Floating cities – brochure
An embroidered sound work in augmented reality
MAC Niterói – Veranda
6 September to 30 November 2025
An immersive journey in the heart of imaginary eco-responsible cities
By Elsa Mroziewicz & Cécile Palusinski
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Exhibition presentation
Between immersive technology and traditional know-how
Floating Cities is an immersive visual and sound work that invites the public to explore imaginary cities offering solutions to environmental challenges. Using a mobile application, each painting can be animated in augmented reality: visitors can thus discover moving scenes, accompanied by sound haikus that poetically evoke the innovations highlighted.
Each painting is enhanced by an audio and video logbook, recounting the testimonies and stories collected during artistic residencies in six countries – Taiwan, India, Tunisia, Brazil, France and the United States.
The embroidered version, created with craftsmen from Brazil and India, sublimates the seabed and the mythological figures of the ocean, giving them substance and dimension. It pays tribute to the slowness of the ancestral gesture, in fruitful dialogue with the speed of digital technologies, to better question our relationship with time and living things.
Available in Portuguese, French and English.
Artistic approach
An artistic approach committed to the living
Through Villes Flottantes, the artists explore the relationship between man and nature, offering a sensitive, poetic and resolutely committed vision. Their work is part of an artistic approach that serves the environment, highlighting concrete solutions, inspiring stories and hopeful gestures in the face of the climate emergency.
By combining immersive technologies and traditional practices, they build bridges between innovation and memory, imagination and reality, art and science. Their work invites us to rethink our relationship with living things, to slow down, to listen, and to reconnect with what binds us to changing ecosystems.
Re-enchanting the world, giving new strength to the stories, to beauty and to the territories’ voices: this is the ambition that drives this trans-disciplinary creation.
Commitment in the field
Concerned with taking action in the field and putting art at the service of the environment, in 2022 the artists created the “Socotra Dragon Blood Tree” association with the aim of working towards the reforestation of the Socotra dragon tree, a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site. In 2024, the association won the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature) Support Program for Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) active in biodiversity in developing countries (ProBioDev). They also donate a percentage of the sales of their works to associative projects related to the preservation of the forest and its ecosystems in the territories where they came to live.
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Biographies
Elsa Mroziewicz
A multidisciplinary visual artist, Elsa explores the connections between traditions, ancestral knowledge, and technological innovations, creating dreamlike and poetic universes, often tinged with mythological or spiritual influences. She co-created the immersive project Arbres-Mondes, selected for the Bologna International Book Fair. Her giant augmented pop-up book Baobab is among the finalists for the Meggendorfer for artist books 2023 award (USA) and was exhibited at the Goodplanet foundation in Paris. She has also created several illustrated books and animated artist books that have been exhibited in museums, salons, and media libraries, including in New York at Columbia University (Rare Book and Manuscript Library), in Prague at the B1 Centre for Contemporary Design, and in Italy at Milan Design Week. Elsa has published several children’s books with Minedition, which have received rave reviews from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and News & Observers. She has created augmented reality sound works that question man’s relationship with nature, in partnership with author Cécile Palusinski: “La forêt Universelle,” “Le sacre des oiseaux” (winner of Villa Swagatam in India, organized by the French Institute of India and MAD Salon+Lab), and “Villes flottantes” (winner of Villa Albertine). She is currently working on a new project in RM, “Les gardiens de l’océan.”
Cécile Palusinski
As a writer, she has published several works since 2005. For six years, she has been co-creating immersive projects, NORD SUD, published in 2019, ARBRES-MONDES, produced in 2022, finalist for the Bologna Ragazzi CrossMedia Awards, and La Forêt universelle in 2025. Winner of prestigious residencies, including Villa Formose in Taiwan (2023), Villa Albertine in the United States, and the Jan Michalski Foundation residency, she traces, through her writing, the contours of a world inhabited by poetry and emotion. Her latest book of photographs and poetry, Socotra, des dragonniers et des hommes, written with Benoît Palusinski, bears witness to a writing rooted in travel. She also lends her pen to sound projects, such as the podcast for Vincent Munier’s exhibition La Panthère des Neiges, and chairs La Plume de Paon, which works to promote French-language audiobooks. Her collection Pages d’arbres, illustrated by Elsa Mroziewicz, also takes the reader on a journey through the forests of the world, where founding narratives and universal resonances intersect, themes that are filigree in her writings.
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It is with great enthusiasm that MAC Niterói welcomes the exhibition Floating Cities, part of the France-Brazil Season 2025. Hosting its Brazilian debut reaffirms the museum’s vocation as a space for cultural exchange, open to the dialogue enabled by transdisciplinarity and attentive to the challenges of our time.
Artists Elsa and Cécile present works that reveal sensitive and fertile encounters between cultures, knowledge, and territories, offering new perspectives for thinking about art, technology, and the environment. Their work reinforces the relevance of contemporary art as a field of rapprochement between countries, through creativity and shared reflection.
We therefore celebrate not only the strength of this collaboration, but above all the symbolic gesture of building bridges between cultures and affirming art as a common language, as a meeting ground between science, memory, and the future.
Victor De Wolf
General Director of MAC Niterói
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Floating Cities – São Luís in augmented reality
In 2024, the CCVM hosted a residency for French artists Cécile Palusinski and Elsa Mroziewicz, who travelled to the legal Amazon to develop the new panel dedicated to São Luís do Maranhão, in collaboration with local artists and traditional communities.
The project, which uses augmented reality to represent cities and their multiple cultural identities, takes on a new dimension with the addition of São Luís. As the fruit of sensitive discussions and of experiences in the field, this panel reveals the symbolic, sonic and visual layers of Maranhão’s capital and celebrates the meeting of traditional knowledge, local narratives and contemporary language, focusing on sustainable forms of preserving memory, cultural diversity and relationships with the environment.
This initiative reaffirms the Vale Cultural Institute’s commitment to strengthening cultural networks between Brazil and the rest of the world, with a particular focus on the voices of Amazonia. By encouraging encounters between artists from different backgrounds and stimulating collaborative creation, the project highlights the role of art as a tool for dialogue, for listening, for sustainability and for building a shared future.
Enjoy your visit!
Gabriel Gutierrez
Instituto Cultural Vale/ Centro Cultural Vale Maranhão
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This project was produced as part of artist residencies in several countries: Villa Formose in Taiwan, Villa Swagatam in India, residency at the Vale Maranhão Cultural Center in Brazil (with the support of the Consulate General of France in Recife and the Institut français), Villa Albertine in the United States.
Sound work embroidered in augmented reality
The embroidered version is the result of a collaboration with the Kalhath Institute and Bumba Boi da Floresta. This collaboration is part of a desire to contribute to the transmission and appreciation of artisanal know-how.
Mestre Apolônio’s Bumba Meu Boi da Floresta, founded on March 12, 1972, by Apolônio Melônio, is one of the oldest groups in the Liberdade neighborhood of São Luís. It perpetuates the art of “Bumba Meu Boi,” a popular show that combines music, dance, and theater, and also teaches children and teenagers how to make handicrafts: embroidery, creation of cazumba masks, hats decorated with emu feathers.
The Kalhath Foundation (Lucknow, India), founded in 2016 by Maximiliano Modesti and Mohammed Amine Dadda, works to preserve and promote traditional Indian embroidery, especially that of Uttar Pradesh. Since 2018, the Kalhath Institute has been organizing international artistic residencies, promoting collaboration between artists and embroidery artisans. These exchanges aim to create a dialogue between ancestral know-how and contemporary creation.
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Art committed to protecting life
On the website, you can find testimonials from 50 people encountered during his artistic research (researchers, artists, fishing communities, architects, scientists, authors, environmental consultants, NGOs, etc.).
https://www.villes-flottantes.com/en/testimonies/
At the United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC) held in Nice in June 2025, Elsa, together with Cécile, presented Floating Cities, her thought-provoking art project that advocates environmental awareness.
This project is part of the France-Brazil Season 2025 program.
In this context, the exhibition will be itinerant: from September 6 to November 30, 2025, at MAC Niterói, in Niterói; from November 18, 2025, to May 18, 2026, at the Vale Maranhão Cultural Center, in São Luís; and from December 15, 2025, to January 31, 2026, at the Cais do Sertão Museum, in Recife.
Initiated by Emmanuel Macron and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the France-Brazil Season 2025 marks 200 years of bilateral relations and aims to strengthen ties between the two countries. It is organized around three major themes: Climate and ecological transition; Diversity of societies and dialogue with Africa; Democracy and the rule of law.
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Practical information
MAC Niterói
Mirante da Boa Viagem, s/nº, Boa Viagem, Niterói, RJ
Tuesday to Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. (last admission at 5:30 p.m.)
Admission
Ticket: R$ 20
Half-price ticket: R$ 10
Exhibition from September 6 to November 30, 2025
© 2026 |
