Invited when he was still very young to Information, the historic conceptual art show held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1970, from the outset Cildo Meireles has occupied a prominent role on the Brazilian and international art scene. The central core around which his works take form is his ability to combine a poetic and symbolic reading of the real with a careful analysis of the strategies regulating the processes of art production, circulation and promotion. In his works, the impulse to communicate a concept always finds an effective sensorial rendering, and he draws on an extensive range of languages and materials. For instance, he has produced installations involving the accumulation of everyday objects – Fontes, 1992, an installation for Documenta IX, was an environment with 7000 yellow rulers hanging from the ceiling and 200 non-synchronized clocks on the walls. Others are markedly sensorial and incorporate sound, fire and smells: Volatile, 1980/84, was produced with ash, candles and the odour of natural gas, while the installation/action The Sermon of the Mount, 1973/79, made use of 126,000 matches, mirrors and five actors. The artist creates the conditions whereby the spectator – who is totally immersed in the work – can grasp its meaning through the experience and not by approaching and passively contemplating the work from a distance. In other works, for example Incursions in ideological circuits (from 1970), he slips symbolic viruses into the standardized circuit of production, writing denunciatory comments on banknotes or substituting the label on Coca Cola bottles with "Yankee go Home!" and then putting them back into circulation. For Documenta XI, Meireles produced a work entitled Disappearing Element/Disappeared Element (Imminent Past), which combines a critical vision of the system of the exchange of goods and an urgent call to consider the progressive deterioration of the environment. He made ice lollies out of drinking water, and organized mobile sales points in various locations around the city. The vendors were recognizable because they had coloured carts, and the proceeds from sales went directly to them. With this work, Meireles alludes to the growing shortage of water on the planet and invites us to reflect on the relations between art and the market, on the notions of use value and exchange value, where the only effective action of dissent must necessarily be the disappearance of the object itself.