(Image by Hedwich Rooks, 2024)

michaela davidova
michaeladavidova.studio[@]gmail.com
+31630540204
@michaeladavidova_
KVK number 87207486

Michaela Davidova (b. 1988; she/her) is a Czech artist and researcher based in the Netherlands. She holds a BA (Hons) in Artist Designer: Maker from Cardiff School of Art and Design, Wales, and an MA in Ecology Futures from the Master Institute of Visual Cultures in North Brabant.

Her graduation research, Constructed Wetlands & Deconstructed Borders, received the EKP Excellence in Research Award in 2022. The project investigates the ecological effects of photographic materials and darkroom wastewater, as well as their remediation and digestion by living organisms. Through this research, she questions the unstable boundary between humanature.

Alongside her artistic practice, Davidova teaches Bachelor’s and Master’s students at St. Joost School of Art & Design and coordinates DISCO Lab (Design for Inter-Species Collective Laboratory) at CARADT, the Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology. She chairs the artist-led foundation Text My Sister and is a member of Filmwerkplaats, an analogue darkroom, and the Compos(t)ing collective, which focuses on regenerative artistic practices. She also collaborates with and supports the UK-based Sustainable Darkroom community.



Artist Statement:

My artistic research revolves around analogue photography, but it is not limited to images. It encompasses material experimentation, ecological research and living processes. I approach photography as a multilayered and intra-active practice, following the agency of materials and organisms as they develop into broader networks of ecological relationships. In doing so, I move beyond the photographic frame and consider the artist’s role as both - an alchemist and a carer.

Working with matter that has been discarded, consumed or digested, I examine transcorporeality, cross-contamination, extraction, material witness, fluidity and care. Rather than presenting artistic production as a pure or non-toxic process, I attend to the transformations and contaminations inherent in material practice. My work asks how these processes might enable different forms of relationship and value, particularly through materials and ways of working that contemporary society overlooks or dismisses as waste.