“At one point I felt the greatest ‘disenchantment’, along with great despondency during much of the dictatorship period. In the classes at the museum [MAM Rio], I began to methodologically eliminate any object or material for use by the students that was not the earth’s surface itself. A feeling of greater harmony with the planet came over me. I started to take my students to places far away from downtown Rio and the West Zone, such as the Marapendi Lagoon, which had been totally abandoned from the time when indigenous Guarani people lived there. I felt that we could work with more ‘freedom’ there. I have a friend, a photographer, Thomas Lewinsohn, who is now a scientist in biology. He used to accompany me to register all the actions and proposals that I conceived during the classes.
Most of the registers were made on transparencies [slides]. This all became part of the show at the MAM Rio itself, and I called it Circumambulatio […].”
Comment by Anna Bella Geiger in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist. (Entrevistas brasileiras, vol. 1. Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó, 2018).
“The entire process with photographic registers involved in Circumambulatio reveals itself as a work in progress, of the art of the body and of the earth in search of the archetype of the self (center), that is, insisting on the necessary connection between the interior and the exterior of the human being”. (NAVAS, Adolfo Montejo. Fotografia além da fotografia — notas de montagem. In: “Anna Bella Geiger — fotografia além da fotografia, 1972–2008”. Catalog of the exhibition in Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro, 2008).