm) for soil (the regenerative, life-centric paradigm), she calls for a decolonization of our relationship to land. That means seeing soil not as a resource to exploit, but as a partner – a co-producer of nourishment and meaning.
Dutra’s artwork, operating as a “geomantic interface,” aligns with this decolonial ethos. It suggests a communication with soil and earth’s energies, a listening as much as a telling. We might view the serpent ideogram as a kind of antenna tuning into what Vandana Shiva would call the voice of the living soil. The painting’s vibrational quality – its sense of frequencies and pulses – resonates with Shiva’s insight that “the most creative and necessary work that humans do is to work with the soil as co-producers of nature.” There is a profound creativity in cultivating land sustainably, just as there is creativity in art. Both involve care, attunement, and a respect for the agency of non-human forces. In a decolonial frame, this means valuing indigenous and local knowledge systems that have long understood the language of the land. The serpent-tongue could be seen as an avatar of those suppressed knowledges – an almost rebellious emblem asserting that the earth has its own syntax and grammar, which modernity must learn from.
Shiva’s philosophy and Götsch’s practice converge on an idea of regenerative cycles. Likewise, Linguagem da Serpente 五 invites us to think in cycles and networks, rather than linear extractions. The work is palpably cyclical: the serpent, an ancient symbol of cyclical time (shedding its skin, or the Ouroboros biting its tail), presides over an interplay of creation and destruction (layers of paint laid down, then cut through, then built upon). This cyclical creativity mirrors agroecological processes – composting, mulching, seeding in succession – which heal the land. The painting becomes a microcosm of regeneration, a celebration of what could be termed eco-poiesis: the making of a home (oikos) in collaboration with nature.
Eco-poetics and the Art of Regeneration
Dutra’s work is part of a broader movement in contemporary art that engages ecological consciousness, often in poetic and speculative ways. Around the world, artists are turning to soil, plants, and indigenous knowledge both as medium and subject, cultivating what we might call an eco-poetic land consciousness in the arts. In this piece, we see a direct homage to earth – from the use of earthen hues and textures, to the invocation of terra preta and serpent myth. Other artists similarly treat soil and plant life as active collaborators. For instance, Colombian Amazonian artist Abel Rodríguez, of the Nonuya people, creates intricate drawings of forest ecosystems from memory, effectively preserving and sharing indigenous botanical knowledge through art. His work, much like Dutra’s, stands at the junction of art and ecology, showing how careful observation of plant intelligence can be an artistic practice. Where Dutra’s serpent ideogram encodes a cosmology, Rodríguez’s drawn forests encode generations of empirical plant wisdom – both are forms of visual knowledge transmission rooted in respect for the living world.
Artists are also literally listening to the earth. The artist Nikki Lindt, for example, has undertaken a project to record the sounds of soil and underground ecologies, from the creaking of root systems to the drip of thawing permafrost. Her Underground Sound project treats soil as a source of audible knowledge, a voice we can attune to if we use the right instruments. This resonates with Linguagem da Serpente 五, where the serpent-tongue ideogram can be imagined as transmitting frequencies we might hear with an inner ear. It’s as if Dutra visualizes what Lindt records: the secret rhythms of soil life and geology transformed into art. Both artists prompt us to slow down and sense the subtle communications of the environment.
In recent exhibitions like The Botanical Mind (Camden Art Centre, 2020), curators have explicitly linked such artistic explorations to a larger history of plant-human symbiosis and spiritual geometry. The Botanical Mind showcased works that reveal “an encoded, vegetal intelligence inherent in plant forms – patterns that can be thought of as blueprints for the natural world,” connecting micro and macro scales, sacred geometries, and even the visionary aesthetics induced by plant medicines. One of its central observations was that plants often serve as symbols of the cosmic order (the Cosmic Tree motif, for example) and that the serpent frequently appears alongside, as a guide between worlds. Dutra’s painting could easily converse with this exhibition: his ideogram is both plant-like (it has a greenish, organic patina) and serpentine, and it unmistakably functions as a cosmic sign or mandala. In fact, one might view Linguagem da Serpente 五 as a kind of mandala for the Chthulucene – a diagram for meditation connecting us to soil, serpent, and star matter. Mandalas, common to many spiritual traditions, enable focused contemplation and “transformative states of consciousness”. Here, the serpent-tongue ideogram, placed in the center of an “all-over” field, works in a mandala-like fashion: it recenters our attention on the interdependence of all the splattered fragments around it, organizing chaos into a coherent whole. It is simultaneously futuristic and ancestral – “a language at once futurist and ancestral, a non-verbal communication through a new visual alphabet,” as one reviewer described Dutra’s serpentine geometric works.
Beyond symbolic and aesthetic connections, many artists are engaging directly with ecological healing. The pioneering conceptual artist Mel Chin, for instance, planted a “Revival Field” in the 1990s to use plants for soil remediation of toxic lands, effectively treating art as a laboratory for environmental science. Similarly, contemporary artist Ursula Biemann, in collaboration with architect Paulo Tavares, created Forest Law, a multi-media project reflecting on the rights of the Amazon forest and the “cosmopolitics of Amazonia”. By treating nature as a “rights-bearing subject”, Biemann and Tavares translate indigenous cosmologies and legal struggles into an art context, advocating for rivers and forests to be seen as persons in the eyes of the law. This fusion of ecology, law, and cosmology in art parallels Dutra’s fusion of ecology, myth, and cosmology in painting. All these approaches blur boundaries: between art and activism, between human and non-human agency, between visible form and invisible significance.
TERRA, Linguagem da Serpente 五 is thus both deeply personal (rooted in the artist’s own cultural milieu and research) and expansively collective (speaking to global currents in thought and art). It is a curatorial dream in itself: a piece that demands to be situated in dialogue with science, history, and spirituality. We see in it a serpent of knowledge winding through time – from the ancient black soils of Kemet and Amazonia, through modernist art experiments in geometry and perception, into the urgent questions of the present Chthulucene: how do we make kin with the earth? The painting suggests an answer: listen to the language of the serpent. That language is written in the land; it is autopoietic and sympoietic, at once a self-generated signal and a call for collaboration. It is geometric and gestural, rational and wild. It is the tongue that licks the air for truth, the split tongue that connects worlds.
In the speculative cosmology woven by Dutra’s work, we imagine standing before the painting as before an altar or portal. The air around it vibrates with meaning. Perhaps the serpent-tongue ideogram is humming – a subsonic hymn of the earth. We, the viewers, become participants in this geomantic act: our act of reading the painting is itself a kind of divination. In that moment, the boundaries between art, earth, and theory dissolve. We find ourselves at the threshold of the visible and the vibrational, tasting the world through a serpent’s tongue, sensing that beyond the splattered surface lies a living, speaking earth. And as we listen, the terra itself comes alive in language, telling stories of creation, destruction, and regeneration – stories as old as soil and as new as the next spring.
Rodrigo Garcia Dutra in collaboration with the Large Multimodal Language Model ChatGPT-4.5 through prompts, conversations, and dreams.
Sources:
- Paulo Lobo, Do Sagrado e do Profano – on Rodrigo Garcia Dutra’s A Linguagem da Serpente seriespaulo-lobo.com.
- J-WAFS News (MIT) – on Amazonian Terra Preta and its origins and fertilityjwafs.mit.edujwafs.mit.edu.
- Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble – on the Chthulucene (sympoiesis vs. autopoiesis)murmurlandstudios.files.wordpress.com.
- Maturana & Varela – definition of autopoiesis (self-making systems)en.wikipedia.org.
- Vandana Shiva, Soil Not Oil – on the necessity of living soil for lifegreenamerica.org; Soil, not Oil quoteazquotes.com.
- Ernst Götsch’s Syntropic Farming – description of regenerating poor soil into productive agroforestpatriciasendin.compatriciasendin.com.
- Camden Art Centre, The Botanical Mind – on plant intelligence, cosmic tree, and serpent as world-bridgecamdenartcentre.orgcamdenartcentre.org.
- Abel Rodríguez profile – art preserving Amazonian plant knowledgecontemporaryand.com.
- Nikki Lindt’s Underground Sound – art project recording soil soundssoilcentric.org.
- Kemet Expert – on Kemet meaning Black Land (fertile Nile soil)kemetexpert.com.
- Ursula Biemann & Paulo Tavares, Forest Law – on rights of nature and Amazonian cosmopoliticsuniverses.art.