What inspired you to create artwork and become an artist?
Born in a favela north of Rio de Janeiro, art presented itself to me very early on as a way to escape the confining reality around me, as a way to construct my own language, to transform structural violence into creative energy. I was first drawn to moving images, drawing, 3D animation, music, and then movement. But it was above all the need to keep invisible narratives alive—family, diasporic, intimate, queer—that pushed me to truly create. It's not a choice of comfort: it's a way of responding to the world with what I have inside me and my way of seeing the world—sometimes an abandoned object in the street will serve as a support for a painting, sometimes it will be an art center or a museum that instead invites me to dance and express myself differently.
What is your artistic background, the techniques and subjects you have experimented with to date?
After training in 3D animation in São Paulo, I was admitted to the Beaux-Arts de Paris following literature studies in Toulouse. At the Beaux-Arts de Paris I worked with Claude Closky, Patrick Faigenbaum and especially Emmanuelle Huynh, with an exchange at CalArts in the United States and a great study trip to Tokyo, Japan. My background is transdisciplinary: painting, performance, installation, video, photography, carpentry, ceramics... Through these mediums I explore the margins and create interdisciplinary projects often staged together: bodies find themselves in movement, objects are charged with history, gestures of care, mechanisms of resistance. I often use found objects — bed bases, cradles, boards, tires — which I divert as supports for pictoriality and meaning.
What are the 3 aspects that differentiate you from other artists, making your work unique?
My perspective is changed from a diasporic and eco-poetic anchor. I connect colonial memory, ecological disappearance and forms of survival in the margins in order to reinvent my perspective, and I hope that of the public, of the subject treated. The use of the body as an archive is something strong for me, through dance performance, I make the body a space of transmission and repair, and the recovered materials become a support for history, a medium of resistance, an interface between the intimate and the political.
Where does your inspiration come from?
I am inspired by what trembles, what struggles, what remains. From my daily life, from what my friends pass by, from the favela, from Afro-Brazilian songs, from the fragmented stories of the Black Atlantic. But also from plants, children, streets, travels. From the poets of defeat—Édouard Glissant, Frantz Fanon, Grada Kilomba—and musicians like Leci Brandão, Caetano Veloso, Anitta, and Emicida.
What is your artistic approach? What visions, sensations, or feelings do you want to evoke in the viewer?
I seek to create sensory experiences where memory, displacement, and repair intertwine. I want the viewer to feel disturbed, welcomed, and stirred. My work seeks not to illustrate but to convey: the tension of exile, the softness of crumpled fabric, as recently seen on the façade of the Théâtre de la Concorde, the shadow of an erased story, as in Berceau du Monde. It's about making visible what survives.
What is the process of creating your works?
My process is hybrid. There are very spontaneous works—often performative—where intuition guides the gesture. Others require extensive preparatory work, readings, research, interviews, and material gathering. Chant du Bitume, an Eiffel Tower made with 80 recycled tires following a quest around a monument that represents the Parisian suburbs, while the bed bases are often made in the privacy of my studio, somewhere between digital collage and wandering in the medium of painting. I alternate between phases of receptivity and production. I see the studio as an emotional laboratory, where accident is part of the language.
Do you use a particular working technique?
Yes, I've developed a way of painting on salvaged objects like bed bases or cribs, which become "object-canvases." I often work in oil or acrylic, using mixed media. In performance, I use ropes, threads, and body traces to materialize invisible tensions. The largest pieces are often made in collaboration with a team around me, for whom I am enormously grateful.
Are there any innovative aspects in your work?
Linking abandoned objects, performances and objects creates unconventional exhibition and narrative devices. There is sometimes a desire to “bug” the gaze of my audience. The first time people see my work, it is difficult to understand it, to know the origin of the support or the way in which the image was created. In my installations, we see clocks that turn backwards, horizontality moved vertically, non-conforming bodies that express themselves… It is a kind of augmented reality, to make the living dialogue with dreamlike worlds.
Do you have a format or medium that you are most comfortable with?
I often return to bodily formats: performance, immersive installation, painting on raw wood. The cradle, for example, is a recurring motif—between shelter and trap, origin and loss, fragmentation and confinement. I like to work on the scale of the body, echoing the history of exile, care, and attachment.
Where do you produce your works? And within this space, how do you organize your creative work?
For the past three years, I've worked in studios in Romainville and Montreuil, a suburb of Paris, in spaces shared with other artists. Today, I travel much more, to venues that host site-specific works. The studio takes on a whole new dimension, and collaborations are a joyous endeavor, in keeping with the specific characteristics of each space.
Does your job require you to travel? What does it bring you?
Yes, I often travel to exhibit, perform, or participate in residencies. Travel allows me to get out of the centers, to encounter other stories, to broaden my sensitive palette. In recent years, I have worked a lot with Senegal, Belgium, Italy, Brazil, France of course… Each territory helps me to reformulate my gestures and to listen differently.
How do you imagine the evolution of your work and your career as an artist in the future?
I want to deepen transdisciplinary collaborations: with musicians, researchers, dancers, and activists. I love theaters and venues that host dance. I'm also pushing for closer ties with West and Central Africa.
What is the theme, style or technique of your latest artistic production?
My latest painting is Anu Preto, a 10-meter-long fresco on raw wood. This piece pays homage to diasporic memories and marginalized territories, using the smooth-billed ani as its central figure, a bird often rejected but carrying stories of resistance. It was supported by the France-Brazil Season and the Brazilian Ministry of Culture and was created on the outdoor stage of the Théâtre de la Concorde as part of Expo Favela Innovation.
Can you tell us about your most important exhibition experience?
Perhaps my most significant recent exhibition experience has been my role as artistic director of Expo Favela Paris, which I held for two consecutive editions. This pioneering initiative in Europe allowed me to bring together artists, entrepreneurs, thinkers, and activists from favelas and their peripheries—in France, Brazil, and elsewhere—in a creative and political dialogue of rare intensity.
The July 2025 edition was a particularly powerful moment: for the first time, entrepreneurs and artists from the margins occupied a prestigious space in the heart of Paris, in a form of poetic and political reappropriation of so-called "noble" art spaces. This exhibition allowed several artists to have their works included in major public and private collections. The Favela Arts project, launched on this occasion, was a powerful gesture: it brought to light powerful, often invisible, artistic practices that question cultural hierarchies and shift centers.
Presenting my own work in this context—at the intersection of contemporary art, social struggle, and diasporic memory—was a way to bring together my two worlds: that of the artistic gesture and that of collective construction. It wasn't just about exhibiting, but about creating a space for repair and reinvention.
Furthermore, I also have a strong memory of my performance 4(a)ch/cords, presented at Cloud Seven in Brussels and at the Palais de la Porte Dorée, in a collective writing in collaboration with artists of diverse origins. This performative project, between voice, movement, text and spatiality, extends my research on bodies in tension, woven memories, and unsigned forms of shared creation.
If you could create one famous work in the history of art, which would you choose?
Probably one of Penone's trees, or Cornelia Parker's installations. But also some of Steve McQueen's films, like Bear. Because they speak of memory, flesh, resonance, and trauma with a kind of radical accuracy.
16. If you could invite any famous artist (dead or alive) to dinner, who would it be?
I would choose Michael Jackson, for his insane life, his status as a queer star ahead of his time, his stage and choreographic genius, and his ability to transform pain into light. A complete, complex artist, traversed by the tensions of the world, always in metamorphosis.
And if I could dream even bigger, I would make this dinner a troupe of icons by inviting David Bowie. Both redefined the contours of gender, identity, pop, and the body. They performed the future, each in their own way: Jackson with his stellar movements, Bowie with his mutant incarnations.
Olimpia Gaia Martinelli
