Luiza Prado – the introductory lecture in the AVU English program — Art in Context

Luiza Prado. (Brazil/Germany) is an artist, writer and scholar. Her practice explores the intersections of food, botany, sexuality, healthcare infrastructures, and digital technologies, focusing on the processes necessary for collective, multispecies care and reproductive justice. She holds a PhD from the University of the Arts Berlin, and an MA from the University of the Arts Bremen.

She is interested in the raw material of life as it flows and loops through practices, knowledges, and relations that connect all beings—human and other-than-human, living and those no longer or not yet embodied. Her work often takes shape through installation, performance, sculpture, text, and image. She is drawn to the fractal nature of time, materialised in her practice through short, looping moving image formats, including GIFs, lenticular prints, and web-based artworks. These formats call on ancestral futurities and the cyclical flows of care and survival across generations and species.

Her work is deeply rooted in the stories and practices of her ancestors—farmworkers, fishermen, herbalists, teachers, and healers—who created poetry, music, dance, and art while navigating fragmented rural and urban spaces in Xukuru-Kariri, Krenak, and Tupinambá territories, now part of Brazil. Their resilience in inventing new forms of survival across diverse contexts and technologies, and their rich, relational approach to other beings, form the foundation of her artistic practice. Her ongoing artistic research project, “Un/Earthings and Moon Landings” engages with silphium, the first plant extinguished by human activity, examining its reverberations in contemporary digital and economic infrastructures.

She has exhibited, performed, and spoken at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg (MUDAM), the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, the Museum of Art in Łódź, the Martin-Gropius-Bau, the Museum Ostwall, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, the National Museum of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Savvy Contemporary, Arebyte Gallery, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and Kampnagel, among others. She is currently based between Rio de Janeiro and Berlin.