Luiza Prado is an artist, activist, and researcher. Her work moves between installation and food, using performance and ritual as a way of invitation and activation for audiences. Her practice explores relations and knowledge between food, infrastructures, and technology, and questions what structures and processes are needed for collective concerns of care. She holds a PhD from the University of the Arts Berlin, and an MA from the University of the Arts Bremen. Her ongoing artistic research project, “Un/Earthings and Moon Landings” narrates, through a series of artworks, the extinction and later reappearance of an ancient contraceptive, aphrodisiac, and spice called silphium. She has exhibited and performed work at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the National Museum of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Savvy Contemporary, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and Kampnagel, among others. She is currently based in Berlin.
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.