Brazilian artist Carla Maldonado has been selected to represent Brazil in the international residency Fluid Boundaries, a collaborative, transdisciplinary project between South Africa, Brazil, and Switzerland, supported by Portas Vilaseca. The initiative brings together artists, researchers, and mentors around a shared focus: water as a poetic, political, and ecological force.
Currently in the midst of the residency, Carla is working in dialogue with a group led by Paulo Basta from Fiocruz, which studies mercury contamination in Indigenous communities affected by illegal gold mining. Rather than illustrating this reality, her work seeks to imagine from within it, creating spaces for listening, presence, and imagination that challenge narratives of tragedy and invite new relationships with rivers, bodies, and storytelling itself.
She is mentored by artist, curator, and researcher Kassia Borges, forming a collaborative exchange where art, science, and Indigenous cosmologies intertwine, not to objectify territories, but to recognize them as active sources of knowledge and transformation.
In June, Carla will visit the Munduruku Indigenous Village, working alongside the Daje Kapap Eypi audiovisual collective, formed by Munduruku women.
Fluid Boundaries is a collaboration project between VIAD at the University of Johannesburg (SA), AiRSA (SA), artists-in-labs program at Zurich University of the Arts (CH), MASI Lugano (CH), the IBSA Foundation (CH) and Portas Vilaseca (BR).
Partner Institutions Science: University of the Western Cape (SA), University of Johannesburg (SA), Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (BR), Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (CH).
Fluid Boundaries is supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.
More information: www.fluidboundaries.org/
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About the artist
Carla Maldonado is a multimedia artist from Brazil, working primarily in experimental cinema, installations, and multi-channel projections. Maldonado’s work delves into narratives shaped by decolonial ecology, examining interactions between humans and non-humans as pathways to radical futurism.
Maldonado earned an MFA in Photography, Video & Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York City (2019). Recently she has exhibited works at The Bronx Museum in New York (2024), Rockaway Art Week (2023), The Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon (2022) and Thomas Erben Gallery in New York (2020), among others.
Her work has been supported by grants and residencies such as ARCAthens Fall Residency in Athens, Greece (2024), The Annual Artist Residency at The Locker Room Gallery, in Brooklyn (2023), the City Artist Corps Grant (2021), and the AIM Fellowship at The Bronx Museum of the Arts (2020).
She currently lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.
