Paula Damasceno’s An Island for an Exiled is a multisensory, multimedia installation conjuring difference and transcultural estrangement through traces of a street performance transposed into retreat. The installation creates space and time for Damasceno to become unlabeled and de-identified through multimodal displays and photographic processes. At times, Damasceno flattens the three-dimensional experience of performance into two-dimensional shapes; at others, she transforms the flatness of performance traces into immersive, three-dimensional experiences. These works reflect on the sacredness of self-definition, cultural transmission, estrangement, and (mis)translation.

Drawing from the iconographies and materialities of a reinvented African Diaspora, Damasceno expands the photographic into a spatial phenomenon in which sound, silence, reflection, concealment, and display interact with repetition, transposition, and sequencing. 

Through An Island for an Exiled, Damasceno creates a meditative space that reimagines estrangement as a sacred, generative force for self-definition and cultural dialogue.