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

Drawn from my larger dissertation on secular aesthetics in Brazilian contemporary art museums, this paper examines Brazilian artist Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro’s 2023 piece Montando a historia da vida (trans. Mounting the history of life), installed at the 35th Bienal de São Paulo. Combining bricks, eucalyptus trees, earth, tarp, and basins across a large platform, Brasiliero took the biennial’s “choreographies of the impossible” theme into the realm of fabulation, creating what she called a “Fictitious Museum of Objects Stolen by the Police.” While the significance of these objects remained opaque to many viewers, read alongside the artists’ writing and interviews, they acquire a distinctly theological weight. Analyzing Brasileiro’s installation alongside Tavia Nyong’o’s theories of “afro-fabulation” and “queer and trans aesthetics,” this paper argues that Brasileiro’s “Fictitious Museum of Objects Stolen by the Police” is an afro-fabulation—invoking the technology of the museum to work both with and against it. 

One of the ways Nyong’o’s defines afro-fabulation is as “the persistent reappearance of that which was never meant to appear, but was instead meant to be kept outside or below representation forms the first sense” (Nyong’o, Afro-Fabulations, 3). Brasiliero’s installation makes specific reference to objects kept outside of representative economies, referencing Afro-Brazilian religious objects confiscated by the police. As religious studies scholar Danielle Boas and art historian Roberto Conduru have written about, some of the earliest archives of Afro-Brazilian religious objects originated in police collections. Brasileiro’s installation attempted not only to “fabricat[e] new genres of the human out of the fabulous, formless darkness of an anti-black world” (Nyong’o, 25). It went further, calling into question the category of the human altogether, drawing on Umbanda and other Afro-Brazilian religious concepts to insist on the memory and the soul of all objects. In this sense, Brasileiro’s “fictitious museum” invoked both the history and the agency of Afro-Brazilian religious materials confiscated by the police. This paper argues that in Montando a historia da vida, Brasileiro responded to the secular force of the museum with counter-theology, saturating the museum with Umbanda theology, drawn from her own study and practice of that religion, and attempting to open up cosmological alternatives that address problems of historical violence, dissolve delusions of difference, and tap into spiraled forms of time. This last concept, of spiraled time, is undoubtedly a reference to Afro-Brazilian poet and theorist of Afro-Brazilian religion Leda Maria Martins who has theorized the way in which Afro-diasporic practices of dance, performance, and music diffract, collapse, and redouble time. 

Brasileiro questions the distinctions between the “biotic and abiotic,” attempting to undermine biopolitical disciplines governing life and death without ignoring the material effects of these still regnant ideologies. In this sense, Brasileiro, herself a Black trans woman, reject racial and gender categories without ignoring their material, biopolitical effects. Part of what makes this case study so interesting is Brasileiro’s rejection of identity politics, racial ideologies, and the explicit ways her identity has been tokenized within the Brazilian art world. This is consonant with the work of Black Brazilian curator Diane Lima whose recent work Negros na Piscina questions the logic of capture that has characterized the wave of curatorial interest in Afro-Brazilian art and artists in the last twenty-five years. Whereas Lima wants to push art institutions to make more meaningful, deep investments in blackness Brazilian art, artists, and art histories, Brasileiro troubles Blackness and the stableness (or even reliability) of identity in the first place. In this way, her work forces a conversation between scholars of Umbanda, Afro-Brazilian religions, and recent scholarship on the new materialisms and animism across black studies, indigenous studies, and religious studies.

The primary sources analyzed in this paper are the Montando a historia da vida installation itself, the 35th Bienal de São Paulo catalog, and Brasileiro’s 2022 book Quando o sol aqui não mais brilhar: a falência da negritude (trans. When the sun no longer shines here: the bankrupcy of negritude). Some attention will also be given to interviews with the artist and promotional materials released by the biennial. While the meanings of the objects in Brasileiro’s Montando a historia da vida installation may be remote to most viewers, I will show how, when read alongside the artists writings and interviews, they acquire significant theological weight. 

The paper will begin with a presentation of the exhibition, placed into context of the biennial’s “choreographies of the impossible” theme and Brasileiro’s earlier, more photography-centered work, charting her turn to larger installation-based pieces in the years prior. From there, I will conduct a close reading of the Montando a historia da vida, with particular attention to the histories of Afro-Brazilian religious objects held in police custody and to claims by Brasiliero about the meaning behind the installation. Drawing on Brasileiro’s 2022 book, her interviews, the work of Leda Maria Martins, I will consider how the piece sits in relation to claims regarding new materialisms and Nyong’o’s afro-fabulation. One of the questions this paper probes is, what aesthetic does Brasileiro propose? In a way, her work, its reliance on spiralized notions of time, and its troubling of categories of racial and gendered distinctions, complicates calls to embrace Afrofuturist aesthetics as a means to agency, freedom, or liberation. In a way, Brasileiro attempts to dissolve time, the fictions of identity, and the person as the only container for agentive force. She names the ways in which Afro-Brazilian religious practices have policed and repressed, but also rejects the allegedly liberatory practices of celebration, militancy, or identitarianism. What she offers in its place is at times gestural, at times theological, at times aesthetic. This paper hope to explore the kind of being her artistic practice, as a black trans woman in Brazil, proposes and whether and to what extent it may open up new philosophical, theological, aesthetic, or even museological possibilities in the face of the anti-black, capitalistic, and identitarian confines of the secular.