Maria Daniela Paloma |

role

Designer

No items found.

Location

The Netherlands

Maria Paloma is a designer and visual researcher, who examines the influence of new media on visual culture and explores the meaning of symbols, rituals, and artifacts in contemporary society. Through speculative scenarios, she sheds light on the paradoxes that emerge from this cultural analysis. Working at the intersection of graphic design, video and writing, she makes tensions tangible by playing with aesthetics and iconography. In doing so, she reveals cultural patterns and behaviors and identifies emerging trends that can inform creative decision-making.

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The Coca Leaf Entanglement

Exhibition

2025 Basic Instinct: Making-With

Images

Ruud Balk & Maria Paloma

Video

thanks

Creative Industries Fund NL

Departing from stigmatized narratives that surrounds the Coca leaf, Maria Paloma explores how artistic and creative initiatives can serve as a tangible counter-archive for this plant. In this work she uses root systems as a metaphor for the social and cultural connections that the leaf symbolizes in Colombian culture. Through collaborative embroidery , she invites you to place the project in a Dutch context and explore how people outside Colombia perceive coca. By mapping these images, alowing them to take root in the local imagination, and using dialogue as a research method, the counter-archive grows, while simultaneously highlighting the importance of collective knowledge development.

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Maria Daniela Paloma

Roots as living lines connecting stigma, tradition, and imagination