Dr. Luiza Prado de O. Martins’ work engages with material and visual culture through the lenses of decolonial and queer theories. In her doctoral dissertation (awaiting publication) she examined technologies and practices of birth control and their entanglements with colonial hierarchies of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and nationality, offering the idea of "technoecologies of birth control" as a framework for observing and intervening in biopolitical articulations emerging around practices of birth control. She holds a PhD in Design Research from the Universität der Künste Berlin, and an MA in Digital Media from the Hochschule für Künste Bremen.
Her current artistic research project, titled A Topography of Excesses, starts from a call to re-appropriate the perception of excess attributed to gendered and racialized bodies through the modern/colonial gender system. Through installation, sculpture, net-art, video, and text, the project looks into the transmission of indigenous and folk knowledges about herbal birth control as decolonising practices of radical care that allow communities to forge new paths by accessing the poetic dimensions of the pluriversal.
She is part of the design education duo A Parede and a founding member of Decolonising Design.
ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE 2023
Luiza Prado is a resident in the transmediale 2023 Digital Art Residency programme in collaboration with Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. In her new research, Empty Calories, she will focus on the increasing disconnection between the realities of food production and climate collapse and its widespread consumption as content on screens. Questioning how online platforms create desires for ingredients and food trends, Empty Calories brings attention to the unusable politics of food, its new networked condition, and disassociation from environmental and sociopolitical realities. Unfolding as a reality tv show, Luiza Prado will research the history of the luxury spice and medical cure-all – silphium – a once highly desired ingredient and delicacy in the ancient world. Tracing through the plant’s economic significance and eventual extinction, Empty Calories raises questions about the links between the anthropogenic extinction of species and plants and politics of distraction.