Clara Silveira (1990) is a Brazilian multimedia artist whose practice unfolds from the social and performative dimensions of gesture and narrative, drawing from traditional Latin American dance. Her background as a tango dancer informs her investigation of embodied memory, framing dance as both an archive of diasporic experience and a choreography of trauma. Her research centers on the body as a living archive of inherited violence, exploring the classical dichotomy between Greek melankholia and Latin furor. Silveira examines how trauma becomes aestheticized as melancholy within the Western canon, while emerging as collective fury or mourning in Latin American contexts—positioning fury as a vital antidote to melancholic paralysis.

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Working across installation, video, and performance, Silveira transforms personal testimony into collective resonance, creating spaces where individual memory encounters shared experience. Her practice extends to social engagement through community projects with youth and collaborations with the women's collective Arsenália, employing art as a tool for empowerment and response to structural violence.

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Currently completing a residency with the women's collective Arsenália, Silveira recently presented her solo exhibition Exercises to Predict the Future at Veras Cultural Center as part of a contemporary art award for emerging artists. She also participated in the Videopoetry Festival in Oeiras, Portugal, showing Chororô—a work originally commissioned by Brazil's Ministry of Culture through the Aldir Blanc Award in 2021.

 

Silveira's practice has expanded through international residencies, including GlogauAIR (Berlin, 2024–2025), where she staged Hard Candy, weaving together themes of violence and displacement. Alongside her central project, she created Net and Dinner Table (2024) as companion experiments, deepening the research she began in Buenos Aires and drawing on South American tango traditions to explore embodied memory, gesture, and collective histories.

 

In 2023, during her residency at Associazione Viafarini in Milan, she developed a cycle of paintings that explore trauma and memory, confronting the pervasive effects of violence and giving form to experiences often silenced. Following her residency projects, Clara’s work has been recognized through presentations and festivals at Stockholm's Dansmuseet, the New York-Buenos Aires Dance Fest, and as a Best Choreography nominee at Exeter Film Festival. Additional accolades include semi-finalist status at Chile's Festival Internacional de Videodanza and an Honorable Mention from REDIV in Buenos Aires.