BIOGRAFIA

João Machado (Rio de Janeiro, 1977) is a Brazilian artist. Trained in Film at Art Center College of Design (California), he worked in the film industry while developing his artistic production. In 2013, he returned to Brazil and since then his works have circulated in institutions such as Caixa Cultural units (São Paulo), SESC Bom Retiro, Casa de Cultura do Parque, Complexo Cultural Funarte, Oficina Cultural Alfredo Volpi, Ateliê 397, Bananal Arte (São Paulo), Respiro Rural (Queluz), Museu Forte Defensor Perpétuo (Paraty) and Centro Municipal de Arte Hélio Oiticica (Rio de Janeiro).

He lives and works in Bocaina de Minas (MG), in the Serra da Mantiqueira, where he founded Mandaçaia Projetos, an autonomous space created in partnership with curator Arasy Benítez, dedicated to the development of projects that articulate art and ecology. For more than ten years he has studied meliponiculture, a practice that has come to ground his work by uniting artistic creation and ecology. In this context, he began an ongoing investigation with native bees, marking a turning point in his trajectory.

From this research emerged the project Geoprópolis, which combines different media — from video and sound works to ceramic sculptures inhabited by bees — and collaborative practices of urban mapping of native bees. The project emphasizes the interdependence between humans and non-humans and has also expanded into environmental art-education actions, reaching diverse audiences in both institutional and community contexts.

Thus, his practice is more broadly situated within the field of ecological approaches in contemporary art, with an emphasis on the project Terrafias, which investigates the ecosystemic recovery of degraded areas as an aesthetic proposition. By mobilizing multispecies agents—mycelia, termites, seeds and bees—the work articulates biological and poetic processes, configuring itself as an exercise in critical thinking on ecology, interdependence and the agency of the earth as a subject of rights.