Composição Aleatória / Random Composition

To swing the world is to practice the difficult art of becoming more than one.

by Amanda Abi Khalil, 2026

Felippe Moraes – Composição Aleatória / Solo Exhibition
MAC Niterói

To swing calls for the body to reconnect with our first bodily experiences, being swung to sleep by our caretakers as babies. It is a fundamental rhythm of connectedness. Swinging is among the earliest forms of play through which many of us encounter the world and discover, often unconsciously, that balance is never entirely our own. Duo swings and collective swings bring other bodies into play.

Composição Aleatória #2 is composed of three duet swings carrying twelve bells, encompassing the full spectrum of notes available within Western music and generating ever-changing combinations through movement. People sit facing one another while the sculpture, instrument, and body extension responds. Placed outdoors in a semi-public space, it may even call flying species and birds into interaction. With every shift of weight, we hear a different arrangement of tones. The challenge becomes finding balance and harmony together, a struggle of our time. The two become three. The three become together.

A distinctly Brazilian art historical lineage inhabits the work, from the participatory propositions of Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica to contemporary collective practices such as Opavivará, where the artwork finds completion through use, encounter, and collective activation.

This playground, instrument, and public sculpture encourages us to become players, both in the sense of play and of playing an instrument. In the same line of thought, audiences, users, and publics become composers, not only in the musical sense of the term, but as composers of other possibilities of being on a swing, of being in rhythm, and, by extension, of being in the world.

In a time of polycrisis and shrinking attention spans, it calls on us to listen to one another’s bodies and to recognize our capacity to expand the imaginary, extending the encounters it sets in motion. There is something precious in the world of early childhood that this environment brings forth: the notes, the swinging, the playing, the possibility of discovery. The work calls upon that being within each of us, offering an invitation to learn the world again and to inhabit it with renewed curiosity.

Installed on MAC’s iconic esplanade for its fourth display, Composição Aleatória #2 enters into dialogue with the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer, the bay, and the city that surrounds it. Suspended between sea and sky, the museum projects a sensation of levity and movement, its curves tracing a horizon that appears perpetually in transformation. The sculpture inhabits this same condition. Sound travels across the open air, carried by wind, bodies, and landscape. How would marine species hear it? What notes might emerge if we learned to listen differently? A choreography unfolds through the museum’s rounded, spacecraft-like architecture, transforming the site into a vast apparatus of resonance.

What interests me most in Moraes’s work and practice is its insistence on togetherness at a moment when isolation is increasingly presented as inevitable. The sculpture asks for cooperation without demanding consensus. It reminds us that a common rhythm emerges through difference, negotiation, and the willingness to remain present with one another, revealing how fragile and how necessary such coordination can be.

For a brief moment, the world swings. We hold it together. We hear ourselves becoming more than one.

Amanda Abi Khalil