4 - 5pm Pacific Daylight Time
7 - 8pm Eastern Daylight Time
8 - 9pm Brasilia Standard Time
The conversation is being held in Portuguese and English with options for English audio interpretation, English real-time captioning (CART), and Portuguese real-time captioning (CART). A participation guide will be shared with all registered attendees that explains how to access these options.
Join artist Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro for an in-depth conversation in conjunction with her exhibition Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro: Eclipse. Vitorino Brasileiro is joined by theorist and artist Denise Ferreira da Silva to discuss and reflect on art, healing, and transmutation. Their conversation is moderated by Vivian Crockett, The Nancy and Tim Hanley Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art and member of the CCS Bard Graduate Committee.
Eclipse is the first work by Brazilian artist Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro (b. 1996, Vitória, Brazil) to be shown 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, stone, water, light, and cloth to form a mandala in the lit center of a darkened room. The shape of the work references the Bantu-Kongo cosmogram, dikenga. According to the artist, this emblem of spiritual continuity symbolizes the spiral movement of time and represents life as a series of continuous deaths and rebirths.
Since 2015, Vitorino Brasileiro’s work has intertwined Afro-Brazilian spirituality, psychology, and art to create tools, facilities, and practices of healing for those who are hurt by coloniality’s uneven distribution of resources and violence. The arbitrary categorization of people by race, gender, birthplace, and other fixed identities is the fundamental colonial procedure used to protect the power structures that became globally hegemonic in the modern era. Vitorino Brasileiro’s work deals directly with those wounds opened by racism, colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and other modes of social, political, and cultural domination that classify people in order to subdue and exploit them. By combining her research as a psychologist with the Bantu cosmovision of her ancestors from the Atlantic coast of Central Africa, Vitorino Brasileiro creates works and texts that understand healing as a provisional state of alignment between the numerous lives that simultaneously compose a person.
An eclipse is a break that occurs in the linearity of the moon or sun cycle. In Portuguese, Vitorino Brasileiro’s first language, “sun” is a masculine word and “moon” is feminine. “Eclipse,” then, can be understood in this work as a symbol for all forms of living that unavoidably contradict the system of fixed identities imposed by coloniality. The ways in which this installation is capable of supporting people in their healing processes remains secret. Special lighting, an original soundtrack, and places to sit and lie down are provided to stimulate meditative experiences that lead to unknown bodily states. In this way, Eclipse hopes to support people in developing their own healing processes—their own embodied state of eclipse.
Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro (Vitória, 1996) is a visual artist, macumbeira and psychologist trained at the Federal University of Espírito Santo. She is currently a master’s student in the Clinical Psychology program at the Pontifical University of the City of São Paulo. She lives the macumbeira spirituality as a necessary body way for escape and rest to happen. She dribbles, incorporates and dives into her Bantu ontology, and takes healing as a perishable moment of freedom. Recently, she participated in exhibitions such as the 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, and the 3rd Frestas - Art Triennial.
Denise Ferreira da Silva (Rio de Janeiro, 1963) is an artist and theorist, currently Professor and Director of the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Her work criticizes the centrality of race in modern thought, emphasizes the racial logic of global capitalism, and points to the art of confrontation as a gesture of anticolonial intervention. She is the author of several influential articles and publications as Toward a Global Idea of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), and Unpayable Debt (Stenberg / MIT Press, forthcoming).
Vivian A. Crockett (Rio de Janeiro, 1983) is a Brazilian-American curator and scholar specializing in modern and contemporary art. Her work focuses largely on art of African diasporas, Latinx diasporas, and the Americas at the varied intersections of race, gender, and queer theory. She is a PhD candidate in Art History at Columbia University whose dissertation examines artistic practices and discourses in Brazil in the sixties and seventies. Crockett has previously worked at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and held fellowships at MoMA and the Whitney Museum. She is currently The Nancy and Tim Hanley Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art.
Jess Oliveira (São Paulo, 1989) is a translator, literary critic, researcher and poet. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Portuguese and German from the University of São Paulo and a Master’s in Translation Studies from Federal University of Santa Catarina. Since her master’s research, she has dedicated herself to the study of Afrodiasporic artistic expressions in Germany. She is a member of the research group Translating in the Black Atlantic, at UFBA, and was a finalist for the 2020 Jabuti Award in the Translation category. She is currently a PhD student in Literature and Culture at Federal University of Bahia and a visiting professor in the Spanish and Portuguese department at Colorado College.
“Art, Healing, Transmutation” was co-developed by Bernardo Mosqueira and Allie / A.L. Rickard, and is also part of their CCS Bard graduate projects Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro: Eclipse and Cripping Curatorial Studies. This program is made possible by the generous support of the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts.
CCS BARD PUBLIC PROGRAMS
To place a request for any of the following services, please contact Casey Robertson, Community Outreach Coordinator, by email ccs@bard.edu or phone 845-758-7598 with two weeks advance notice.
Captioning
Live captioning is available for public programs upon request with two weeks advance notice. Relay and voice calls welcome.
Verbal Description
Verbal description is available for public programs upon request with two weeks advance notice. Relay and voice calls welcome.
American Sign Language Interpretation
ASL-English interpretation is available for public programs upon request with two weeks advance notice. Relay and voice calls welcome.
