Daniela Ribeiro, artist
By Alberto G. Palomo from Luanda (Angola)
The plastic artist was born “by accident” in Mozambique, but her country is Angola. He grew up there and lives developing a work where he mixes the ancestral with the technological.
His family tree would be enough reason for an interview. He belongs to the sixth generation of Portuguese emigrants living in Angola. His great-grandmother had 11 children who decided to remain in this African country. They all prospered. Her father held positions of power, including a ministerial portfolio, and her mother was one of the first women to head a humanitarian aid NGO. They never left Luanda, despite a civil war or continued adversity. The capital, in fact, is where he grew up, where he still resides and where he has developed a unique career, although the place of birth that appears on his identity document is Mozambique, “by accident”, in 1972.
Daniela Ribeiro has a turbulent background, but she does not hesitate when asked a simple question about her origin: “I am Angolan and I consider myself a daughter of war.” You could doubt or add some nuance: you have spent time in Paris, studied in Lisbon and frequently travel to different parts of the globe. However, he is based in Luanda, a city of more than nine million inhabitants where he develops his career and finds inspiration. Her ship, located a few meters from the Atlantic Ocean, houses an immense and heterogeneous work: the plastic artist has spent decades researching science or the environment and transferring it to her discipline.
She is the creator of the term “scientific surrealism”, a movement that she herself has named and of which she proclaims herself a pioneer. It is not a whim: the trajectory and originality guarantee it. But before detailing the movement in which he is part, what it consists of and how he has achieved this position, Ribeiro goes back to his childhood and remembers the days of the conflict in a threatened city. «The truth is that I had a very special youth. There was a lack of everything: water, fuel… and there were ration cards to get the basics, but it was a very nice period because we were very united,” he comments in fluent Spanish.
«My parents separated when I was 12 years old. “I grew up in a generation that was very bitter about the social context,” the artist introduces, referring to the 1970s in which Angola became independent from Portugal and a civil war began between different anti-colonial factions that lasted until 2002. “I went to Paris. and when I finished high school I studied a diplomatic career in Lisbon,” he summarizes. At that moment he realized that he did not want to follow such an official, bureaucratic path, and he discovered science. «I was very unhappy. I wasn’t satisfied. I saw that in Portugal there was a lot of cultural backwardness and I started to paint,” he says.
At that time he surrendered to the images taken by satellites such as Hubble or Supernova. He felt “a great connection.” “He had a very strong creativity and painted sun and fire,” he points out. He fell in love with those landscapes of the universe and focused his interest on atmospheric phenomena and toxic products or resins: “One day I was introduced to a person in charge of Apple and I realized that there was a technological revolution and no one was aware of it.” From those colorful, impregnable compositions, he changed to something more solid. “I went from gases to Earth,” he clarifies, “I didn’t know how to express that change and I destroyed my phone.”
Suddenly, his workshop was filled with computer parts and different technological devices. Ribeiro observed that these pieces, in addition to being what human life orbited and the cause of a serious environmental impact, could simulate a model. He placed chips and plates as buildings and converted these inert elements into the recreation of three-dimensional planes. The artist already had a marked tendency towards issues related to the environment and digitalization.
«There is a distortion with nature. We copy it artificially. “We are within a biological matrix and we have a collective thought,” says Ribeiro, who tries to explain his work with a mixture of data, logical predictions and theories that point to something yet to be exploited. Hence their collections: montages simulating space echoes, bionic eyes – in the image above – and transhuman bodies, models of cities made with electronic scrap or those that convert ancient masks and tools into objects of the future. «Over the years I have had a paradigm shift. I have gone from those spatial reflections to something more quantum, which has to do with world transformation and energies. But it is difficult for me to know that many will not understand it and will call me crazy,” muses the precursor of art-science or self-proclaimed scientific surrealism.
With those plastic portraits where she merges the virtual with the past or those plates in which there are prehistoric objects with computational ornaments, Daniela Ribeiro plays at scrutinizing a reality beyond the pedestrian dimension. «We look outside, but we have everything inside. We are doing everything externally. First we must develop our biology. There is a lot of talk about matter, but it does not exist, it is all energy,” she says worriedly. As she has progressed in her work and in conversation, the Angolan addresses the topic that most attracts and worries her at the moment. «I was in a very frozen culture. And I saw that the ancestry came from Africa. It is enough to give an example of evolution: we have gone from a stone knife invented on this continent to an electric one. “Here you connect with the essence of life!” he says.
What this transformation has brought about is the inference that “the world is going to something without love.” «There are even mechanisms to introduce hormones into robots. We believe in artificial intelligence, but we forget about love, which is the greatest force,” he says. «I am in a process of understanding. We are growing in structures when everything is energy. And it has its laws. “We are looking to the side,” he adds.
He has such a broad vision of his surroundings that sometimes he suffers. “The soul is collective and music is a sample of the unconscious,” he defends before stopping at one of his latest projects, the “quantum throne.” In it there is, indeed, a throne and several panels, each one representing a stage of humanity. «We are saturated. The job is going to change. There is a problem and it will be very tense. I am fine at home, but I feel anguish. An enormous anguish that is not real, but quantum,” he reveals. Contrary to what it seems, he is not afraid of artificial intelligence. What’s more, he observes it as a revolution of the proletariat: “Man does not have time to think and this will allow him to meditate, explore physical capabilities, go to places that are not real.”
Ribeiro believes that there is a geographical territory and another quantum one. “There are owners of humanity who have nothing to do with your house or your food. We are the last natural generation. More extinctions are coming like the last one, which has given rise to the most intelligent mammals,” he says. As he clarifies, he is in a stage of mutation towards naturalism. “I’m going to try to explain why we have two eyes for nature and one for energy,” argues who, in turn, has “a cyclothymic personality.” «I was born in the context of communication, but I am bipolar on a cultural level. I had a constructivist upbringing, but I was the crazy one. He had spatial intelligence and a lot of creativity. I don’t need to see to see. “Be the painting before you pick up the brush,” he says.
«I see my emotions in colors. I have a dysfunctional brain. It’s getting harder and harder for me to live. It affects me in everything. I know a scientist who agrees with me or I talk and read alone, I study and then sometimes I can’t talk,” she adds. “I am still in Angola, although it is a country with many difficulties because there is a lot of quantum force,” he says. Here he contemplates a wisdom different from that of Westerners: «Europeans do not have this freedom nor the sense of good and evil. I’m talking about ancestry. Here the rules are very different. Africans are very civilized. Africans only grow crops to eat, they hunt to eat. We are destroying resources and nature. Nature depends on how you behave. The African people understand life because they understand death. And they continue to reproduce a lot. They are a soul, a spirit.
Ribeiro warns that men believe they are “better than others.” «Now I plan the gardens. I have bought land and I am going to live with the basics. My life focuses on curiosity and the need to understand reality. And in that process physical things come out, like my work,” he says, anticipating the months he will spend in Portugal, an upcoming trip to Japan, the opening of exhibitions and new requests in Angola, where an enormous installation of his is already visible in the Luanda international airport. «I will have to see how I approach my work, because materials that I use, such as silica, will disappear in 30 or 40 years. They gave me many pieces two decades ago, but I will be left with nothing to continue, although it will be valued as something pioneering,” he concludes.
