Felipe de Ávila Franco

Felipe de Ávila Franco lives and works between Brazil and Finland. His artistic process addresses art as a tool to awake new perspectives of knowledge, establishing interdisciplinary links between arts, social and natural sciences. His work evokes art as a mechanism to activate a deeper discussion on the human conflict with itself and over the idea of ‘nature’ as something external or separate from the human. Ávila’s works approach the concept of the Anthropocene, when it seeks to establish an intersection between the humanistic, geopolitical and ecological topics. His latest works are produced through extensive research about the contaminated soil from the largest environmental disaster in Brazilian history. In November 2015 an iron ore tailings dam suffered a catastrophic failure, leaking 60 million cubic meters of ore tailings into nature, destroying 700 Km of river waters before it reached the Atlantic Ocean.