Luiza Prado De O. Martins is an artist, writer and scholar. Her work moves between installation, sculpture, and the moving image, using performance and ritual as a way of invitation and activation for audiences. Her practice explores relations and knowledge between plants, political infrastructures, and technology, and questions what structures and processes are needed for collective concerns of environmental care and reproductive justice.
ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE 2023
Luiza Prado was a resident in the transmediale 2023 Digital Art Residency programme in collaboration with Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. In her research, Empty Calories, she focused 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 researches 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.