Henrique Oliveira, “Baitogogo”, Reclaimed Tapumes, 2013, Palais de Tokyo Museum, Paris, France

Designed by Henrique Oliveira to look like an impossibly tangled Gordian Knot, the Baitogogo sculpture was installed within an exhibition space at Palais de Tokyo as a mass of tree-like plywood branches.

The exhibition curators said “ Creating a spectacular and invasive Gordian Knot, Henrique Oliveira plays with Palais de Tokyo’s architecture, allowing a  work that combines the vegetal and the organic.”

The large installation was created from reclaimed tapumes – a plywood material traditionally used in Brazilian towns to construct the hoardings around construction sites. Oliveria collected the discarded tapumes from the streets of São Paulo, where he both lives and works. The veneer-like strips were bent into shape and nailed together to form the installation’s branches. Further wooden veneers were fixed to the structure to give it a bark-like texture and appearance.