The Institute
The Art-Ecology Institute is an organisation devoted to research, education and artistic production where art meets ecological restoration.
It began in a tree nursery in northern Paraná, in southern Brazil, which for twenty years has been the base of IBF (Instituto Brasileiro de Florestas), an organisation founded and directed by [link: Solano Aquino, artistic direction], a biologist with twenty-five years of work in forest restoration. That is where making art and bringing land back began to look like the same work.
The Institute now works on three fronts: production, education and research.
Origin
The gesture that precedes the work
The idea of an institute in Apucarana goes back to the mid-1970s, to Higino Aquino, an artist, out of his own practice across several fields. It stayed a project, and a collection.
The Art-Ecology Institute was created in 2026 by Solano Aquino, his son, to carry that legacy on and turn it towards the meeting of art and ecology.
The field of light, one of the three fields of Art-Ecology, is about what we leave to those who come after. The Institute exists because Solano took up what his father left.
01 · Production
The series and the studio
Large-format paintings, sculptures and installations made with matter that comes from the nursery: seedling tubes, offcuts, leather. Production carries on away from home, in residency.
02 · Training
Residencies and seminar
The Art-Ecology Berlin Residency and the Art-Ecology Seminar, free and open online, with invited teachers, artists and researchers.
03 · Research
The three fields
The Art-Ecology thesis and the three fields that organise it, supported by specialists in ecology, philosophy, psychoanalysis and history.