In an interview with Marc Pottier for the series Um Olhar Estrangeiro da Arte Brasileira (A Foreign Gaze on Brazilian Art), broadcast on Arte1, Mercedes Lachmann offers an in-depth reflection on her artistic trajectory and on the genesis of one of her most emblematic works: the installation The Boat of God. Throughout the conversation, the artist reveals how her practice is shaped by the intersection of art, nature, myth, and lived experience, in a process marked by attentive listening to place and by the symbolic transformation of matter.
During the dialogue, Lachmann explains that her work emerges from direct engagement with specific environmental and social contexts, where the artistic gesture unfolds as a process rather than a finished form. The Boat of God arises from this expanded understanding of art as an experience in transit: starting with the encounter with the abandoned hull of a fisherman’s boat in Guanabara Bay, the artist initiates a path of physical and symbolic rescue, transforming the object into a vessel for narratives related to memory, environmental crisis, and the ancestral relationship between humanity and nature.
In the interview, Mercedes Lachmann describes how the boat, lifted from sludge and stagnation, undergoes successive transfigurations until it becomes installation, performance, and image. More than a sculptural object, the boat takes on the role of a living organism, moving through different urban and natural spaces and activating reflections on belonging, care, and regeneration. The artist also emphasizes the ritualistic dimension of the project, in which actions such as baptism, displacement, and public display function as gestures of symbolic reconnection with water, understood as origin, memory, and vital force.
Marc Pottier guides the conversation by highlighting the poetic and political dimensions of the work, situating The Boat of God within a contemporary practice that resists immediate solutions and embraces the complexity of process. In response, Lachmann stresses that her work does not aim to offer closed answers, but rather to open spaces for experience and thought, where art, ecology, and spirituality intertwine in a sensitive and critical way.
The interview thus reveals an artist for whom creation is inseparable from life, and for whom art functions as a mode of passage—a field of experimentation in which the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary coexist. The Boat of God, as becomes clear in the dialogue with Marc Pottier, is less a point of arrival than a device in constant transformation, capable of condensing the urgencies of our time and proposing new ways of relating art, the world, and consciousness.
