Through her work, artist, writer and clinical psychologist Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro (Vitória, Brazil, 1996) seeks to deconstruct the racial mythology that has segregated and subjugated bodies and delineated class and race hierarchies since colonial societies. Through an interdisciplinary artistic practice influenced by her background in psychology, she has developed a body of work that combines performance, photography, video, writing and installation to produce new language systems.

Her autobiography, which extends to the stories of her family members, the summoning of collective memory and the soul, healing rituals, Afro-descendant cultures and religions of African origin serve as both the point of origin and the material for the creation of her work. At the confluence of these elements, the artist exercises a cosmovision that traverses the idea of transmutation and transit between life and death as liberating practices. Challenging the binarism imposed on the peoples of Amerindian territories by European colonisation, Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro exercises new visions of the world.

Corpo-flor, 2016-present

Photographs, X print on Hahnemühle Photo Luster 260 g paper

Transfiguration and transmutation are gestures that come together in Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro’s work as strategies of resistance to the violence of racialisation. In Corpo-flor, photography bears witness to rituals that propose a “radical hybridity with lives from other realms and worlds” as a practice of communion and self-knowledge. Beginning in 2016 with solitary rites that accompanied periods of the artist’s “absurd loneliness”, marked by her life in the city of Vitória (Brazil) and her gender transition, the series accompanied her anguish and, over time, expanded through encounters with other lives and people who came to make up the Corpo-flor ontology — transforming the term into a nomenclature that designates a species, not an individual.

The Biennial presents a selection of images from the series in one of the intermediate rooms of the Monastery of Santa Clara-a-Nova. The architecture of the space allows the photographs to surprise the viewer, hovering “over” the walls like indecipherable presences. Pointing to past acts of violence repercussing in the present, Castiel Vitorino comes to remind us that “transfiguration is the only certainty”, “the most powerful truth” because only it “has the power to end the history of racialisation in our lives”.