Floating Cities : artwork in the service of the living
In a world faced with ecological emergencies and systemic upheaval, Floating Cities is a deeply committed work. At the crossroads of artistic languages, this project by Elsa Mroziewicz and Cécile Palusinski questions the relationship between humans and the ocean.
Each floating city draws its inspiration from concrete initiatives to meet environmental challenges, from a variety of cultural and geographical contexts. Floating Cities gives shape and voice to these alternatives through an immersive aesthetic, where augmented reality and sound poetry respond to each other, weaving connections to better convey, awaken and connect.
There’s nothing abstract or theoretical here: the work is rooted in the territories crossed, in the gestures observed, in the stories gathered during residencies in Taiwan, India, Tunisia, Morocco, Brazil, the United States and France. Each painting thus becomes a fragment of the world, inhabited by voices, memories and solutions rooted in lived experience.
It’s an art of connection that unfolds: a link between ancient knowledge, through embroidery, and contemporary technologies, between scientific data and poetic narrative, between the political and the sensitive. Thanks to the Under The Starry Vault mobile application, viewers are invited to animate the images and listen to the haikus and audio logbooks. They become not just visitors, but storytellers, activating a living memory in which the voices of the world resound.
Beyond the interactive device, a subtle reflection on time also runs through the entire work. The almost immediacy of digital technology is in tension with the long timeline of embroidery. Produced with embroidery collectives in Brazil (Bumba Meu Boi da Floresta de Mestre Apolônio, Sao Luis) and India (Kalhath Institute, Lucknow), these embroideries give body to the invisible, to currents, to corals, to the beings of the deep sea.
By choosing to unite technology and craft, speed and slowness, Floating Cities creates a space for listening and contemplation, where the world can be re-enchanted – not as a return to the past, but as a movement towards a habitable future shaped by imagination and a commitment to life.
Elsa Mroziewicz & Cécile Palusinski, exhibition curators
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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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Technical details
Artists :
Cécile Palusinski – writer and sound artist
Elsa Mroziewicz – visual artist and animation director
Curators : Cécile Palusinski & Elsa Mroziewicz
Music: Jean-Paul Le Goff
Embroidery: Kalhath Institute (India), Boi da Floresta (Brazil)
Voices: Bernard Gabay (French), Emma Gariepy (English), Marcello Lunière (Brazilian)
Translators: Susan Pickford (English), Marcello Lunière (Brazilian)
Website: Michel Ravey
Developers: Editions Volumiques and Robin Moretti
Languages available: French, Portuguese (Brazilian), English
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Practical information
Exhibition from September 6th to November 30th 2025
Visits Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 6pm (admission until 5.30pm)
MAC Niterói – Mirante da Boa Viagem, s/nº, Boa Viagem, Niterói, RJ
© 2026 |
