The fact is, it’s more a pool for paddling than serious swimming, plus the chilly breeze on London’s south bank today helped dissuade early targeted traffic to the Hayward gallery from taking a dip.

The heated pool is an element associated with an exhibition by way of the Brazilian artist Ernesto Net – the initial with the Hayward because it was closed in January for renovation – and gallery managers anticipate the public being more forward than journalists were today. They may be taking bookings that allow 16 people sixty minutes into the two changing rooms, also works of art, and pool.

Net also has transformed the Hayward’s upper galleries into playrooms that one could touch, smell and walk through while pondering existential questions on who I am and what we’re doing here. You can even bang a drum.

The show, Net’s most ambitious as of yet, has become a 2010 year inside planning and three and a half weeks in their installation. “There are numerous things happening as well but that, there’s no doubt that, could be the life we have been living today,” Net said yesterday. “Everything is interconnected.”

Net said he installed the pool with summer at heart, but he was a student in Rio de Janeiro when he was planning it, not London.

His exhibition, The sides around the globe, is something of any labyrinth and Net said he has also been inspired by London and its twisting, winding streets: “You go two blocks working in London therefore you never go straight, there is a turn here as well as a turn there and this also makes things very indirect.”

Hayward director Ralph Runoff said the exhibition was one “which invites you within it as well as around it, that invites you to see things, feel things, touch things. It’s actually a show in which you will find spaces of contemplation along with activity; a reveal that asks us to rediscover what boundary means, what limit means and what a threshold means.”

Net’s show opens towards public on Saturday, starting off the Southbank Centre’s Festival Brazil, a summer-long celebration of other nutritional foods Brazilian with music from the likes of Gilberto Gil and Maria Bethany, along with dance, literature, film and caper.