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multidisciplinary artists between the realm of matter and idea

Da Costa’s practice is rooted in questioning the western structures that define what is considered knowledge, using relationality and reciprocity as the baseline for exploration. This curiosity emerges from a gap within dominant systems of validation (scientific and academic). Particularly their disconnection from the body. In her work, the body becomes the central element, a site of creating, storing, and remembering knowledge. Meandering between realms of memory, dreaming, and embodiment.

Vera’s work exists within collaboration. She understands it not only as working with others, but also with material, space, ideas, and context. Each relationship is approached as an intentional exchange, where agency is given to the other. In doing so, she creates space for different needs, boundaries, and desires. 

vBy placing the body in relation, mapping and naming what unfolds, Da Costa navigates her process. She often works through trance-like states, meditation, ritual, intuitive making and moving, repetition, and automatization. Methods that quiet the mind and allow her to delve deeper into feeling. Within this intentional approach, Vera is committed to holding a sacred space, one where all elements  are seen as having as much spirit as herself. There is no hierarchy or ownership, she occupies the same plane as materials, ideas, feelings, context, and audience.

Ritual is a central language within her practice. It functions both as method and as outcome. A way of accessing, processing, and sharing knowledge. Through repetition, attention, and intention, it becomes a tool to re-enter ways of knowing that are often dismissed or forgotten. It allows for a slowing down, for presence, and for the creation of spaces where alchemy can occur. These moments are not fixed, but rather emerge in response to each context, each material, each encounter.

Although naming is an important tool in her practice, and conversation a key methodology, there is also space for symbols to exist as facts. Symbols are a constant part of her language. Rather than seeking to fully explain them through logical thought, she allows the rational and the felt to exist in dialogue.

Archetypes, particularly feminine ones, are recurring presences in her work. They function as carriers of memory, bridging personal and collective experience. These figures are not fixed identities, but shifting, layered, and sometimes contradictory. They hold within them histories of care, resistance, intuition, and knowledge that have often been silenced or devalued. By working with these archetypes, Vera creates space to reconnect with lineages of memory that live in herself and in the collective unconscious, while also questioning and reshaping them.

In terms of materiality, Vera has always been drawn to textiles. She works with weaving, natural dyes, and textile manipulation as primary tools of research. What began as an intuitive collaboration has expanded into an understanding of the deep and widespread bond between women and fabric, one that crosses geographies and cultures. It is a connection rooted in the body, in touch, in repetition, and in time. Through this, textiles become both material and metaphor: carriers of memory, labor, and care.
She often incorporates moving images, analogue photography, and print into her work. In recent years, writing and performance have become essential tools and modes of expression. These elements come together in installations, immersive environments where the worlds she engages with becomes physical and relational.  The viewer, a collaborator. The work exists as an ecosystem where each element is essential. This relational field mirrors the interconnectedness between human and natural systems, challenging the western idea of separation.

Her current research has been engaged with care, both as a theme and as a practice. She approaches it as a radical gesture within a Western context that prioritizes productivity, speed, and extraction. Here, care is not passive or secondary; it is active, intentional, and transformative. It exists in gestures of tending, holding, listening, and sustaining.
Da Costa is particularly interested in care as rhythm, something cyclical, attentive, and ongoing. A way of being that resists urgency and instead values slowness, softness, and presence. Within this framework, tenderness becomes a form of resistance, and softness a radical position. Through ritual and relational practice, she explores how care can act as a quiet but powerful force of transformation, one that reimagines how we relate to ourselves, to each other, and to the worlds we inhabit.

Vera da Costa ultimately seeks to expand what we understand as knowledge by centering forms of knowing that are embodied, intuitive, relational. Often unnamed, yet deeply felt and lived.








Based between Netherlands and Portugal
Contact
email - veramachadodacosta@gmail.com
instagram - Vera da Costa