At Miami Art Basel, Costa Brazil Debuts a Partnership with Creative Time Honor Composer, Kamala Sankram

There is a certain madness that surrounds Miami’s Art Basel bacchanal. Thousands of art-obsessives flock to the city’s sunny shores, but spend much of their time flitting in and out of a seemingly endless array of vernissages and talks and cocktail parties and dinners, but last night’s evening spent at the subdued, candlelit Casa Tua was a strikingly different affair. Guests were welcomed with the aroma of breu, a resin extracted from the Almacega tree that burned in an open fire and believed to activate one’s chakras, and a warm embrace from Francisco Costa. 

The designer-turned-beauty maestro, who launched the cult-favorite eco-beneficial beauty line Costa Brazil in 2018, was on hand to debut a partnership with Kamala Sankram. The Creative Time honor composer had recently debuted a 10 hour “public sound installation and experimental opera” entitled The Last Stand, chronicling the life of a 300-year-old red oak tree, and Costa Brazil and Amyris, the synthetic biotechnology company, were now the opera’s lead patrons. Following Art Basel, the public work will continue to travel around the world through 2022. 

“I left Calvin and had this idea for the brand, but wasn’t sure about the ingredients,” Costa recalled. “I had the opportunity to go to the Acre region, and it changed the notion of what I thought beauty was. We were very lucky to find the breu, and was totally infatuated by the scent of it, but later found that the scent was almost of secondary to the nature of the ingredient itself. It’s very powerful. From this one ingredient, we built the brand and found so many other amazing ingredients, all in Brazil.” 

Costa was joined for the seated candlelit dinner by a bevy of his most loyal fans, including a large cohort of Brazilians that included Bruna Marquezine, Lais Ribero, Isabella Grutman, Camila Coelho, and, perhaps most captivating of all, Laura Yawanawa, who had traveled from the Amazon to join in on the fun. The Yawanawa tribe leader, along with husband Tashka Yawanawa, were the first tribe to host Costa during his exploratory trips to the Amazon, and offered guidance to this beautiful, verdant territory. “She really symbolizes the birth of Costa Brazil,” Costa added. “It’s incredibly special to me that she’s with us tonight.” 

The evening was capped off by a performance from Bossa nova pop singer Bebel Gilberto, who ended her stage time with a tune entitled “Jabuticaba,” a song that fittingly tells the story of her favorite tree.