Lima’s installation The Drawing Drawing at the ICA is delightfully disorienting, with the model and the artists – the audience – orbiting one another on mechanised platforms. The artist talks about why she sees her work as conceptual art rather than performance art, and how she finds inspiration in philosophy, the Rio Carnival and the Brazilian art historical tradition

Born in 1971, Laura Lima grew up in Brazil’s countryside region of Governador Valadares, before moving to Rio de Janeiro, where she still lives. Initially a law student, Lima changed degrees to complete a BA in philosophy, realising her interest in the subject after her younger brother had a stroke, and she asked herself some important questions: “What is life, what is language and what is normality? What does it mean to exist?” Around the same time, she started attending a free art school, the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage. It was important to her “that there were no preconceived ideas or rules, and that it wasn’t about technique, but about ideas”.

Read the full interview on Studio International