Monoculture Plantations of Coconut (2026) Oil on linen, 180 × 140 cm - Nursery Cultivation Bags I (2026) Blown glass, 32 × 18 × 18 cm - Nursery Cultivation Bags II (2026) Blown glass, 28 × 18 × 18 cm
Artistic Practice & Research Statement
Geraldo Dos Santos's artistic practice operates at the intersection of visual anthropology, material research and narrative construction. Drawing from South American cosmologies, ancestral knowledge systems and personal archives, he investigates how cultural memory, ritual and identity are transmitted and transformed through objects, images and gestures. He is particularly interested in what he describes as strange relationships: ambiguous connections between materials, symbols and narratives that resist fixed interpretations.
Working across painting, ceramics and installation, Dos Santos approaches craft as a form of embodied knowledge, exploring how materials carry cultural and symbolic meaning across generations. Through historical techniques, ornamentation and material transformation, he examines how traditions are preserved, displaced and reconfigured within contemporary contexts.
A central thread in his research concerns the relationship between human intervention and the construction of nature. He investigates how landscapes and biological environments are shaped by cultural beliefs, systems of cultivation and processes of domestication. Drawing connections between ancestral cosmologies and contemporary ecological conditions, his work questions the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, the cultivated and the wild.
Through layered compositions and material assemblages, Dos Santos brings autobiographical fragments into dialogue with collective histories. His work explores the tensions between inheritance and invention, spiritual knowledge and material reality, creating spaces where different systems of knowledge coexist without resolving into a singular narrative.