Artistic Research : Erasmushogeschool Brussel, Koninklijk Conservatorium Brussel.
Orchestral piece : Commissioned by l'Itinéraire (DRAC Regional Department of Cultural Affairs - aide à la composition musicale France). Premiered by Laiana Oliveira (soprano), soloists of l'Itinéraire Ensemble (Mathilde Lauridon, Lucia Peralta, Myrtille Hetzel, Julie Brunet-Jailly, David Mengelle), USP Chamber Orchestra, Guri Santa Marcelina Young Choir, dir. Ricardo Bologna.
26 October 2025 Teatro Sao Pedro, Sao Paulo - Brazil (Année France-Brésil official programmation)
finalist São Paulo Association of Art Critics APCA Prize
Symphonia Botanica is a modular work that adapts to local context.Inspired by a Baroque passio, its form is organized into short pieces — recitative, aria — but also incorporates the profane universe of songs. Local folklores can likewise be adapted and included. The lyrics are translated to embrace the languages of the country where the performance takes place.
Symphonia Botanica is at once a musical work and a research-creation project — providing music, form, and methodology for collaborative musical processes.
Drawing inspiration from a polyphonic listening to nature, it provokes encounters and nurtures relationships: between musicians, and between musicians and their environments. Each performance tightens bonds, enabling the construction of new connections, new communities of listening.
At its heart is a polyphonic orchestra — one that honours the presence of each of its members, a writing practice that embraces diversity rather than dissolving it. Professional ensembles are invited to expand their audiences through themes that speak to all of us, themes that are at once intimate and universal.
Symphonia Botanica is a celebration of life — weaving bonds through music and through the stories we tell about the plant world.
Inhotim BR Musical Performance Version - 2024
Instrumentation : string orchestra and choir in an open air space in direct interaction with the living environment: the animals, plants, and ecosystems of Inhotim's vast botanical garden. Duration : 30 minutes, language : Brazilian Portuguese.
Sao Paulo BR Concert Version - 2025
Instrumentation : soloists (soprano, flute, violin, viola, violoncello, percussion), vocal ensemble (young voices choir), 4 percussionists, professional chamber string orchestra. Duration : 30 minutes, language : Brazilian Portuguese.
Prados BR Concert and performances Version - 2026
Instrumentation : soloists (mezzo-soprano, accordion, violin, viola, violoncello, percussion), vocal ensemble (female voices choir), 4 percussionists, professional chamber string orchestra + amateur chamber orchestra. Duration : 20 minutes (final concerto) + serenades, improvisations based on local songs inspired by the plant universe, music performances in public spaces throughout the city during the Prados Music Festival. language : Brazilian Portuguese.
Campo Grande BR Concerto Version - 2026
Instrumentation : soloists (soprano, local soloists, violin, viola, violoncello, percussion), vocal ensemble (children voices choir), 4 percussionists, professional string orchestra. Duration : 20 minutes (final concerto). Language : Brazilian Portuguese.
Aubervilliers FR Concert Version - 2027
Instrumentation : soloists (soprano, flute, violin, viola, violoncello, percussion), vocal ensemble (young voices choir), 4 percussionists, student chamber string orchestra. Duration : 20 minutes, language : French (recitativo and songs) and Brazilian Portuguese (aria, soloist).
According to Yanomami mythology, all music on Earth originates from Amoa Hi, the Tree of Songs.
"These are immense trees, covered with a brilliantly shining down of blinding whiteness. Their trunks are covered with lips that move ceaselessly, one above the other. From these countless mouths continuously spring forth songs of incomparable beauty, as numerous as the stars in the heart of the sky. All the songs of the spirits come from these very ancient trees."
— Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman
Sao Paulo Premiere, Teatro Sao Pedro, October 2025
Symphonia Botanica (concert version) : 1. Dream (recitativo) 2. Amoa Hi (aria) 3. Rose and Lily (song) 4. Morning (recitativo) 5. Jurema (song) 6. Ponta de Mata (cadenza solo flute) and Ponta de Mata (song)
I. Dream - Recitative
You should dream of the earth / For it has a heart and breathes / In dreams the forest speaks / The rivers tell truths / The spirits of the woods dance / And the earth pulses, alive. / You should dream / Of the roots that embrace the world / Of the winds that blow memories / You should dream of the waters. / You should dream / As the ancient trees dream / As the earth itself dreams / Before the sky falls. / You should dream to remember / That everything is alive / Orygham speak the leaves / In the motherlanguage of the world. / You should dream to feel / the pulse beneath your feet / And the earth's veins / in the fertile darkness of time. (Free adaptation, inspiration : The Falling Sky - Davi Kopenawa et Bruce Albert)
II. Amoa Hi for soprano and string orchestra
A single tree. A million mouths / Its whispering songs / Flow like a river / Without beginning or end / Numerous as the stars in the sky / Where earth embraces the horizon / Where rest the eternal roots of heaven / Infinite chorus of the forest / House woven of sounds.
III. Rose and Lily Song
I was in the Rose garden. / I sighed, further ahead I saw a Lily plant / It was crying, I was in love / It was scenting, I was in love / I sat down / When I stood up / It was crying, I was in love / It was scenting.
IV. Morning - Recitative
That morning you felt / The world's scent Manaçá, Peroba, / Cells unfolding in the sun / Microscopic music / That morning you saw / Deep green, light-green, shadow-green / In textures and reliefs / The spirals of time/ Taste of awakened chlorophyll / New moon's tongue / When you closed your eyes / You heard all this together.
V. Jurema Song
Gather flowers Oh little Jurema Oh Juremá / Leaves bark and seeds / Manacá, Paricá/ Clove cinnamon and ginger / Oh little Jurema / Juremiê / At the foot of Jurema there are flowers / Oh little Jurema / Eia Danda Juçá / Ouricuri foot of Manacá / Oh red sky / The arrow stained / The Mirror earth / Jurema Fell / Jurema Tenueflora / Mimosa Verrucosa / Mimosa Nigra / Persistent Mimosa / Bloomed.
VI. Ponta de Mata Song
Forest edge has Jackfruit / Has Cajui has Mango tree / Araticum and Guavira / Has Murici Gameleira. /Forest edge has Jackfruit / Has Cajui has Mango tree / Ingá Pacaba Guavira / Mangaba and Pitangueira.
The string orchestra is surrounded by a percussion ensemble. This configuration brings an especially engaging role to the orchestra, inviting musicians into an active dialogue with one another and with their environment.
The score stimulates a high degree of sonic interaction, situating performers and audience alike within a polyphonic forest of sounds.
Concept : Folk Songs and plants
"The cycle was inspired by the reading of Thus Spoke the Plant by Monica Gagliano — plants as sentient, communicative beings capable of learning and memory, radically challenging the boundaries between vegetal and animal intelligence through the lens of science.
Symphonia Botanica is anchored in a cosmology in which the botanical and the sacred are inseparable — an assemblage of songs and plants, of living matter and living myth.
As the project was born in Brazil, the first version of the work draws its references from the myths and biomes of that country.
Ponta de Mata — Forest Edge
A poetic inventory of flowers, trees, and fruits, adapted to embrace local species wherever the work is performed. The forest edge is both a geographical reality and a liminal space — a threshold between the cultivated and the wild, the known and the uncharted.
Jurema
This song invokes simultaneously the myth, the healing plant, and the sacred tree from which ayahuasca originates. It condenses multiple, irreducible layers of meaning: Jurema as spiritual entity within Afro-Brazilian traditions, as medicine in Indigenous ritual practice, and as a cosmological gateway — an opening onto other dimensions of consciousness. To sing Jurema is to stand at the intersection of ecology, theology, and healing.
O Jardim da Rosa e do Lírio — The Garden of the Rose and the Lily
This movement draws from the medieval universe and the alchemical imagination. The Rose and the Lily — ancient representations of the feminine and the masculine — enact here a union: a love song with a troubadour sensibility, at once delicate and charged with longing. A synesthetic dimension is woven into the texture through percussion instruments composed of grains, leaves, and seeds, and through bird whistles that call and respond across the ensemble. The female choir joins this avian dialogue — their voices alternating with the whistles in a gesture that evokes the alba, the troubadour dawn song in which birdsong signals both the beauty and the fragility of the moment. The percussion writing thus becomes a sonic garden in itself: rustling, scattering, singing, calling — a garden at the threshold of dawn.
Symphonia botanica, by Michelle Agnes, is one of those emblematic works that speak to one of the greatest dramas of our time—an invitation for the 170 or 180 nations gathered in Belém do Pará at COP-30, the United Nations Conference on Climate Change, to reflect on this warning by Davi Kopenawa:
“The forest is alive. It can only die if the white people persist in destroying it. If they succeed, the rivers will disappear underground, the soil will crumble, the trees will shrivel up, and the stones will crack in the heat. The dried-up earth will become empty and silent. The xapiri spirits who come down from the mountains to play on their mirrors in the forest will escape far away. Their shaman fathers will no longer be able to call them and make them dance to protect us. They will be powerless to repel the epidemic fumes which devour us. They will no longer be able to hold back the evil beings who will turn the forest to chaos. We will die one after the other, the white people as well as us. All the shamans will finally perish. Then, if none of them survive to hold it up, the sky will fall.”
As the excellent soprano Laiana Oliveira delivered the moving texts of the shaman Davi Kopenawa, while the orchestra reproduced the rustling of leaves and the marvelous sounds of the forest, I felt immersed in the very entrails of the Amazon, transported to The Lost Steps, the masterpiece by Alejo Carpentier.
João Marcos Coelho, Complete article : Revista Concerto, 27/10/2025
In São Paulo, the soloists of the French ensemble L’Itinéraire joined the University of São Paulo Chamber Orchestra, together with the Guri Santa Marcelina Choir. The project was presented as part of the official France–Brazil Season of the Institut Français. This initiative was accompanied by a series of meetings and workshops within the Guri Santa Marcelina social music program, a foundation that promotes music as a tool for social inclusion.
Research at Inhotim Institute Brumadinho MG
During this phase of the project, I participated in an artistic residency that enabled an exchange of knowledge with the Inhotim Institute’s team of biologists. Beyond being a monumental botanical garden and a leading contemporary art museum, the Institute also hosts an orchestra and a music academy. As part of the program What Is a Plant?, several cross-disciplinary projects were developed, encouraging dialogue between music, biology, and the visual arts.
The residency included workshops, open-air performances, and real-time composition sessions with the Inhotim Orchestra and the Inhotim Children’s Orchestra, conducted by Leandro Oliveira.
