Daniel de Paula, Mãe (2025)
Daniel’s talk centers on Mãe (2025), a work developed in relation to the Pinheiros River in São Paulo, in which a 25-ton turbine from the Henry Borden hydroelectric plant is displaced and reintroduced into the urban river landscape. The project reflects on processes of industrialization, environmental transformation, and the historical production of urban space, tracing how infrastructures of energy both sustain and exhaust the territories they inhabit. Through this gesture, the work articulates a critical reading of ecology, labor, and modernization, framing the river not only as a site of extraction, but as a witness to the long-term material consequences of development.
Bio
Daniel de Paula’s practice investigates the material and symbolic structures that sustain contemporary life. His works emerge from extended processes of negotiation with individuals, institutions, and corporations, in which the conditions of acquisition, displacement, and installation of materials become constitutive elements of the work itself—revealing entanglements between infrastructure, politics, and economy. Intersecting art with geography, geology, architecture, and urbanism, his practice proposes a critical and self-reflexive gaze toward the forces that shape space, ultimately approaching materiality as a language through which broader social, economic, and historical dynamics can be read.
For more on Daniel’s work, see the articles in New City Art, here and here.
