Our job is to create experiences that make people ask new questions, curator Fábio Scarano tells Observer. Courtesy Museum of Tomorrow

If you happen to have started your holidays early down in Rio de Janeiro, this week marks your last opportunity to check out “The Lumisphere Experience” at the Museum of Tomorrow. The Lumisphere is an innovative project developed by Carey Lovelace’s Visions 2030 studio. Within the Lumisphere’s three domes you’ll find a unique solution to the planet’s current ecological crises, as the experience takes visitors through a psychedelic light show that merges visual art and science, culminating with a survey that asks them to visualize their own green future with the help of A.I. It’s not like anything else you’ll see in the worlds of art, science or technology, and is likely coming to a venue near you in the future. To hear more about how the project came to Rio, we sat down with the Museum of Tomorrow’s Fábio Scarano.

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Let’s start off by talking about how this project came to your museum, and how you see it fitting into the broader programming that you’ve been doing for 10 years.

It was a very good match, but also a bit of a surprise. This conversation started around the time we were deciding on a new curatorial line for the museum. I joined as a curator two years ago. I’ve been here for three years, but as curator for the past two. We started to think that we were beginning to make changes in the main exhibition, and we also thought that we should change the narrative of the museum. The museum is very much science-oriented. The main exhibition talks a lot about climate change and the challenges of the planet, and it tries to provoke a sense or vision of the future as it is.

As time went by, especially after the pandemic, there was a change in perception. Many visitors at first felt informed. Around 2023, feedback showed that people were leaving the main exhibition concerned about the future and anxious. We figured that we should change the narrative a little, and also how it works across the museum as a whole.

We think the word “tomorrow” is much less about the future than about hope in an active sense. Tomorrow is something inside us that moves us forward. It has to do with images we build of the future, the images that guide us. Attention is our relationship with the present, and memory is our relationship with the past. Our premise is that we are a society with a very short attention span and hardly any memory about the planet, and very little memory of our own lineage. Tomorrow is an image that results from our relationship with the past and present.

We have these three times inside us simultaneously. While speaking here, attention is happening, memory is being accessed and anticipation is already forming. I think that because we have short memory and limited attention, we become forgetful about other ways of seeing the world or interpreting life. We are addicted to modern science, which is extremely important and has brought great advances. But in times of crisis, there is no kind of knowledge—so long as it is democratic and loving—that should be abandoned.

We thought the exhibition should create a conversation between modern science, ancestral knowledge—especially from Brazil and this region—and the arts, because art communicates things science talks about in ways that can touch people emotionally and immediately, beyond numbers and graphs.

You can see this in the main exhibition. In addition to being very much a science narrative, it could feel like it could be anywhere in the world. It doesn’t have much about Brazil in it, in this area in particular. Which makes sense because for some Indigenous people from the Amazon, this is where the world began. So the holy point is about this place. When some shamans come here, they have friends from that region. Their whole life is about the places, the mountains, the legacy. These are probably people who migrated from Asia through North America, all the way south and up again. They saw it on the way down.

They thought this particular bay was the center of the world?

Yes, for some, this is where the world began. For America, Vespucci wrote a letter here called The New World, which became the nickname of the continent. That letter inspired Thomas More’s Utopia thirteen years later, which is about desire—about........

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