Luma Nascimiento

Luma Nascimento is an interdisciplinary Brazilian artist whose practice operates through sculpture, installation, audiovisual performance, and computational processes as methods of engaging material memory, spatial inscription, and embodied transmission.

Working through her ongoing series Corpo Documento (Body Document), Nascimento approaches the body as an infrastructural site where matter functions simultaneously as carrier and transmitter of temporal knowledge. Through the accumulation of glass beads, ceramic elements, cowrie shells, sisal fibre, and soil collected from quilombola territories, her work investigates sculptural composition as a system of circularity, entropy, and ancestral continuity.

Rather than approaching matter as passive substance, Nascimento proposes objects and materials as active repositories of diasporic memory. Her installations frequently operate through suspended assemblages that negotiate gravity, spatial orientation, and spiralled temporalities, challenging linear understandings of history and historical time.

Central to her practice is a sustained investigation into glass as both chemical material and symbolic language. Drawing from African, Afro-Brazilian, Indigenous, and Latin American systems of knowledge, she examines beadwork and chromatic structures as forms of communication and encoded transmission that exist outside Western textual traditions.

Within UNTRANSLATED, Nascimento’s work positions sculpture as a form of cosmological and archival inscription. Her practice foregrounds the body not only as a site of memory, but as a living document continuously marked, transformed, and transmitted through material relation.