Tell us a little bit about yourself.

I am an artist from Brazil, currently based in Vienna. My practice explores the intersections of consumerism, religious beliefs, migration, and material discourses within the Anthropocene. This semester I am beginning my PhD in Philosophy at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. My actual research, Was Gescheites (Something Clever), examines the political dimensions of wine production in Austria and how national identity is manifested in commercial aesthetics. Beyond that, I am a member of the Viennese band Trauma Glow, which mixes Shoegaze, Grunge, and Emo influences. Our upcoming tour along the U.S. East Coast will include New York, Washington dc, Baltimore, and other six cities, and it has also led to my solo exhibition in Massachusetts.

Can you speak on your band Trauma Glow? Is there any intersection with your visual arts practice?

Trauma Glow explores a post-human nostalgia, liminal memories and a feeling of entrapment within the promises of modernity. It intersects with my visual practices through shared interests with materiality, digitalization, temporality, and decay, which influences our imaginary, as we mostly do everything by our own, from unconventional merch pieces to our projections for the concerts. 

Our last album, About to Find Solace in Your Arms, felt like catching a body in free fall. For the cover we collaborate with the artist Leon Sahiti, which portrays a digital human figure, lost in Limbo, with dark backgrounds seemingly bleached by the sunlight, performing age despite its newness, embodying a landscape where distortion suggests vulnerability. And for our next release, set for July this year, we are going into a Frutiger Aero aesthetic; within a European futurism entangled with war and climate anxiety, and it is going to be a collaborative Album together with the Viennese Artists Sakura.

What kinds of things are influencing your work right now?

Maybe materialist and post-Anthropocene perspectives. Through Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, I got interested in nonhuman forces and aesthetic realities. If objects and substances possess their own agency, then how do commercial aesthetics and ideological positions inscribe themselves into consumable goods? This inquiry has led me to refine my critique of consumer aesthetics within the Austrian wine industry and its intersections with far-right ideology. The concept of terroir suggests that a producer’s environment, land, and methods influence the taste of the wine. But if terroir encompasses both material and immaterial conditions, I ask: Can an extremist right-wing producer also imprint ideological traces onto the wine itself? Does wine, as an artifact of both nature and culture, carry an aesthetic or even a sensorial expression of political tendencies?

What are some recent, upcoming or current projects you are working on?

I recently opened a show at ASIFAKEIL, MuseumsQuartier in Vienna, titled Trugbilder/Delusions. One of the key works in the exhibition, Trugbilder, takes its name from the German word meaning ‘trick image’: images that distort perception, delusions, creating an ambivalence between reality and fiction, a visual deception both aesthetic and political. The things of the art system, are complies in the creation of these images it mostly critics. 

Do you think your work is at all influenced by the current socio-political climate of any particular setting? If so, do you think this is a purposeful decision?

Yes, particularly in relation to migration and consumerism. The way I engage with materiality is a provocation and a critique. I have a body of work made from Styrofoam and cardboard, materials primarily used for transportation and packaging, carrying objects across borders while simultaneously being a symbol of disposability and environmental harm. There is a dialectic, between critique and fascination, responsibility and desire. I am drawn to glossy, reflective surfaces, to the way they capture attention and signal value through newness, cleanness… This tension mirrors the bible: good and bad, beautiful yet destructive. My work doesn’t seek to resolve this contradiction but rather to occupy it, questioning the ways in which aesthetic pleasure and critical awareness coexist.

How did your interest in your work begin?

I have always been drawn to materials associated with transport, things designed to carry other things, without understanding why. Over time, I realized that this interest was related to my biography. I went to a catholic school for 8 years, and like the crucifix hanging in my classes, I started to see materials like Styrofoam, cardboard, and other packaging elements, as artifacts. Objects of transport; handles, tripods, bus, cars, bikes, trains, flights, became “biblical” metaphors; embodying themes of displacement, transition, and impermanence, dealing with personal and political dimensions of mobility, like pressing horoscope symbols into car tires.

Do you have a specific process in terms of conceptualizing materiality?

I start looking for things which I cannot comprehend. It develops though texts and in more specific cases, it transforms into a research. For instance, lately I have been visiting Smartphone and Internet Shops. I like to see then as a modern chapel. Everything shinnes thought it’s virtuality. Representing stuff that aren’t really there. An idea of “ghosts of consumption” resonates a post-factual world, where representation often carries more weight than reality itself.

How long have you lived in Vienna and what brought you there?

I came to Vienna as it was the only place where I found the Critical Studies program in the Academy of Fine Arts. This course offers a hybrid approach for working with aesthetics, politics, research, and curatorial praxis. The cost of living in Vienna is relatively accessible. The city owns a large number of social housing buildings, which helps regulate rental prices, a reminiscence of its red past. Studying here is also quite affordable. 

What do you want a viewer to walk away with after experiencing your work?

The way I work may give attention to daily banalities, making people aware of the everyday objects, things with no capital value. For instance, in With Persuasive Trace Resting Heavy Behind Your Shoulders, this happens strongly. A handle from the Viennese public transport system serves as both a literal and symbolic object, it carries the weight of collective movement, routine, and anonymous interactions while also embodying the mechanisms of persuasion and control. This way, I hope to create a shift in perception, where functional artifacts are not just passive elements but instead reveal their embedded histories.

What’s your absolute favorite place in the world to be and why?

I have a fascination with taking long train journeys with my laptop. I feel sober, I think clearly, I am alone and I can listen to loud music. I move with the things around me. I create models. Things are quite sterile and not personal. I am in a space in between, where I have nowhere to go because I am already going.

What are you really excited about right now?

Fashion. It may extend a sort of language I have being developing. A relation between body, textiles and projections, where already on work I exhibited in 2021. There I was trying to create landscape, between exotic projections and artificiality. Textiles as a second skin, promising something but not really giving it.

You previously referred to yourself as a video installation artist, but your work also has connections to sculpture and painting. Can you talk about this?

Now I am focusing on video, but my practice is fluid and interdisciplinary. Between idea and communication, there are moments when materials shape meaning, and others when I approach the material with a pre-existing question. Video installations have allowed me, for example, to explore surfaces, reflections, and the immateriality of images. But over time, I became more interested in the physicality of objects themselves, which led me to work more with sculpture. Painting, on the other hand, is a way of working through layers, both physical and recorded. It serves as a surface for projection, which, in turn, connects back to the video works.

How do you think of material in different contexts?

I do see it as something indexical, which communicates and changes meaning, that registers a physical handling process, that keeps information and generates agency. In my artistic language, Wine, something we consume, Musik, vibration that goes through my skin, images, are not separated from my experience, as well the agency they generate.

 

Interview conducted and edited by Liam Owings