Wirz Paulo

Lives and works in Zürich, Switzerland

Artist statement

I am a visual artist working across sculpture, installation, photography, and video. My practice explores the symbolic systems through which societies remember, preserve, and imagine themselves. Drawing on funerary rituals, domestic spaces, play, and oneiric worlds, I examine how objects, images, and places become vessels of memory, belief, and cultural identity. Questions of conservation, transmission, material attachment, visibility, and invisibility run throughout my work. Many of these concerns originate in my childhood in Pindamonhangaba, in Brazil’s Paraíba Valley, a region historically shaped by encounters between Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, and European settlers. The house where I grew up stood between a cemetery and a vacant lot, a geography that profoundly shaped my perception of space and its symbolic potential. Within our home, family objects inherited from my Swiss and Egyptian-Lebanese ancestors preserved the memory of people I had never known. The cemetery gave ritual form to collective memory, while the vacant lot served both as a playground and as a site for Afro-Brazilian religious rituals. Together, these spaces, the domestic, the funerary, and the undefined, formed an early symbolic landscape that continues to inform my imagination and artistic research. This formative experience nurtured a lasting interest in how societies assign value to objects, produce meaning through belief systems, and negotiate mortality through material culture and...

Artwork