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My work begins with listening: to materials, to memories, to what has been left aside.
In times of excess and constant connection, I turn toward what has been discarded. Not to rescue it, but to ask what it still has to say.
I use repurposed cell phone screens, everyday recordings, and fragments of the physical and the digital, the phygital, to create works that move between object, image, and space.
My research explores consciousness, connection, and healing: what emerges when we slow down enough to look at what is usually forgotten or rejected.
I work across installation, performance, painting, photography, and video. The medium follows the research, not the other way around.
Paula Marcondes
Paula Marcondes was born in 1969 in São Paulo, Brazil. She lives and works between São Paulo, Bozeman (Montana, USA), and Singapore.
Working across installation, object, painting, performance, photography, and video, Paula Marcondes investigates what it means to be human and conscious in a contemporary phygital world. Her research — rooted in thirty years of work on consciousness, communication, and resilience — addresses the tensions between the physical and the digital, the intimate and the manufactured, the discarded and the luminous.
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Repurposed mobile phone screens are central to her practice: surfaces that function simultaneously as mirrors and portals, reflecting the body and granting access to virtual ecosystems. Around these screens, and around sources of light — incandescent bulbs, LED strips, mirrors, and glass — she builds works that incorporate popular symbols, industrial waste, materials collected from nature, and elements drawn from the multiple geographies she inhabits.
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The series are not separate. They are the same question asked in different languages: what does it mean to be human and conscious in a contemporary phygital world? The research deepens and expands from one series to the next. Childhood Games (2025, ongoing) examines how technology shapes desire, identity, and modes of existence, from childhood gestures through to the phygital present. Within this series, The Doll House (2026) is a transparent polycarbonate structure built by hand, inhabited by phone screen figures seated on 3D printed furniture, and accompanied by a manuscript the visitor is invited to take home. Amplify (2024, ongoing) transforms everyday instants into spaces of presence. Filmed with a handheld cell phone camera — without tripod, without high resolution, without technical perfection — each 90-second video is an act of attention: a breath, a meditation, an amplification of the present moment. Kitsch Glitz (2023) investigates the tensions between sophistication and excess, the sacred and the mundane, drawing on the legacy of Pop art and the work of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Portraits (2020–2021), created during the pandemic lockdown in Singapore, investigates the representation of what transcends physical form and manifests as energy, presence, and essence.
Paula Marcondes has exhibited at the Basel Investor Forum, Davos, Switzerland (2026); Galeria Tato, São Paulo (2025); CCA Galleries International, Jersey, UK (2024); Casa de Cultura Mário Quintana, Porto Alegre (2024); Solar dos Abacaxis, Rio de Janeiro (2023); and Galeria Dezoito, São Paulo (2023), among others.