Between Material Evidence (Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, 2025) and Cameron Rowland’s Rot (2025): Testimonial Agency and the Critical Power of Matter

This critical recension examines Provas Materiais (Material Evidence, Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, 2025) through a focused analysis of Cameron Rowland’s piece Rot (2025). While considering the exhibition’s curatorial framework and its ambition to explore materiality as a historical and epistemological agent, the essay argues that Rowland’s intervention extends the exhibition’s critical potential while also exposing both the exhibition and museum fragilities. By allowing sugar canes to decay within the museum, Rot redefines material evidence as a living, decomposing process of testimony, confronting the institutional logic of preservation, authorship, and commodification. Rowland’s work transforms decay into a mode of knowledge and care, revealing the museum as a site of tension between conservation and transformation, history and material criticalities.