Life inside the grid: MóDULO De ViDA by DOISDOIS

Circular openings reveal solitary figures inside the suspended structures of MóDULO De ViDA, an ongoing image series by DOISDOIS that examines the distance between a place to live and a way of life.

A face appears in a dark opening. Elsewhere, a seated figure occupies a softly lit compartment, dwarfed by the grid surrounding it. In MóDULO De ViDA, the repetition of the building is immediately legible; the lives within it take longer to emerge.

DOISDOIS removes these inhabited modular structures from any recognisable landscape. There is no street or skyline to explain their scale, and no surrounding neighbourhood to situate their occupants. Architecture becomes an outsized, provisional presence, offering shelter while also defining the limits of each person’s world.

A window for each life

The images move between assemblies and individuals. Stacked volumes and repeated panels establish a strict order, while folds, translucent surfaces and exposed frames give that order a fragile appearance. Circular openings puncture the grid, sometimes revealing a person and sometimes remaining dark.

In the closer views, the opening becomes a frame for a face or a resting body. Warm interior light distinguishes some compartments from the cooler surfaces around them. These small differences give the inhabitants a presence of their own, even as the larger structure reduces each dwelling to another repeatable unit.

From a way of life to a module

The title shifts the Portuguese expression modo de vida, meaning way of life, into módulo de vida, or module of life. That change names the central concern of the series: how much of the way we inhabit the world is chosen, and how much is determined by the systems into which we fit.

DOISDOIS connects the work to the pressure for efficiency, optimisation and repetition in large cities. Living units become smaller as the structures containing them grow larger. Promises of access, proximity and convenience sit alongside a narrowing range of possibilities for dwelling.

The research also draws on Ailton Krenak’s Ideias para Adiar o Fim do Mundo, particularly its reflections on contemporary ways of life, civilisational abstraction and the plurality of existence. With no defined setting to anchor them, these structures leave that question open. The images ask what is lost when the singularity of a life has to conform to the dimensions of a module.

Project Credits

Project: MóDULO De ViDA
Author: DOISDOIS / @studiodoisdois
Year: 2026
Status: Ongoing series
Images: DOISDOIS
Research reference: Ideias para Adiar o Fim do Mundo, Ailton Krenak