Modos de descolonizar: o trauma é brasileiro, de Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro

Abstract

This work proposes a research on the artistic production and clinical practice of Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro – visual artist, psychologist and macumbeira – as a device for promoting healing, criticizing racialization and reinventing the memories of colonialism. The framework consists of looking into colonialism as a lingering phenomenon, ceaselessly reproducing itself as a historical and collective trauma through everyday racism. To speak of trauma, in this case, is to deal with the illnesses of subjects marginalized by the regime of racialization that organizes bodies (black and indigenous, in Brazil) between killable and livable. Thus, in the articulation between colonialism, racism and their modes of mortification – or, in other words, from a past that keeps returning as an open wound –Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro's work is located at the crossroads of other modes of subjectification and decolonization of the subject, through the cultivation of afro-diasporic memories. The proposal adresses the colonial system’s production of the black body (Hortense J. Spillers), the redistribution of colonial violence as self-care (Jota Mombaça), the psychological effects of colonialism (Frantz Fanon), everyday racism as colonial trauma (Grada Kilomba), practices of mediation of resistance to death (Achille Mbembe) and de-identification as cultural and political subversion (José Esteban Muñoz). The upheaval of Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro takes place in the movement with which her body escapes from the coloniality that insists on racializing and imprisoning subjects. Enjoying the freedom of disobedience with which she manipulates energies and colonial violence, the artist, psychologist and macumbeira produces devices of fight and healing as self-care for herself and her allies. It is mainly in the recreation of memories, in its visionary and subversive force, that the Brazilian trauma is conjured. In this process, the disruption of oblivion has to do with the imagination of a new reality in which the word of command is liberation and life. 

Keywords: Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro; decolonization; cure; colonial trauma