In the late 1960s, Cildo Meireles began his prolific career-which now spans over four decades —with drawing, later expanding his practice to include an extraordinarily diverse range of mediums. Part of a generation that emerged immediately following the rise of the Neoconcrete artists in the early 1960s in Brazil, Meireles produces work that is informed by the group's poetic and social dimensions, while also reflecting the conceptualist trend that was beginning to gain ground during the same period in various parts of the globe. Meireles's fundamental concerns are the investigation of representational systems in relation to the concepts of territory, value, and scale, and the shifting interaction between mental construct and sensory experience.

Measuring only 9 mm, Cruzeiro do Sul (The Southern Cross) is a tiny cube made of soft pine and hard oak, installed on the floor of a vast and empty gallery. Pine and oak are sacred trees in the cosmogony of the Tupi Indians: by rubbing pieces of their woods together, one can produce fire, which evokes the presence of an Indigenous divinity. The mythic narrative embedded in this work shifts the focus from its "objecthood" and confers on it an immense amount of energy, which has the effect of monumentalizing its minute proportions. According to Meireles, "Southern Cross was initially conceived as a way of drawing attention, through the issue of scale, to a very important problem, the over-simplification imposed by proselytizing missionaries — essentially the Jesuits — on the cosmogony of the Tupi Indians. The 'white' culture reduced an indigenous divinity to the god of thunder, when in reality their system of belief was a much more complex, poetic, and concrete matter, emerging through the mediation of their sacred trees, oak and pine."

Fire can be a metaphor for both creation and destruction, and, forty years on, The Southern Cross continues to be a powerful reminder of the plight of Native peoples in Brazil.

- Kiki Mazzucchelli