Ernesto Neto’s surprising, multi-part installation at Le Bon Marché, a department store in central Paris, was inspired by the story of Adam and Eve—before and after the bite into the apple. Reweaving the Genesis narrative with other mythologies, he creates an immersive and interactive meditation on life and our place in the natural world. “Le La Serpent” is the 10th artist intervention at the site, following previous projects including works by Ai Weiwei, Joana Vasconcelos, Prune Nourry, and Daniel Buren.
Robert Preece: What inspired your white serpent? Could you explain a bit about its movement through the space?
Ernesto Neto: The Adam and Eve myth from Genesis was the inspiration. On the morning of October 11, I was walking on the beach, concentrating on the invitation from Le Bon Marché and the two atriums. Two days before, Frédéric Bodenes, artistic director, and Victoria Comune, cultural project manager of Le Bon Marché, had visited my studio Atelienave, and I was reflecting on whether I should accept the invitation or not. Suddenly I began to see a sculpture representing Eve in one atrium and Adam in the other, with the enchanted serpent drawing the infinity symbol around them, connecting the two bodies and the two spaces. I felt as if it was an order, something that I had to do.
In 2014, I had an epiphany while I was talking with my wife. I understood the question of the cross, but how could the serpent—the spiritual connection for the Huni Kuin people in Brazil and Indigenous people in general, for Aboriginal Australians, and for almost all ancestral cultures—be the devil that brought sin? As soon I said it, the light came: If the enchanted serpent had not spoken with Eve and she had not shared the enchanted apple with Adam, they would still be in Paradise today. What would that mean for us? Where we would be? We would not be—not you, not me; there would be no humanity. So came the clarity that the serpent is our mother and father, the divine who brought life to humanity.
Later, I read Jeremy Narby’s The Cosmic Serpent and his hypothesis about DNA as two serpents, spiral stairway serpents that appear in many ancestral stories across the globe. I also read Joseph Campbell, who proposed that the bite was the birth of duality, female/male, dark/light, Ying/Yang. In time, I begin to understand DNA as the spiral of the serpent E (ve) and the serpent A (dam). With this vision, I understood that this was the moment to go deeper into the theme and the way to help the reconnection process between us and nature, the nature that we are.
RP: How did you decide on the materials? Was everything made in Brazil?
EN: The crochet and the bamboo structure of the serpent were made at my studio in Rio. Everything else we did in Paris. Decisions were made according to the conditions of the space. We used cotton fabric for the works in the atrium. For Eve and Adam, we used a natural dye on the fabric, we used leaves to fill the forms and clay for the counterweights—leaves for life and clay for history. In Avant que le temps n’apparaisse (Before time appears), which is in the second-floor room, the crochet is made with cotton; inside the trunk of the tree, we used a mixture of leaves and pieces of paper to have two moments of cellulose, natural and cultural.
RP: The serpent twines around suspended brown forms that suggest hanging eggs.
EN: I never thought about eggs, but since this is an open artwork, that is a welcome view. Eggs are the seeds of animal life, the possibility of life and fecundity’s fruit, so, pretty much what I talk about. I feel that, in the art scene, we talk very much about death and suffering; in the end, we become stuck on it, so in terms of the healing that I propose, it’s important to valorize life, the idea and the grace of life, in the middle of so much war and devastation. I feel that it is good to say thanks to life. Living is not easy for any animal, but it is a gift and there are a lot of possibilities to bring joy out of it. Perhaps we should focus on that.
RP: What was the installation process like? Did any unexpected things come up?
EN: It was great. We worked every night from 8:30 pm to 6 am, so it was very quiet and challenging, with our bodies surrounded by all the goods inside the store. Every big sculpture that I do is what I call a “sculpture adventure.” We are always working with gravity, and in this dance, there is always a lot of tension with the pieces and inside us. It’s all about the relationship. We make tests in the studio, but we only see the work when we have installed it. It’s exciting to see how the baby comes out of the uterus, how the bird flies from the nest, and we need listen to it, to adjust and fine tune. It’s marvelous, and it was not different here. Every moment is an art moment, until we arrive at the end, which is always a new beginning.
RP: What is going on in the large room connected to the serpent installation? How are we to understand the space?
EN: We are into the Genesis myth. We have the Tree of Knowledge and on either side of it, as part of the Garden of Eden, we have Eve’s land and Adam’s land. The empty space between represents the river and the serpent. I felt that the tree in the center might represent the seed generating E and A, or the fetus generated by them. The external counterweights of the tree are made with clay, the internal ones with spices—cumin, turmeric, clove, and ginger—representing the fruit and bringing smell to the senses. We can take our shoes off and lay our bodies on the ground, relax, play some sounds with rattles on the edges of the tree, draw or write on the wall, even sleep. On one wall, there is my text about the exhibition. The lyrics of the chant le la le la are on the back wall, with a button that can be pressed to listen, and a hand-out of research conducted by Pedro Luz about the serpent as a protagonist in ancestral stories worldwide. (This content can be accessed in English, French and Portuguese through a QR code.) It’s a place more reflexive to body and mind connections, us together with the roots of Le La Serpent.
RP: What can you tell me about the color?
EN: We thought carefully about color. Considering the serpent as a divine entity, the idea of white was that it would come from another dimension in contrast to Eve and Adam who are bodies of life. We then chose to dye the clay with black tea to have a skin color and the cell edges—all of the crochet works are made with crochet “cells”—with another color. We dyed Eve with stinking-toe bark to get something darker and black and Adam with onion skin to become more reddish.
We also chose white for the Tree of Knowledge because it is related to the concept of an entity that existed before time, before the bite. It is not yet an organic and living being, it represents, like the serpent in the atrium, an immaterial body. The fruits, with their scent and color, become the connection with the earth, the living world. The bottle caps then become the connection to the universe of industrial products that we live with today. The E and A rugs are a kind of gray, to create a soft move, a state of transition from whiteness to a colorful life.
Finally, I understood that the walls should be black to bring the idea of an infinite cosmos on which this altar of the sprouting of life would “float,” and the white pieces of chalk would open the space for people to be able to draw, write, express themselves as if it were the star powder in the cosmos field, and at the same time, express the birth of the symbolic, the cognitive, which makes us the cultural animals that we are.
Ernesto Neto’s “Le La Serpent” is on view until February 23, 2025.
