Peter Gabriel – o\i – The Artwork

Once again, Peter Gabriel has accompanied each track on his new album with a work of art. This follows the same principle as on i/o. Once again, suitable artists and works of art were sought out worldwide – though the works were not always created specifically for the song.

Gabriel feels a strong connection to the visual arts – whether paintings, sculptures, or photographs. He loves it when there is an exchange, a dialogue between his music and other forms of expression. He has long been inspired by interdisciplinarity. In the case of album artwork, he has also liked to draw on material from the field of science.

Here we present the 12 artworks for o\i, the artists, and some background information.

1 – Janaina Mello Landini: "Ciclotrama 156 (palindrome)" for Been Undone
2 – Tomás Saraceno "Cosmic Spider/Web" für Put The Bucket Down
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overview of the o\i article series

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Release #1 from January 3, 2026: Been Undone

The Track

Been Undone is a rather quiet song that enumerates a bitter, long list what has ruined or destroyed in life. However, Gabriel also says that he actually sees these negatives in a positive light. Because you also learn from difficult and painful moments in life – often the most.

And so the song continues with an optimistic "just listen and feel." And at the end, even "and I feel it in you, you feel it in me." So the sombre conclusion is that you can feel something after all – in others, in yourself.

The Artist

Janaina Mello Landini (born in Brazil in 1975) initially studied architecture, then fine arts; her work also incorporates insights from physics and mathematics.

She initially worked as an architect for ten years, then designed stage sets and costumes for theater productions and films between 2003 and 2006. In 2013, she moved to São Paulo to devote herself exclusively to her art. She still lives and works there today.

In 2010, Landini began experimenting with space, using threads, nails, and knots, twisting and tension. She now works almost exclusively with strings and ropes, which she weaves and knots into wall hangings and expansive webs. Many of them resemble roots, branches, and trees. They are also reminiscent of lichen growth or the structures of blood vessels.

Basically, thick ropes are divided into individual strands, which are then split again into smaller strands, and so on, down to the basic individual fibres. Landini arranges these increasingly branching structures into patterns with a wide variety of outlines. And depending on the situation, one can also see the process in reverse, with the thinnest fibres connecting with each other, continuing further and further until they form thick strands.

Her work is characterized by skilled technique, often taking months or even years to complete. She frequently draws on the Fibonacci sequence and other patterns found in nature, contrasting the rigid logic of artificial structures with the wisdom of organic forms. She seeks to explore themes such as connectedness and interdependence, time, and diversity.

Landini's objects have been exhibited in Brazil, France, the Netherlands, the United States, and the United Arab Emirates. Her works were on display at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2016, at the Château de Chaumont-sur-Loire in 2019, and at the 13th Mercosul Biennial in 2022.

Her website provides a comprehensive insight into her work.

The Artwork

The first artwork for the album is called Ciclotrama 156 (palindrome), measures 138cm x 138cm, was created in 2019 and consists of handmade green cotton rope on linen.

Two separate fabric panels spread out in semicircular, highly branched structures. Both extend toward each other, and there is a knot at the connecting center. In a sense, it is the center of everything.

The title Ciclotrama combines the word "cycle" with the latin word "trama" (meaning "chain" or "weaving"). The additional designation palindrome refers to the mirrored arrangement, which allows the work to be "read" forwards and backwards.

At the moment, Landini's existing piece has been selected for Been Undone. But Gabriel is delighted to announce that another work, created especially for the track, is to follow.

The Connection

Gabriel finds several connections to his song in the depiction: the theme of knots and entanglement or disentanglement, the thread that either does us up or undoes us, perhaps also the thread of life in general. He also recognizes something like brain hemispheres. This fits in with his current theme of the brain project, to which he adds the song Been Undone.

He probably also likes the exciting connection between technical precision (he also sees fractals here) and natural, organic structures.

Fun fact: Gabriel pronounced the name of the upcoming album also as "Oi". This is a greeting in Brazilian Portuguese, similar to 'Hi'.

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Release #2 from February 1st, 2026: Put The Bucket Down

The Track

Gabriel says that the bucket in Put The Bucket Down is full of the crap that goes around our head all the time. To find your way forward, you have to put it down.

Gabriel also says that he is fascinated by the idea that it might be possible to read and write human thoughts. However, he also sees the dangers of invading privacy or transplanting foreign ideas. And that the whole process is likely to cause enormous confusion. The song is about this confusion. The person singing is uncertain because she does not know exactly what she is experiencing. Whether her thoughts belong to her or to someone else.

The Artist

Once again, the creator of an o\i artwork comes from South America. Tomás Saraceno was born in Argentina in 1973 and studied art and architecture in Buenos Aires and Frankfurt. In Italy, he took part in a course taught by Olafur Eliasson (who also contributed a work of art to i/o), among others. In 2009, he also participated in NASA's International Space Studies Programme.

Saraceno's themes are fundamental natural structures and their status in the technological world. With his nature-laboratory aesthetic, he is quite close to the work of Olafur Eliasson. He has already explored emission-free flying, built floating greenhouses out of helium balloons, laid ropes through rooms that produced ambient vibration echoes when touched, and constructed landscape objects with a technological-aesthetic appearance that stand in nature and interact with it, for example by serving as habitats for birds and insects.

And he keeps coming back to spiders. He even has his own website about them, which includes a mobile app for interacting with the vibrational senses of spiders. Saraceno has repeatedly used these animals to create objects that trace cosmic structures – or has meticulously recorded spider populations in exhibition buildings (and not removed spider webs during the exhibition period).

Gabriel says he first encountered Saraceno through the Aerocene project, an interdisciplinary community of artists that seeks to highlight new forms of ecological sensitivity and raise awareness of the atmosphere and the environment.

Saraceno has lived in Berlin since 2001.

His website provides a comprehensive insight into his work.

The Artwork

The work provided by Saraceno is called Cosmic Spider/Web and is not actually the artwork itself, but a photograph of it. It shows a partial view of an installation that Saraceno created with the help of spiders, which had woven webs along metal elements throughout an entire room.

This installation was called Weaving The Cosmos and was on display in 2019 at the Milan Planetarium. The spider webs floated under the dome of the planetarium and looked like galaxy systems. Thanks to a sound system, visitors could also hear the vibrations of the spiders in the web. Saraceno was inspired by the similarities that scientists have found between the thread-like structure of the cosmic network and the intricate web of spider webs. Details and some photos of the installation can be found here.

For those who are interested: involved were five specimens of the genus Cyrtophora citricola, a single Nephila senegalensis and six Holocnemus pluchei.

The Connection

Saraceno listened to Gabriel's song and then found this image fitting and selected it. Gabriel, in turn, found the shapes of the spider webs fascinating and beautiful. He sees a connection between them and other shapes in nature, as well as to perceptions that the brain is capable of. That's why the image suits him too.

So perhaps what is represented here is less the content of the song about the confusion caused by thought transmission and more the idea of brain networking as a whole. Its cosmic size, its fascination, its light and shadow.

Also remarkable in this context is that there is a species of spider named after Peter Gabriel: Umidia gabrieli, a species of trapdoor spider from Baja California described in 2021. The tour book for the i/o Tour notes that this species of spider has some similarities with Gabriel: for example, it has little hair – at least on its legs…

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Author: Thomas Schrage