bio
Daniela Zúñiga is a Franco-Chilean visual artist based in Paris. Trained in both mechanical engineering and visual arts, she develops a practice founded on the displacement of reference and reading frames, positioning herself as observer at the point where subject and object are one. Her works are cosmological infrastructures: language systems that allow one to read scientifically what is constructed artistically, and conversely.
She is the founder and artistic director of Cosmologies du Sensible, a transdisciplinary research platform exploring the relationship between science and consciousness through art: a space of epistemological inquiry where different knowledge systems complete each other in the act of observation, without ever reducing one to the other. The platform is developed under the mentorship of Pierre Cox, former Director of ALMA, with an international network spanning scientific institutions and cultural spaces across Europe and Latin America.
Her work has been presented in Paris, Thiers, Marseille, London, Lyon, Helsinki and Clermont-Ferrand.
Artist Statement — Daniela Zúñiga
My practice takes shape in the space where different knowledge systems meet without reducing one to the other. What interests me is questioning how we appropriate reality and the systems that describe it: through which protocols, from which position. Those zones where scientific measurement reaches its own limits, where gesture and ritual operate as forms of embodied thought. We are not rational beings who feel — we are sensory beings who rationalize. It is from this conviction, as much epistemological as existential, that my work emerges.
Every cosmology is a technology: a device that organizes information, structures observation and produces a reading of the real. In this sense, astrophysics and ancestral knowledge systems do not oppose each other, they complement each other, in the sense that Bohr understood complementarity: two regimes of truth irreducible to one another, which together produce a more complete knowledge. My work stems from a refusal to hierarchize these systems, and from a conviction that science, precisely because it is itself situated and historical, extends rather than abolishes the symbolic tradition.
I work with materials whose nature is deliberately heterogeneous: charcoal, dandelion pistils, dust, mineral pigments, wax, horsehair, human hair, silk, bronze — substances that retain the trace of gestures, transformations, the passage of time. Their precariousness is not a weakness: it is an echo of impermanence at every scale, from the human gesture to deep time. These materials coexist in my practice with others of an assumed artificiality — 3D printing, video, scientific data — which have their own poverty, their own resistance. This is not a contradiction: both participate in the same gesture, that of searching within matter, whatever it may be, for structures that make sense across different reading systems.
Sensory experience is the starting point of all observation — not as an absolute condition, but as the first reading system available. The body is for me the first space that is both cosmological and technological, where the search for organizing structures begins. In Heartbreak (2019), the cardiac pulse resonates with the signal of a NASA pulsar; in Dark Matrices, cross-sections of my own orbital scanner subjected to the same operations applied to astrophysical data produce forms evoking nebulae, gravitational fields. These are not metaphors. They are demonstrations that certain structures organize information in the same way across different reference systems, and that the act of observing transforms the observer, just as it transforms what is observed.
I conceive my works as open matrices: self-referential systems where different reading regimes — scientific, sensory, symbolic — coexist without hierarchy. They are not demonstrations or illustrations. They are spaces where information moves from one reference system to another, where what is measured can become vibration, and what is felt can be read as data. Observation becomes perception, and knowledge, experience.
I would describe my practice as a perceptual ecology: an attempt to hold together, without resolving them, the tensions that structure our relationship to the real. What I pursue is not a synthesis but a trajectory — one that seeks to keep open the space between what we can measure and what we can experience, aware that it is precisely in this space that knowledge renews itself.