Brazilian
Lives and works

"it’s like seeing a lightning bolt and trying to deduce — from that fleeting flash — the invisible shape of the clouds that created it"

Daniel de Paula’s multiple propositions aim to reflect upon the production of space as a reproduction of power dynamics, revealing critical investigations into the political, social, economic, and historical structures that shape places and relations.

His practice and production — not confined to the domain of art — intersect notions of geography, geology, architecture, and urbanism, highlighting an interest in understanding the complex social forces and forms hidden within surrounding materiality.

Through strategies such as extensive negotiations with public and private entities, appropriation, displacement, and recontextualization of pre-existing objects — alongside interactions with the agents constituting the exhibition space and its surroundings — his works propose a critical, and self-critical, gaze towards infrastructural, institutional, and individual spheres of space.

Thus, materiality is understood as a language to be read, ultimately revealing the abstractions and shadows that dominate and inscribe meaning onto our lives — whether through ideologies of property, capital, labor, or the production of value.