Reflex

Daniel Greenfield-Campoverde: Structures for Jet Lag


Daniel Greenfield-Campoverde: Structures for Jet Lag

Structures for Jet Lag curated by Art Haxhijakupi at PAUSE/FRAME, 194 The Broadway, SW19 1RY, London, UK. Photographed by Studio Adamson.


 

PAUSE/FRAME, London, presented Daniel Greenfield-Campoverde’s debut UK solo exhibition from April 4 to May 2, 2025.


A video projection occupies the back room of the gallery, with the Teresa Carreño Theatre in Caracas as its starting point, a Brutalist colossus erected during Venezuela’s 1970s oil boom, now repurposed as Nicolás Maduro’s bureaucratic annexe. The artist, exiled in London, films the site from far away, his friend’s camera stands like a ghost. Longing is not for a lost homeland but for the idea of home as an open question. The theatre’s decay mirrors Venezuela’s collapse but also the artist’s own: a body fractured between geographies, reconstructing identity from fragments. Just like his psyche, it exists in a state of queer temporality, neither fully alive nor dead, but suspended in the liminal space between memory and myth. 


From left: El Equilibrio, 1996,  collage on paper, 42 x 36 cm; Relative Symmetry (Dungeness-Chroni), 2025, 50 x 50 cm;  and Visual Scale (The Other Self), 2025,  concrete, archival, imagery, oak frame, 50 x 50 cm.


Daniel Greenfield-Campoverde’s Structures for Jet Lag is a raw meditation on the migrant body — its fractures, its longings. This is an exhibition that refuses to settle, shifting restlessly between sculpture, drawing, collage and film like a body in transit, always searching for a place to land. It’s about borders, yes, but not borders as fixed lines. These are borders that bleed, that crack, that dissolve under the weight of desire and memory. At the centre of the gallery, a three-metre concrete sculpture cuts through the space like a wound. It’s an ‘unfolded’ line, a representation of the British coastline made in cold, hard concrete, a material that speaks of modernist ambition, of nation building, of permanence. It’s fragile, precarious, raised on a plywood plinth that feels temporary. This is a border that doesn’t hold. It’s a site of negotiation, a place where the geopolitical collides with the personal, where the fixed becomes fluid. It’s a queer monument, not to stability but to the rough potential of borders as sites of rupture and repair. This sculptural work began in 2017 to raise awareness of oil smuggling and displacement along the Venezuelan-Colombian border. It was later completed to include the land and sea borders of all 13 Latin American countries. 


Insomnia, 2024-25, pencil on Fabriano Artistico 140 lb. paper,  100 x 140 cm 


Now, in the UK, he remaps England’s entire coastline — 12,429 kilometres from Land’s End — as a single, unbroken horizon in his work entitled Coastline (2025). Drawing on José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of queerness as a horizon of becoming, the sculpture reimagines the coastline as a ‘long beach’, a space where the geopolitical dissolves into possibility. A concrete panel hangs nearby. Luggage tags from London trips, an image of a pre-Columbian Venezuelan sculpture titled My Other Self, and the handwritten words “de allá” (from there) by the artist’s own grandfather, mourning a “there” that no longer exists. This is a self-portrait in reverse: not who the artist is but who he might become. Muñoz wrote that queerness is the rejection of a here and now for a future ‘not yet here’. To stand before this work is to stand in the hyphen between here and allá, where the body is not lost but becoming.


From left: Simetria Relativa, 1996, collage on paper, 42 x 36 cm;  Balanza Visual, 1996,  collage on paper, 42 x 36 cm


This body is a body out of place, a body that wears its dislocation like a second skin. Greenfield-Campoverde knows this intimately. His work is haunted by the question of orientation: how do you find your way in a world that insists on telling you where you don’t belong? Sara Ahmed might call this a queer phenomenology, a way of being in space that refuses the straight lines of normative belonging. The concrete sculpture forces you to reorient yourself, to navigate the dissonance between here and there, between the body and the space it inhabits. It’s a reminder that space is never neutral, that it’s always shaped by power, by desire, by the ghosts of what’s been lost. An archival postcard, magnified into a vinyl sticker that swallows the gallery wall, spreads its faded tropics: a palm tree, a body of water, blurred boats dissolving at the horizon like afterthoughts. The original message “recuperate pronto” is now lost, its cursive script melted into pixels. This is correspondence as hauntology: a piece from the past sent from Venezuela to Surrey, its call for recovery blurred into the mute grammar of longing. The boats are not destinations but verbs. They remain as spectral shapes caught between departure and arrival, their voyages unspoken. 


The Mpox Drawing I+II, charcoal, 2022-23, coloured pencils, Japanese Washi tape on transparent paper, steel and aluminium frame, 180 x 110 x 40 cm


Here, the migrant body is a shoreline, a thing carved by crossings, its cartographies written in salt and absence. The water is both wound and witness, mapping the unsayable distances between there and here, between the self and its ghost. In Insomnia (2024-25), a large pencil-on-paper drawing, the artist fractures architectural precision into a migrant’s lexicon as if the very idea of ‘home’ has come apart into a kinetic field of gravity-defiant forms. This is architecture as delirium: forms recompose themselves in mid-collapse, defying the rules of traditional geometry to mirror the body’s negotiation of belonging. The structures are neither falling nor rising; they are becoming, suspended in a transient zone where identity is perpetually renegotiated. Yet there is liberation in this fragmentation. The drawing’s airborne geometries evoke Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, where architecture becomes a speculative act, a ‘desire for elsewhere’. 


Coastline, 2025, concrete, National Geographic map of England, 172 x 13 x 13 cm


Greenfield-Campoverde’s lines are both wound and stitched: they map the psychic toll of displacement while offering a radical reimagining of space as fluid, collective and defiantly ungovernable. To exist within this work is to persist in the in-between of here and there, where the body is not a site of lack but a blueprint for new architectures of belonging. In the Mpox Drawings, I+II (2022-23), the queer body emerges as a site of biopolitical scrutiny. Created during a three-week confinement due to the Mpox virus, the drawings explore the absence of touch as both a physical and metaphorical condition. A metaphor for the migrant experience - the distance, the isolation, the longing for connection. Greenfield-Campoverde uses frottage to capture the texture of gloves worn to prevent transmission, turning isolation into a meditation on vulnerability. The drawings are rendered on Japanese Washi paper. They map the artist’s East London flat, but they’re also maps of absence, of longing. Fingerprints and glove impressions overlap, evoking not just quarantine but a broader regime of control that equates queerness with risk. Yet in their fragility, the drawings resist: they insist on touch as resistance, on the queer body as a territory that refuses to be sterilised.


Get well soon, we love you, England, 2025, modified postcard, 27 x 36 cm


Structures for Jet Lag is an exhibition that refuses to be contained. Recovery isn’t about returning to wholeness. It’s about learning to live with the cracks, the gaps, the irreparable losses. It’s about finding beauty in the broken places, about imagining a future where borders are fluid, where belonging is always in process. Daniel Greenfield-Campoverde’s work is about the queer migrant body, but not as a victim, not as a problem to be solved. This is a body that resists, that dreams, that imagines new ways of being in the world.



Selected Bibliography

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 4th ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012.

Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.

Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: NYU Press, 2009.

Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. Translated by Bruce Benderson. New York: Feminist Press, 2013.

Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001.

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974.


Art Haxhijakupi is a researcher, curator, and writer, and also the Exhibitions Director of The Koppel Projects in the UK.




Daniel Greenfield-Campoverde (b.1984, Caracas) is a Venezuelan American visual artist living and working in London, UK. Exploring themes of identity and place, he contests notions of cultural belonging through an expanded video, drawing and installation practice. His research has led him to create performative walks along contested borders, embody nonsensical choreographies amidst war bunkers as well as diaristic pieces which speak to the queer experience. 


His work has been exhibited and screened internationally in venues including: The Bronx Museum of the Arts (New York, NY), Savvy Contemporary (Berlin, DE), LUX (London, UK), Hua International Gallery (Berlin, DE), Iklectic (London, UK), PS120 (Berlin, DE), Momenta Art (Brooklyn, NY), Art Exchange (Colchester, UK), The Centro Cultural Chacao (Caracas, VE), and POLIN (Warsaw, PL). He has received travel grants from Asylum Arts and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art; the latter, to study Nicholas Grimshaw's "Eden Project" in Cornwall, UK. He was selected to participate in the 38th cycle of the Artist in the Marketplace program (AIM) at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, in the fall of 2018. He has participated in various residencies including the Watermill Centre (Watermill, NY), The Wassaic Artists' Residency (Wassaic, NY), Hangar Centro de Investigação Artística (Lisbon, PT) and ZK/U - Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (Berlin, DE). His work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, Artnet, Art Observed, Architizer, El Nacional and ArteFuse.


Greenfield-Campoverde holds an MFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London and degrees in Architecture from Yale University and Pratt Institute. Daniel is currently an associate lecturer in the MA Design: Expanded Practice at Goldsmiths, University of London.




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