On the eve of her departure to Luxembourg and Germany, where she will participate in exhibitions with other female artists, Anna Bella Geiger spoke to Newcity Brazil by phone from her studio in Rio de Janeiro, while also making the final preparations for her next solo exhibition of new works at Mendes Wood Gallery in São Paulo, which will open in November. All of this would be trivial for an artist known worldwide, if we were not talking to a ninety-one-year-old woman who is a pioneer in several areas of Brazilian visual arts, such as abstractionism, video art, engraving and multimedia installations.

Shortly before flying to Europe, Geiger inaugurated the first reassembly in fifty years of the multimedia installation “Circumambulatio” (“to walk around” in Latin) at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP). The artist praises the reassembly of the work, which mixes photography, handwritten texts, sound and slides to discuss what the “center” is and where it is.

“‘Circumambulatio’ is wandering around the center,” Geiger says. “[The installation] was faithful to the installation in Rio, which I did in 1972, but more sophisticated now. We have a ‘wisdom of thinking,’ but they did it very perfectly. About six months ago, I went to São Paulo, to the MAC reserve, to list all those handwritten sheets of paper that I wrote, and also the images, which were stored. Since the museum has the original, they used total rigor. And the unity of the exhibition conveys exactly the concept that it is an environment. At the time, I called it the environment for today’s installation. I used ‘environment’ as an ecological idea of ​​the environment itself. So, besides everything, all this work was, in my mind, very influenced by the beginning of ecological concerns.”

The installation emerged from drawings made directly in the sand of a plot of land near Marapendi Lagoon in Rio. Geiger and the group formed by Abelardo Santos, Eduardo Escobar, Lígia Ribeiro and Suzana Geyerhahn drew using hoes, a tractor and their own bodies, in actions recorded by photographer Thomas Lewinsohn. This material was used to create an audiovisual work composed of 109 slides and a sound recording containing texts by Carl Jung and the team itself interspersed with songs by bands such as Can, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer.

“I know that I am considered one of the first conceptual art artists internationally,” Geiger says, “but my antenna has to do with the very needs that appear in my work. I am in tune because I study a lot, because I also teach, because my teaching career also influenced my own work—as I developed new interests, I also passed them on to my students.”

The group and Geiger also conducted extensive research on the idea of ​​the center, seeking references in the arts, literature, philosophy, history of religions, anthropology, architecture and natural sciences, as well as interviews on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. The results were compiled into a set of twenty-four sheets containing quotes from various authors and twenty black-and-white photographs reproducing works of art and architecture, scientific images and city maps. Together with the audiovisual pieces, these works constitute “Circumambulatio.”

“I started sending the students out onto the streets to ask what the center is,” Geiger says. “It was controversial on the streets, because under the dictatorship in Brazil no one could go out as a reporter on the streets, but they went out with sheets of paper. So I sent them to neighborhoods like Lapa, Copacabana and Flamengo. But Copacabana was sensational, because it was a very mixed crowd, as it is now. So there were people who said that the center is when they saw Christ the Redeemer through their window and prayed, for example. So, at a time like that of the dictatorship in Brazil, I think that this touched on something spiritual. In fact, there are many more developments in ‘Circumambulatio.’”

Always remembered for her first video works in the 1970s, before that Anna Bella Geiger had her first experience in the digital world. A small self-portrait made on a dot matrix printer is on display at the Museum of Modern Art (Mudam) in Luxembourg. Geiger is one of the female artists in the exhibition “Radical Softwares: Women, Art & Computing 1960-1991.”

“Believe it or not, that work was done in 1969!” Geiger says. “I was in London and I passed by a street where I saw The Computer Place. Incredible! It was a machine, there were two artists. Can you believe it? I went in to see what it was. I said I was an artist and I was traveling. They asked me, “Do you want to do an artwork? Of course I do! Then, I did it. And I have two other works in the exhibition, but the curators invited me because of this small self-portrait. They asked about my experience with photography and I have several moments, like ‘Brasil Nativo.’ So, they gave me a huge space because of this self-portrait and invited me to go there. They are very involved with me.”

Engraving and drawing are the most constant means in Anna Bella Geiger’s work, but the creation of “Circumambulatio,” in 1972, signaled the need to find new means of expression. Experimentation marked her work during the 1970s with the use of photoengraving, photomontage, silkscreen, photocopies, postcards, video and Super 8. The video “Passagens” (1974), in which the artist appears climbing stairs, is one of the first encounters in Brazilian art between video art, performance and conceptual art. The work is part of the collections of MoMA, Centre Pompidou, Museo Reina Sofia and the Getty and is currently on view in the exhibition “Where We Speak” at the Kunstverein Bielefeld, Germany, where Geiger recently gave a lecture.

“In Bielefeld, it is a more feminist thing,” Geiger says. “The exhibition is based on the book by a Brazilian woman, ‘Place of Speech’ [‘Lugar de fala,’ by Djamila Ribeiro], in a feminist way. And there, in Bielefeld, they are in tune with Brazil, which is good. I sent them a photo of the research for ‘Circumambulatio,’ in which I am lying on the sand and which I call ‘Neolithic Era,’ which is also in the exhibition at MAC USP. I also sent ‘Amuleto, a mulata, a muleta, América Latina’ (1970s), which is a drawing of Latin America, and the video ‘Passagens.’ These are works with diverse questions, but the interesting thing is that they always have questions that I have already asked and that are being read again, works that are, let’s say, in this terrain that I consider conceptual.”

“Anna Bella Geiger: Circumambulatio” is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP), Avenida Pedro Álvares Cabral, 1301, Ibirapura, São Paulo, through July 27, 2025.