Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro

Art is constructed detached from any possibility of life [...] it removes from the object the possibility of the soul, that is, of memory, and transforms that life into an object and, therefore, subject to control. So, these art venues − museums and galleries, institutions that are built precisely as a museological experience of removing, of cleaning, of erasure and of a static life −, when they encounter my work and other works, they experience a crisis, not only an aesthetic crises, but a historical crisis. My work is alive.

– Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro

“[Castiel] lives Transmutation as an inevitable destiny. She dribbles, incorporates and dives into her Bantu ontology. She takes healing as a perishable moment of freedom. She studies and builds interspecifc spirituality and ancestry.”

Artist, writer and psychologist, her work transcends from a double dimension: healing in the existential and bodily fields, and the reterritorialization of the body and the spaces in which it circulates and inhabits. Her pieces are articulated between performance, video, photography, installation, situation and pictorial practices, moving in an open spectrum between traditions common to the field of art, healing, encounter, macumba and other psychic-spiritual activities. Her image-ideas, magnetic and stunning, bring high energy intensity, causing cognitive shifts that dilute dichotomies between culture and nature, and discredit the structures that racialize and hijack the fluidity of experiences. Her actions give name to the traumas, so they can finally take their course.

Interweaving a diversity of knowledge, her work suggests transformations and twists of all kinds. And, from these practices, movements and singular rituals emerge, mobilized by the astuteness of the tongue, the swing of the waist and the care of the soul. From its elementary inventiveness for bodies and esoteric trances, actions and elements vibrate in this plane and in the others.

– Germano Dushá

Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro (b. 1996, Vitória, Brazil) lives and works on planet Earth.

Some of the artist’s solo exhibitions include: A linguagem dos anjos, Mendes Wood DM, Brussels (2024); Remember when we talked about meeting again, Mendes Wood DM, New York (2022); O Trauma é brasileiro, Galeria Homero Massena, Vitória (2019).

Additionally, her work was included in group exhibitions such as: Amadeo Luciano Lorenzato en conversation avec Lucas Arruda, Sanam Khatibi, Patricia Leite, Paula Siebra, Marcos Siqueira, Erica Verzutti et Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Mendes Wood DM, Paris, France; Third World: The Bottom Dimension, Serpentine Gallery, London (2023); Social Fabric: Art and Activism in Contemporary Brazil, Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas, Austin (2022); 4+3=1, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2022); Atos Modernos, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, São Paulo (2022); Eclipse, Hessel Musem of Art, New York (2021); Crônicas Cariocas, Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro (2021); LA PISADA DEL ÑANDÚ (O CÓMO TRANSFORMAMOS LOS SILENCIOS), La Virreina Centre de la Imatge, Barcelona (2021); Enciclopédia Negra, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, São Paulo (2021).