Vera da Costa

Da Costa’s practice is rooted in questioning Western structures that define what is considered knowledge, using relationality and reciprocity as a baseline for exploration. This curiosity emerges from a gap within dominant systems of validation, particularly their disconnection from the body. In her work, the body becomes a central site of creating, storing, and remembering knowledge, meandering between realms of memory, dreaming, and embodiment.
Vera’s work exists within collaboration. She understands it not only as working with others but also with material, space, ideas, and context. Each relationship is approached as an intentional exchange, where agency is given to the other and space is created for different needs, boundaries, and desires.
Ritual is a central language within her practice, functioning both as method and outcome. Through repetition, attention, and trance-like states, it becomes a tool to re-enter ways of knowing that are often dismissed or forgotten, allowing moments of slowing down and presence where transformation can occur.
Archetypes, particularly feminine ones, recur in her work as carriers of memory that bridge personal and collective experience. Vera has long been drawn to textiles, working with weaving, natural dyes, and textile manipulation as tools of research. These materials carry histories of touch, time, labour and care. Her practice moves across moving image, light, writing, performance, and installation, weaving these forms into immersive environments where body, space, and material meet. The viewer is part of this ecosystem.
Her current research turns toward care as both theme and practice. Within a Western context shaped by productivity and extraction, she approaches care as a radical gesture. Through acts of tending, listening, and holding, she explores softness and slowness as forms of resistance. She expands what we understand as knowledge by centering the embodied, intuitive, and relational. Often unnamed yet deeply felt.