Mounting Secular Counter-Theology in Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro’s Montando a historia da vida

This paper examines Brazilian artist Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro’s 2023 installation which combined bricks, eucalyptus trees, earth, tarp, and basins to create a “Fictitious Museum of Objects Stolen by the Police.” Drawing on Tavia Nyong’o’s theories of “afro-fabulation” and “queer and trans aesthetics,” I argue Brasileiro’s work is an afro-fabulation—invoking the technology of the museum to work both with and against it. The installation not only “fabricat[ed] new genres of the human out of the fabulous, formless darkness of an anti-black world.” It called into question the human altogether, drawing on Umbanda and other Afro-Brazilian religions to insist on the memory and soul of objects, invoking both the history and agency of Afro-Brazilian religious materials confiscated by police. Saturating her museum with Umbanda theology, Brasileiro responded to the secular force of the museum with counter-theology, pursuing cosmological alternatives to address historical violence, dissolve difference, and access spiraled forms of time.