The Tropics, The Moon, and Mars

_The Tropics, The Moon, and Mars_ is the first New York solo exhibition of Brooklyn-based Brazilian artist **Mari Nagem**. In an immersive installation that unites light, sound, sculpture, painting, and digital experiments, Nagem constructs a post-natural tropical environment in which heat reorganizes relationships between bodies, technologies, geological formations, and living systems. The tropics appear as climate, home, and projection: a lived geography shaped by extraction, ecological transformation, and a long history of being imagined from elsewhere. The exhibition originates from a simple yet unsettling proposition: humanity dreams of becoming an interplanetary species while remaining unable to live collaboratively with the terrestrial ecologies it already inhabits. Rather than presenting planetary expansion as technological triumph, Nagem considers how fantasies of the Moon and Mars extend the same logics that have long shaped extractive relationships on Earth. The three locales of the exhibition title become less distinct destinations than overlapping terrains through which to reconsider survival, adaptation, and coexistence. Through the works, scientific knowledge is translated into material propositions. Data serves as landscape; research infrastructure is imagined as domestic architecture; geological formations resemble bodies; synthetic objects take on natural qualities of minerals, branches, and nests. In the work, Nagem approaches scientific research as transformative subtext, allowing empirical observation and speculative imagination to coexist within the same environment. Heat permeates every aspect of this environment. Synthetic light burns rather than tanning. Color functions as both climate and atmosphere. Bodies—human, vegetal, geological, and technological—search for new modes of communication and persistence within an increasingly arid landscape. Accompanied by a commissioned sound work from Mapuche-Brazilian musician **Brisa Flow**, the installation is a temporal and evolving choreography in which survival is neither guaranteed nor singular. _The Tropics, The Moon, and Mars_ resists imagining the future as either dystopian inevitability or technological salvation. Instead, Nagem considers how various systems and forms of knowledge—scientific, traditional, artistic, and material—might generate new ways of inhabiting worlds that are already undergoing profound ecological change. The exhibition compels us to consider where we are going next, and how different forms of life might continue together within altered conditions of heat, time, and planetary belonging.