Currículo
Link para currículo acadêmico Lattes: http://lattes.cnpq.br/6228855946764716
Maria Luiza Pinheiro Guimarães Fragoso (Malu Fragoso)
Date of Birth: June 10, 1962
Maria Luiza (Malu) Fragoso is a Brazilian artist-researcher and professor. She earned her PhD in Arts and Multimedia from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP), São Paulo (2003), where she conducted research on artistic experiments in telematics; completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the School of Communications and Arts at the University of São Paulo (2014); and served as a postdoctoral artist-researcher at the École des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, France (2024). Fragoso worked at the Institute of the Arts at the University of Brasília from 1993 to 2009, and at the School of Fine Arts at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro from 2009 to 2025. She coordinated NANO (Center for Art and New Organisms) from 2010 to 2025 and currently serves as a collaborating researcher. Today she works as a consultant for events, exhibitions and courses in Art and Technology. She is currently part of the EBAT project team - Brazilian School of Art and Technology (ebat.com.br) in Rio de Janeiro. In this context, she develops artistic practices that address the interaction between traditional and scientific knowledge—focusing on experiences with land workers and Brazilian Indigenous cultures—and creates a consistent body of theoretical and practical work at the intersection of art, science, technology, and nature. These works, which form a hybrid zone between organic and artificial life (incorporating plants, bees, bacteria, etc.), are inspired by nature and by modes of thought ranging from scientific to ancestral knowledge, such as Amerindian Indigenous traditions and Eastern cultures. In 2005, together with artists Tania Fraga and Wagner Barja, she published the book and exhibition catalog >= 4D: Computational Art in Brazil. In 2014, she produced and organized the proceedings and the event CAC.4: Congress on Computational Art in Rio de Janeiro. Together with Guto Nóbrega at the NANO Lab, four books in the “Hiperorgânicos” collection were organized and published by Fragoso and Nóbrega, featuring extensive compendiums of articles under the themes “Resonances: Art, Hybridization, and Biotelematics” (2015), “Ancestrofuturist Reconnections” (2020), “Art, Consciousness, and Nature: Creating, Cultivating, Connecting” (2021), and “Cosmogonies and Plant Art” (2024).
Recent artistic projects:
Composting Series (2024 - ) -Composting#3 brings together a glass container into which organic waste has been placed. Along with the waste, dry leaves collected in Morro da Saúde, Gamboa neighborhood (RJ), and microorganisms collected inside the terrarium installed in the OpenLab of the Hiperorganicos 12 event were placed. Under the lid of the container, an environmental control center was installed that monitors humidity and temperature of the composting process. This data is sent over the internet to the cloud and subsequently shared openly. The “Trash Does Not Exist” series began during a workshop held by Malu Fragoso and Jules Bassene, with the collaboration of COPOC - Recuperateque of the School of Fine Arts of Nantes, in April 2024.
Néctar Project (2024-2025) - NECTAR- Food sharing is an urban telematic artistic installation that uses a honeycomb as a reference, typical of apis bees. Made up of a set of hexagonal wooden boxes, it is possible to cover walls of any size, creating a volume capable of storing a variety of foods. Each box has an opening and an electronic system that must be activated by the person donating the food, indicating the type of food. The types of food can be categorized using the human food pyramid table, and each one has a color defined by LEDs. The installation invites the community to voluntarily create and offer a food reserve for the community itself. Boxes are chosen freely and colors are designated by people. As foods are added or subtracted, compositions are created providing a data visualization that expresses characteristics of that community. The same data is transmitted to a server that gathers data from the various combs spread across city neighborhoods and exposes the hunger and volunteering conditions in each of them. In 2024, the first module of the work was presented at the EmMeio#16 exhibition, from September to November 2024, at the National Museum of the Republic, Brasília. At the EmMeio#16 exhibition, an image created in AI was assembled in the format, glued to the wall, occupying an area of approximately 1m (W) x 2m (H), and a wooden cell with the interactive system was fixed at one point of this image. The cell had a door, and just like bees, it was possible to close and protect the food. In front of the alveolus was a button that, when rotated, changed the color inside the object. The color was chosen according to the type of food according to instructions from a printed algorithm, placed next to the work, where the procedures were described next to a food pyramid. When placing the food, the person turned the corresponding color button and closed the alveolus. The alveolus door is translucent, so you can see the food and the color of the light.
We Bees – (2015-) continues the S.H.A.S.T. project. in disseminating the experience with bees, creating a module that enables an almost-bee experience for humans. The object is an oval-shaped “hive”, built in brown cardboard origami, suspended by steel cables, supporting an IoT system and a flower terrarium. The complete object allows one person to enter and offers immersion in a bee environment, with darkness, smell and sounds. The last assembly was in September 2023 at the National Museum of the Republic during the collective exhibition of Art and Technology EmMeio #15, Brasília (BR).
Project S.H.A.S.T. (2012-)- Housing System for Homeless Bees. It consists of a system that aims to integrate active hives with urban spaces and/or cultural and pedagogical spaces through telematics. It initially involves investigations in the field of art, biology, urbanism, design and IoT technology. The work is based on an integrated hyperorganic system, where a living organism (hive) is connected to a telematics system (IoT) and together they produce and transmit data, which are interpreted by other living organisms, which again emit data, which can return to the original system or express the process in the context of artistic creation. It all started with a visit to a sacred territory protected by bees in the Kaimbé indigenous village, in the state of Bahia (BR), the worsening crisis of the disappearance of bees in the countryside and the growing population of swarms in the Brazilian urban context. Based on the importance of bees for our planet, the initial proposal was to monitor and capture urban exams, in order to rescue the queens and their families, without killing them, and transfer these swarms to organic rural producers. In this way, we create a system to preserve the species Apis mellifera and contribute to the production of healthy foods. Prototypes, objects, IoT systems, tests and data were collected. The proposal developed in a more artistic way with the creation of data visualizations, performances (in person, on video and in Virtual Reality) and immersive objects. The work is related to issues of human ecology and biological balance based on scientific and traditional knowledge, including the problem of urban sustainability. The production is categorized as interactive art, or interactive computer installation in telematics. The artistic project and its concepts are shared with artists, scholars and beekeepers from different parts of the country.