I was born in 1980 in Tiradentes, Brazil, a small baroque village in the state of Minas Gerais, son of a painter and a translator. When I moved to Rio de Janeiro for university, I chose to study History and Philosophy other than Art. Those disciplines were crucial in the development of my experimental artistic methods.

I have spent much time over the past years unburying forms and perceptions of gestures, as if they were the object of an archaeological inquiry. Focusing on the intersection in everyday life and art, gestures are disconnected from their individual biographical background, arranged in a ritual sequence and portrayed as deliberate historical acts with a political dimension. My work inscribes itself in the Brazilian contemporary invention of participatory art, I am specifically indebted to Lygia Clark’s notion of a “Ritual without Mythology”.

I use photography, video, food and sculpture to identify and construct my own liturgy of gestures, which are activated in conjunction with the ‘users’ of my works. A large source of primary material from this construction comes from a collection of newspaper (and printed media) photographs, which are removed from their context and archived under gestural categories.

Those gesture became several series of works that explore language, possession and motion in a way that has far-reaching ethical implications. They were presented at the São Paulo (2010), Taipei (2014) and Cuenca (2018) Biennials; Fondazione Morra-Greco, Naples (2013), Castello di Rivoli, Torino (2017), Kunstverein in Hamburg (2020) and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2025) , among others. I live and work in Berlin, to where I moved in 2016.

His work is represented by Sprovieri

contact: camofao@gmail.com