Initiation with Paula Damasceno
Initiation with Paula Damasceno
Join us via Zoom on Wednesday, April 8th, at 7 pm EDT
Paula Damasceno will take us on a journey through her artist book Initiation—an elemental work shaped by touch, repetition, and diasporic memory. Through its text and Riso-printed photographs, the work invites a haptic, slowed engagement where form and content continuously inform one another. Drawing on Orisha iconographies as natural forces that become political through diaspora, the talk considers how repetition transforms the book’s material and conceptual structure. In this context, Initiation emerges as a modest counter-archive in which elemental time, myth, and opacity shape how histories are carried and encountered.
Paula Damasceno is a transdisciplinary artist and professor of Media Studies at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her practice weaves together photography, performance, installation, and film through an initiation poetics in which knowing and not knowing, opacity and refusal become generative forces. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she specialized in multimedia and transdisciplinary space-making. Engaging material legacies such as tintypes, ritual objects, embodied gestures, and moving images, her work creates speculative grounds for memory, exile, and new territories in confluence across disciplines and histories.
Her films—documentary, short fiction, and experimental—center memory as a living archive, braiding local stories with community records and speculative fabulation to surface what the official record withholds. Across media, Damasceno’s work is concerned with the ways archives live in bodies, objects, landscapes, and gestures, and with how artistic practice can open space for histories that exceed official representation.
She also holds an MSLS in Digital Archives from UNC Chapel Hill and a BFA in Photography from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In 2024, her MFA thesis, An Island for an Exiled, was exhibited at Gatewood Gallery in Greensboro, North Carolina. That same year, she presented a solo exhibition at the Horace Williams House in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and participated in the group exhibition Dirty Abstractions at Union Hall in Denver, Colorado. In 2025, she participated in Destierro at The LookOut Gallery at Michigan State University.
Lesly Deschler Canossi
