Viola Pineider belongs to that rare kind of author whose biography, material and gesture cannot be told apart. A master carpenter trained in Florence in restoration and bespoke construction, she knows wood from within. Alongside the discipline of craft, another education took shape in the European underground scenes between the 1990s and early 2000s: occupying abandoned spaces, transforming discarded matter, treating creation as an act of resistance.

That gesture has remained hers. In Rio de Janeiro, where she has lived for more than ten years, it found its synthesis. Here she founded ARC Studio — from that research come the wearable objects signed by ARC and the authorial works that move through the body, sculpture and space.