Dias & Riedweg

Dias & Riedweg

“Our artistic practice and our daily lives, which we’ve shared for nearly twenty years, unfurls in that territory between one and the other, an unknown terrain of desire and fear, of a world to explore, that’s out there to be discovered.”


Dias & Riedweg includes Mauricio de Mello Dias (b. 1964, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) and Walter Stephan Riedweg (b. 1955, Luzern, Switzerland), who have worked together since 1993 to make collaborative and interdisciplinary public art projects, videos, and performances.

Dias studied in the school of fine arts at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro from 1982 to 1986. After traveling through Europe, he took courses in engraving at the Schule für Gestaltung in Basel, Switzerland. He subsequently studied at the Printmaking Workshop in New York. Riedweg’s formal education focused upon theater and music; he studied at the Musik Academie in Luzern, the Scuola di Teatro Dimitri in Verscio, Switzerland, and participated in several workshops at the Performance Studies Department at New York University.

Together, Dias & Riedweg combine video, ethnography, and performance art to tackle social and political issues; in their projects, the artists examine human subjectivity as it is conditioned by ideas of nationhood and mediated by contemporary technology. Based in Rio de Janeiro, the duo often looks to the conditions of that city’s favela cultures to consider how a city is constituted.