Meet the Artist // Daniela Federighi

Could you tell me about your background and the project you’re proposing for this three-month residency here at GlogauAIR?

I am a Brazilian visual artist living in São Paulo. I see my artistic practice as a way of feeling my way through the world around me and through the multiple layers of everyday life. I believe it’s about collecting the landscapes of my life, and so interdisciplinarity becomes very welcome in my process. My work begins with my small journeys and the encounters I have along the way, which I observe carefully while collecting fragments of these landscapes, later reinforcing or rearranging them.

For the project I have been developing at GlogauAIR, I decided to emphasize the idea of traveling, also because of its complementary opposite, which is staying at home. The very experience of coming here was literally the starting point for the work. Once here, I let myself be guided by Berlin’s everyday scenes, perceiving the strangeness of language as a foreigner and paying attention to what the city offers in terms of materials along my routes, as if they were stones in the way: I may pick them up and keep them, or I may step over them and move on. I came here open to working not only with the limitations of what I find on the streets —and what makes sense within the concept of the work— but also with the limitations of transport to the studio, since I am sometimes on foot or on a bicycle with a small basket. From there, the work itself begins to set the path, and the pieces start coming together.

Your work can be seen as a dialogue between your surroundings and your personal recordings and experiences within them…How do you select the pieces, materials, and media that will become part of the final work? And how do you make them interact to bring the project to life?

Photography is very present in my works, but it may also be accompanied and expanded into notes, sounds, drawings, and the appropriation of ordinary objects and materials I come across. From there, I move toward combining and handling these loose ends to build visual narratives, whether in the form of video, sculpture, or a visual-material, non-linear diary. I work with assemblage, so I look for materials that carry constructive or poetic potential but also resonate with the universe of my interests at a given moment.

Being a three-dimensional collage, assemblage allows me not only to juxtapose elements that belong to the same theme, reinforcing it, but also to bring together those that come from different contexts, those that apparently don’t match, but somehow when they’re together, they force you to find the connection between them. Once combined, they become something ambiguous, a quality I find very interesting.

The materials I use are present in my everyday life, as I said, but I do have a sort of curatorial process when choosing them. In terms of photography, I tend to capture things that lie between fiction and reality, scenes that look staged, landscapes I encounter during trips, ordinary objects. The objects and materials I choose usually have to do with the concept I’m working with (or the opposite , which gives contrast) but also what I find interesting in an aesthetic way.

In São Paulo, for example, I often come across materials related to construction sites, such as wooden planks or metal sheets. Cardboard boxes are also widely used in my work. They are objects that accommodate but also transport things from one place to another, so they carry a concept directly connected to what has been interesting to me lately in terms of route and travel. Color emerges both intuitively and rationally in this process. I usually work with desaturated, cooler tones, avoiding strong contrasts in color.

When it comes to working with these materials, the process unfolds naturally and with its own rhythm, without relying heavily on drawn-out plans. I try to create pieces that either support the photograph and its theme, or that echo a form that appears within the image. Assemblage becomes a way of telling a story or part of one, and the process carries a trial-and-error quality, intuitive at first but followed by moments of detachment that are more critical and rational. I would like my work to achieve, at least for now, a sense of narrative that encompasses both theatricality and reality.

During that vague, in-between stage of your creative process —when you’re gathering seemingly random pieces and nothing yet makes sense— How do you experience that moment of uncertainty before the work begins to take shape? Are there any recurrent thoughts or feelings that tend to surface?

Uncertainty is constant, at least in my process, and I deeply believe in it. I don’t know if it will ever disappear, but honestly I hope it doesn’t. I don’t see my work, at least for now, having anything to do with certainty. I prefer to ask questions instead of thinking that I know the answers. Especially because I work with encounters, and an encounter is not predictable or programmed.

When I collect things from the streets and I still don’t know how to use them, I write down what I see and what I think about them. Particularly in this first contact with the materials, my approach is through annotation, observation, and touch. And so I keep putting one piece next to another until it tells me the way forward.

Sometimes works or fragments remain in the studio for weeks or months before they begin to unfold. At times they resolve themselves only when I come across a new piece by chance, or when I accidentally drop or place something on top, or when I decide to take an opinion or suggestion from someone completely outside the work, bringing a perspective I would never have considered myself but which turns out to be exactly what was missing for a sense of mystery, ambiguity, or narrative to emerge.

Here at the residency, the project took some time to find a material thread, even though the conceptual one was already in place. After all, an idea is one thing and its materialization is another. Perhaps because of the limited time here, this uncertainty made me a bit anxious because I couldn’t believe 100% that in the time available the work would unfold. What I have been creating took a while to shift into first gear, but at the same time I also like the idea of presenting something that is still in process, that’s still en route.

The work already begins to exist the moment you commit yourself to producing at least one small piece every day. I never know how it’s going to come up after months, but something will come up. It’s uncertain and I embrace it.

For your current project at GlogauAIR, you’re working with the theme of traveling and what that means to you here in Berlin. Could you share some of the impressions or findings you’ve gathered during this time exploring and collecting in the city?

I think the first movement towards the project was a video I edited with fragments of my journey from my studio in São Paulo to the studio here in Berlin. The video contains shots of my house, my studio, my suitcase being packed, the street, the road, the airport, an airplane window, a car window. It was not something I had planned, but it gradually took shape. I think that traveling is more than just leaving your house. It’s about imagining, collecting memories and dreaming of possible scenarios. So I’ve been trying to work with the traveling theme in a more broad way.

I had built high expectations about what I might find in the streets of Berlin, but in the end it was nothing like what I had imagined. I thought I would come across more metal sheets, more loose wooden planks around the residency, but instead I kept finding entire pieces of furniture, way too personal clothes, books, posters. At first this broke from my expectations and frustrated me slightly, but then I remembered that this is exactly the kind of process I like to work with. I truly believe in restriction, working with what is available and how it is available. My own curation filtered these found items with the project I had in mind, but much was left behind and, most importantly, much was never even found. I think that here in Berlin, I was expecting something that didn’t come out in the way that I wanted it to. But that’s when I know that things will get interesting. For example, something very curious happened, and it was the encounter with objects in the same palette and tonalities.

What has been taking shape here in this room-studio is precisely this blend between the room and the street, the longing for home alongside the desire to remain in this country, the constant translation of foreign words, the photos I take, the books left on the street for others to pick up. I believe it is about these encounters that happen within the journey inside the journey inside the journey.