Time is a substantial element in the creation of a garden. Newly planted beings grow into the earth. As they establish their base, they rise, entangle, occupy their surroundings, and at times fold into one another. Together, they create modes of coexistence, offering sub- stance for mutual growth.

For over a decade, the Cerrado and the Atlantic Forest have been entangling within the Jardim de Transição (Transition Garden). Moving from solidity to rapid transformation, a week and a few millimeters of rain are enough for this well-trodden garden to manifest a sprout, a leaf, a flower, a new body—anticipated yet unknown.

Time is a substantial element in the creation of an image. Field studies of angle, color, and the thickness of the pen. Tests of light, the film’s transition on the camera roll, drawings settling into the de- veloped image. The mirrorless Zeiss Ikon, a mid-20th-century cam- era, leads to photographing almost without seeing. It demands calm, precision, slowness. Its focusing mechanism, guided by a distance scale, calls for physical closeness: in the absence of a rangefinder, measuring with a tape measure requires shifts in position between the camera and its subject.

From the place where the images were created to the laboratory where they will be developed, the images travel at least two days and nearly a thousand kilometers while still latent—stored, but unseen. Then, in a matter of minutes, they emerge in the bath of developing chemicals. In that interval, the bromeliad, extraordinarily red, unfurls its astonishingly moving inflorescence.

Three hours ahead, the images cross the Atlantic Ocean and ar- rive in another season. While Maria produces the photographs in the Jardim de Transição at Inhotim, in the Southern Hemisphere, Bárbara participates in their creation from afar, in the Northern Hemisphere. Instead of being physically present, she visits the garden through her imagination, adding another layer to the image through her drawings.

The interplay of these two languages on the same surface—photography and drawing—creates new proximities among the plants, 

establishing a connection that shifts the image into another tempo- rality, residual and dreamlike.

Different transitions permeate the images of the garden: the tran- sition that partially superimposes images on the photographic film; the transition born of the interplay between photography and draw- ing. Between the light filtering through gaps in the canopy and the shadowy half-light cast by the dense forest, the dreamlike quality of this visual essay invites a sensory immersion through its pages, like a long stroll through the Jardim de Transição, where two biomes coexist.