Archival photograph of cargo ships crossing the San Francisco Bay (NOAA Photo Library), the waters where the ashes of economist Milton Friedman (1912–2006) were scattered, overlaid with a textual inversion of the title of his book “Free to Choose.” Research image developed in relation to Daniel de Paula’s project for Expo Chicago. Courtesy of the artist

I first met the Brazilian artist Daniel de Paula in Chicago in 2023, when I was working on a long story about a project he was doing with former local artists David Rueter and Marissa Lee Benedict that involved salvaging the last trading floor at the Chicago Board of Trade. We stayed in touch after that, and he even gave me a tour of one of his gallery exhibitions in São Paulo. His singular work, which stretches the idea of art into a mix of social, architectural, agricultural, historical, economic and geopolitical inquiry, is extraordinary—but it requires you to take the time to understand it.

When he tells me he is coming to Expo Chicago for a solo exhibition at the fair, I am intrigued. It’s a rare pleasure to see work so cerebral and not obviously commercial in that environment, so I ask him to answer a few questions about his plans.

Daniel de Paula/Photo: Brian Hieggelke

What are you going to be doing at Expo Chicago this year?

In the context of my solo presentation at Expo Chicago, in collaboration with the gallery Yehudi Hollander-Pappi, I will exhibit a new body of work centered on a group of industrial thousand-liter water tanks filled with water collected from the shoreline of the San Francisco Bay. This tidal estuary is a site where multiple material residues converge, including the cremated remains of neoliberal economist Milton Friedman (1912–2006) and the chemically treated effluents discharged daily by Silicon Valley’s data centers and electrical infrastructures.

The work attempts to situate these ideologically embedded landscape fragments within a broader spatial fabric, approaching them as points of entry into a critical reading of the infrastructural totality of digital capitalism, including data centers, electrical grids, sewage networks and industrial cooling towers, that sustain contemporary regimes of computation, logistics and finance.

From this perspective, the waters of the Bay appear not as an isolated and neutral body of water but, through their incorporation into technical infrastructures, as a material intersection within a planetary system whose operations reorganize territories, intensify extraction and produce ecological, social and geopolitical violence across distant regions.

Dictionary entry for the word “inch,” sourced from the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th edition), including a usage example attributed to economist Milton Friedman. The phrase condenses a neoliberal logic consistent with “The Shock Doctrine”: the cutting of social programs and public infrastructures in favor of privatization, deregulation and free-market expansion, often enacted under conditions of crisis and regardless of their violent social consequences — historically implemented in contexts such as the Chilean military dictatorship. Research image developed in relation to de Paula’s project for Expo Chicago. Courtesy of the artist

Have you done other art fairs in the past? We don’t often see conceptual art in the booths…

I have participated in art fairs before, although I rarely have the opportunity to present solo projects so closely connected to the broader geography in which they are shown. The specificity of the art fair, an explicitly mercantile space, is simultaneously interesting and unsettling to me, as in its frankness and occasional absurdity the mechanisms of exchange and circulation become unusually visible, inevitably informing the way the work appears and operates within it.

At the same time, conceptually grounded and context-responsive practices often refrain from unfolding within art fairs, as the global circuit of fairs with its accelerated pace, geographic ubiquity and short presentation periods is frequently in tension with the slower investigative processes that critically engaged works, particularly those that develop a strong relationship with a specific spatial context, tend to require. In that sense, the context is not simply a neutral container for the work but a condition that inevitably shapes its form.

Is your work for sale?

Yes. In the event of acquisition, the work establishes a contractual structure through which property rights are offered not over the 1,000 liters of water physically contained in the exhibited tanks, but over the atmospheric vapor and cloud formations continuously produced in the Bay Area by the cooling cycles of the data-center and energy-generating infrastructures that convert water into heat-dissipating vapor.

This legal framework draws a direct line to Chicago’s financial markets, particularly the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where instruments such as the Nasdaq Veles California Water Index futures contract were introduced in 2020, allowing water to circulate within speculative financial systems without requiring the physical transfer of the resource itself. Presented in Chicago, a city historically central to the development of modern futures markets, the work mirrors these financial mechanisms by framing the atmospheric byproducts of infrastructural cooling processes as an abstract asset whose ownership can be contractually transferred.

By doing so, the project critically mirrors the financial mechanisms through which contemporary economies transform material processes into speculative claims, revealing how property, ownership and value increasingly operate through abstract ideological constructs detached from the physical substances and infrastructures that sustain them.

“deposition” (2018–ongoing), Marissa Lee Benedict, Daniel de Paula, David Rueter. Installation view in the 34th Bienal de São Paulo (2021)./Photo: Everton Ballardin

I first met you in Chicago when you were launching the book for your Chicago Board of Trade-related project. What’s the latest on that? Was that your first time in Chicago?

Yes, that was when we met, in 2023, during the launch of the book regarding the work titled “deposition” (presented at the 34th Bienal de São Paulo), which emerged and still operates as a collaborative effort with artists David Rueter and Marissa Lee Benedict into the historical transformation of trading floors and the disappearance of open-outcry pits that for more than a century structured the spatial and social choreography of financial speculation in Chicago, producing real physical space elsewhere in the world. For the project we salvaged the last remaining trading pit at the Chicago Board of Trade shortly before its closure, treating it both as an architectural fragment capable of hosting bodies and voices and as a material trace of a financial leviathan that was rapidly being absorbed into algorithmic trading systems.

Yet my first time in Chicago actually dates back to 2019, during the early stages of the investigation that would eventually lead to “deposition.” Guided by the principle attributed to Mao Zedong, “No investigation, no right to speak,” the trip involved field research in the city, attempting to understand firsthand the material and spatial conditions through which financial abstractions are historically produced.

As for the project itself, it remains ongoing. Because the trading pit is a large and heavy architectural object, its displacement depends on very specific material conditions, such as institutional partnerships, significant logistical coordination, significant labor, and a certain alignment of circumstances, a kind of favorable weather that allows the work to move from one context to another.

Interestingly, the work tends to generate a certain institutional desire because its central object of investigation is capital and its spatial infrastructures. In the sense that “deposition” can often be recontextualized within the specific conditions of the place in which it arrives, allowing it to operate as a fragment through which global economic and logistical systems become legible.

Despite this interest, our most recent negotiations with institutions ultimately did not materialize into a physical presentation. While a few early conversations remain open, we have begun to consider, once more, the possibility of displacing the work further south, perhaps toward Central America. One trajectory we have discussed would follow the historical circulation routes that once linked Chicago to the Panama Canal through the Illinois Waterway, the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico, tracing the logistical corridors through which commodities have long moved between agricultural hinterlands and global maritime trade, or, in parallel, through the trucking routes that connect Chicago to Latin America.

How long will you be in Chicago? 

Even though I will be present for the installation of the work at the fair, I have not yet purchased my ticket and therefore do not have the exact dates. I intend to stay for at least a week, both to reconnect with colleagues and friends and to continue some ongoing investigations. Chicago has long been a place where certain economic, infrastructural and logistical systems become unusually legible, and spending time there allows me to comprehend how the city can often be a lens to read the world.

Part of Newcity’s unofficial guide to Expo Chicago 2026. Read more here.

Published in the print edition of Newcity’s April 2026 issue.