Luiza Furtado (*1999) Florianopolis, Brazil. (she/her)
After receiving her B.A in Industrial Design (2021) in Rio de Janeiro, the artist moved to Austria for her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Luiza works as a performer and multimedia artist researching materiality, within its ecological reverberances in the Anthropocene. She is interested in the friction between past and present. While focusing on topics of hybridity in late stage capitalism, to trace connections between biopolitical control and industrial dynamics. Her pieces reflect on natural and synthetic surfaces as repositories of living memory, and delve into their prosthetic quality as extensions of the human body.
"I work as a performer and multimedia artist researching materiality, within its ecological reverberances in the Anthropocene. I am interested in the friction between past and present. While focusing on topics of hybridity in late stage capitalism, to trace connections between biopolitical control and industrial dynamics.
The construction of my work beggins with a practice of arquiving urban materials. Which are second hand fragments - that were industrially produced - such as; textiles, metal and plastic. Sourcing them from comercial spaces like recycling centers, often, flea markets or organically collecting from people in my community and interrupted areas around the city.
My background as an industrial designer influences my approach with material. Every surface that comes into the work triggers questioning. And, each question takes form as a line in my research web. Knotting, through tensioned layers (in which circumstances was this element built? what were the machines involved? how will it be absorbed by the soil?).
Influenced by Haraway's writings on cyborgism and Latour’s contextualization of climate crisis emergence. I reflect on (natural/synthetic) surfaces as repositories of living memory, and delve into their prosthetic quality as extensions of the human body. In performances, I combine soft sculpture and fluid costume with embodied movement as tools to blurr these boundaries."
