Solfejo (Solfège), 2025
Solo exhibition
CAIXA Cultural Rio de Janeiro
Curated by Victor Gorgulho
Rio de Janeiro – Brazil
January 14 – March 30, 2025
The exhibition Solfejo – Felippe Moraes, presented at CAIXA Cultural Rio de Janeiro between January 14 and March 30, 2025, occupies multiple spaces within the institution, including galleries, the foyer, and the Teatro CAIXA Nelson Rodrigues. With around 50 works, the show constitutes the largest panorama of the artist’s production to date, bringing together works developed over 15 years.
The exhibition, originally presented in 2019, returns to Rio profoundly expanded and reworked to engage directly with the artist’s home city. The presence of samba, of the urban landscape, and of Rio’s collective memory runs through the show, which weaves together sound, music, and cosmology as ways of understanding the world and its invisible rhythms.
Amid interactive installations, luminous works, videos, and sound sculptures, Solfejo proposes experiences that activate both body and listening. Works such as Composição Aleatória #2, Harmonices Mundi, and Solaris Discotecum create situations in which the visitor takes part in the sonic construction, perceiving relationships between movement, time, and space.
With a curatorial text by Victor Gorgulho, the exhibition puts pressure on science, spirituality, and popular culture. By moving through the universe of samba and the music of the spheres, Solfejo reveals invisible patterns that connect everyday experience to the cosmos, proposing an expanded listening of reality.
Curatorial Texts
- Tudo é perigoso, tudo é divino e (ainda é) maravilhoso – Victor Gorgulho
Solfejo – Felippe Moraes
Solfejo is an idea. A cross-section of my research into sound and music. It encompasses countless ways of singing: many of them with the hands, others with the eyes, some, even, in silence. It is a square where we gather to carry out random compositions, but also where my ideas play. Celestial bodies and physical phenomena, the visible and the invisible, life and death — they sit in a circle to make samba. Brazilian philosophy. Carioca ontology.
As an exhibition, Solfejo first presented itself at the Centro Cultural FIESP, on Avenida Paulista, in São Paulo. In the intense, and now distant, year of 2019, it sang amid the great historical narratives of that moment. In 2024, it was reincarnated at CAIXA Cultural Brasília, transformed and expanded, accumulating new works produced over the five years separating the two shows. Today, dressed in light, it arrives in my city.
In this edition, Solfejo takes place on the sacred ground between Gamboa and Lapa, the Sapucaí and Avenida Rio Branco — where samba overflows every February. Here I have already been swallowed by the Cordão da Bola Preta and surrendered to the drums of the Bloco Afro Orunmilá. I have already seen Mangueira saluting Cacique and Cacique saluting Mangueira. Here I sing with my ancestors, for it is in music that they live and dance through Carnival. It is from this terreiro that the thinking behind this show emanates. And today, here, it is reborn.
Felippe Moraes, Summer 2025