CASTIEL VITORINO BRASILEIRO
Eclipse Trans Healing
Bernardo Mosqueira
ECLIPSE - CASTIEL VITORINO BRASILEIRO
Eclipse is a "perishable space of freedom" by Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro (b. 1996, Vitória, Brazil), an installation developed to support healing experiences against the traumatic limitations of colonial social categories.
Eclipse is the first work by Brazilian artist Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro (b. 1996, Vitória, Brazil) to be exhibited in the US and it highlights her original approach to matters of healing and decoloniality. This newly commissioned immersive installation uses spiritually active materials - such as soil, salt, charcoal, cloth, stone, water, and light - to form a mandala whose shape references dikenga, the Bantu-Kongo cosmogram. An emblem of spiritual continuity, dikenga symbolizes the spiral movement of time and represents life as a series of continuous deaths and rebirths.
Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro: Eclipse is curated by Bernardo Mosqueira as part of the requirements for the Master of Arts degree at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. In addition to general CCS Bard exhibition support, Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro: Eclipse was made possible by the executive production and generous support of 4H5H MEDIA (Marcus Vinicius Ribeiro and Zachary Kuipers) and OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts.
CASTIEL VITORINO BRASILEIRO - Artist
About the Artist
Since 2015, Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro (b. Vitória, Brazil, 1996) has been investigating and experimenting with healing processes that produce integral life experiences through harmony with transmutation. Combining her academic research and clinical practice as a psychologist (currently a master's student in psychology at PUC-SP, supervised by Suely Rolnik) with the Bantu-diasporic worldview and her vital/spiritual macumbeira¹ practice (she is “Filha de Santo” of Mãe Matilde at the “terreiro” Casa de Iansã Caboclo Pena Branca), Vitorino Brasileiro has been creating works and texts that conceive healing as a provisory state of alignment between the countless lives that simultaneously compose a person. With special attention to the different dimensions that make up the life matter, Castiel proposes other ways of conceiving the notions of life, death, end, being, and transformation. All of this makes her work a powerful agent of construction, inspiration, and conspiracy of opacities, insubmissions, insurgencies and other cures - for herself and for others who also suffer from the unequal distribution of resources and violence of modernity-coloniality.