Leonardo Gabriel do Amaral
Bio/Statement
Selected
Almost (T)here (2025) — Installation
Almost (T)here - Full Installation View
That space between here and there has shaped everything I make.
The rift started in my tongue. The doctors told my mom her experiment worked too well, English became my first language despite the soil I lived on. It was the key to a new kind of soil, an imagined, maladaptive one. I grew up navigating cultural languages, digital subcultures, and global media, slipping in and out of identities without ever fully inhabiting one. English gave me access to the internet, to America, the world. My current reality rendered optional. Being in-between continents, languages, and selves, is the foundation of my work. It drives my curiosity on identity, longing, and displacement.
Almost (T)here uses renders, diagrams, photographs of screens that unravel into RGB, collages and sculptures that build semiotic culs-de-sac, and poetry that moves and hides in signage, the project is a meditation on suspension, on the moments between departures and arrivals, between point A and B. The project folds traces of migration, transit, and family into a space where the in-between can be felt.
My work is for anyone who has lived across borders, loved from afar, inhabited the cracks between homes, languages, and identities. It resonates with both cultural nomadism and physical displacement, voluntary and forced. I make work to inhabit the in-between fully, to hold the tension of distance and longing in forms others can enter. It is an invitation to stand suspended between what is here and what is there, to fall out of reality, to be held in the middle of two divine bodies, to be home.