Weird trajectories of matter

daniela brill estrada's love for rocks and deep time

Daniela in her studio space at West, Vienna, 2025
 
 

Thank you Daniela, for having me here at your studio space in Vienna. How does your life as an artist, researcher and student look like?

My life is kind of weird. Officially I work for the JKU in Linz, where I´m writing my PhD in art, science and protest at the art x science school for transformation. But I´m also an active artist. In my daily life I deal with keeping my plants and my cats alive, and keeping myself alive. Twice a week I travel to Linz to work at the university, and twice a week I am at the Angewandte. I travel a lot, usually once a month, or every two months to give workshops, presentations, to exhibit, or for residencies, and then I have to find a catsitter. 
 

The artistic part of your master's project impressed me a lot. Can you tell us a bit about the materials you have used and the physical background?

How nice, all these familiar names... Wonderful to see how Art&Science has brought together so many interesting people, who continue working with each other even after their studies.

crocheting with the cat (piece_ Begriff des Körpers)
 

How would you describe your artistic style?

Would you like to introduce a certain project of yours? Something you are currently working on?

Mhhh ok ok, one of the projects I´m working on right now which is really exciting and nerdy is a residency project at the SETI institute in California. At the SETI institute researchers are trying to find intelligent extraterrestrial life. I applied for the residency program “cosmic consciousness” with two artists that I really admire - Julie-Michéle Morin and Bart Kuipers. We applied as a team with a project we called “exoplanetary poetry”.

In it, we will co-create poetry with a possible extraterrestrial entity. We will train an AI using the chemical data of exoplanets (the planets on which life could be possible). For this we got the AI and art stipend from the Austrian ministry of arts and sports. So, what we think is that if there is intelligent life somewhere it will most probably have a body, such as ours, but possibly very, very different than ours. To communicate with this body, which might not have eyes or ears, but very possibly a perceiving surface or skin, we try to think of a possible universal language.

Our human bodies are made of the same chemical elements as the earth (something I researched in a previous project I made while I was studying art & science, called “our celestial bodies”), and if there are living bodies on another planet they will surely be made from the same chemical elements as such planet.

One of the possible universal languages to communicate with those bodies is the chemistry they are made of: here on earth, we perceive, with our human senses, for example, smells (of the wet soil, of the ocean), or on the skin we sense temperature changes in the atmosphere. They, the aliens, must surely also perceive chemical processes made from the same components as their own bodies. We will co-create chemical poetry, made from their own chemical elements, to speculate on alien communication.

Pretty cool. 
 

You are travelling between countries and ateliers, international residencies are important to you; can you tell us how you manage this?

Honestly I don´t know how I manage. Last year I read a book about snails, and how they slowly eat a leaf of lettuce. And I often tell myself “like a gastropod, dani”, step by step and day by day. If I wake up and think about all the things and travels and planes and airports and stuff and texts that I have waiting for me in the next months I go crazy. I prefer to wake up and have in mind the next couple of hours. What is waiting for me today? What can I do to make the rest easier?

I try to act like a snail, making sure to eat the whole lettuce slowly and steadily, patiently, no rush. Most of the times it works, sometimes I need to breath deep and get through it, not easy, specially when there´s a deadline or I have to do serious stuff for the Phd.

I think being an artist, to me, means constantly working, because all I love doing also resonates with my work, so if I take vacation to go to Barcelona to see my brother I will spend the time looking at sand on the beach with my microscope, and start thinking about its chemical properties, and how it relates to my queerness, and how I could bring it into my next work, and so on, the cycle never ends.

What kind of job would you do if you had not become an artist?

Geologist.

 

At last, would you like to tell us something about your remarkable biography?

Home is where your heart is... Thank you for your time and openness to share some personal info with us. I wish you continued success in your artistic life and look forward to new projects of yours, which surely will amaze me - as they always have - with their aesthetics and the meaningful depth behind them.