Since the late 1990s, Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto has created interactive, enveloping sculptural environments using translucent stretch fabric. Navedenga is one of the earliest works in this ongoing series. Its soft, sensuous surface, curving, taut contours, and rounded appendages evoke the human body, and its material is pliant and responsive to touch, like living skin. This form and the title of the work—a Portuguese neologism created by the artist—suggest both a fantastical spacecraft (nave means "ship") and a protective womb. Aromatic cloves embedded in the structure add an olfactory dimension to the visual and tactile experience of the work. Viewers are invited to enter the works hollow chamber two at a time.
Gallery label from 2009.
