Ode is busy revolutionising Brazil’s creative landscape through her experimental works and deep commitment to championing the beauty of LGBTQIA+ identities. The São Paulo-based multidisciplinary artist has just been recognised at the Latin American Fashion Awards for her second film ‘Divina’, which hails the legendary Brazilian travesti Marcinha do Corintho. She’s also worked with brands including Namesake and Comme des Garçons and published the photo book, ‘A Rose and a Prayer’. And now comes her latest project, ‘Ascensão’ with Jean Paul Gaultier, which evokes the higher powers of a loving community.

A Nataal film debut, discover the work here.

Ode tells us that she found inspiration for ‘Ascensão’ in chapter 13 of bell hooks’ book ‘All About Love’, in which the author discusses angels. “bell hooks was first told stories of angels as a child attending church, where she learned that angels were wise comforters in times of loneliness. As she grew up, hooks discovered many angels in her favourite authors, and often they were seen as profane,” Ode explains. From here, she considered how hooks recounts that, “after so much being alone in the dark of the room, clinging to the metaphysics of love, trying to understand its mystery, she could finally reach a new vision of love.”

In the film, Ode’s angel-winged character is first encountered in such a room and then transforms into a pomba-gira (the spirits of women free from social conventions who are worshipped in Candomblé and Umbanda religions) with the help of a cast of divine beings played by her musician and model friends. Against a soundtrack by Dianne ‘Shabazz’ Varnie from Saint Heron, these guiding lights – adorned in fantastical, form-fitting JPG looks and made magic by stars, roses, feathers and bows – are drawn together to rise up and create a communal vision. ‘Ascensão’ is also accompanied by the below text, a response to the work by curator Cairo Clarke. Be prepared to be bewitched.

The crossroads is a seven-pointed star

Dear Ode,

Like an angel your messages always come when I need them most. When your name appears after extended periods of quiet between us, I know magic has been made. I’m writing this (love) letter as a thank you for sharing ‘Ascensão’ with me.

The first thing that struck me was light. It pours in from open windows, it flickers in the flame of a candle, it creates contrast and shadow. It shimmers from the seven-pointed stars crowning the heads of spirits and angels. Light presents itself so naturally within each scene that it creates a sense of intimacy and familiarity. We are at home together. The surreality of the everyday appears before our eyes. We see what really lies between shimmering shafts of light. I’m sure there are many other presences that we don’t see but are there also. I greet them warmly.

Roses continue to present themselves in your work. In our previous collaboration together, they were the thing that stood out most to me as an entry point for my own musings and memories. The name of my text, ‘A Rose and Prayer’ became the title of the project and exhibition. A connecting thread between us, but also across your work. When I noticed the presence of roses again, I went to an old book of my mother’s that I salvaged from a forgotten storage unit. The title is ‘Flowers and their Messages’ and the author is The Mother. From what I understand, The Mother was a spiritual guide who supervised the activities of an Ashram in Pondicherry, India. On my mother’s only visit (so far) to the country of her parents, I believe she spent time there.

So, I opened the book to look up ‘rose’. Alongside a black and white sketch of a rose is the words ‘Love for the Divine’. It describes the psychic love related to the rose as pure and self-giving without egoistic demands. The appearance of the rose in your work speaks to this work of the Divine. Divine love work. To be in community with angels, to make work with friends and people you love.

According to the Mother “the abundance” of red roses “will save the world” through their communion with the Divine. ‘Ascensão’ speaks to me as a communion with the Divine. It’s in the space of this film that angels, guardians, Pomba-giras and Exu are manifested. As I watch the film again I wonder, why this communion? What are you asking us to meditate on? Perhaps it is love, a journey of self, a meditation guided by angels on learning what/who and how we love and that we are not alone in figuring it out. There are many of us. We can look to Pomba-giras to remind us of that.

Recently I’ve been reading Roberto Strongman’s book ‘Queering Black Atlantic Religions’, 2019. In it he examines Candomblé to “demonstrate how religious rituals of trance possession allow humans to understand themselves as embodiments of the divine”. It’s in this book that I come to the term “transcorporeality” as “the distinctly Afro-diasporic cultural representation of the human psyche as multiple, removable, and external to the body that functions as its receptacle.” (Strongman, 2019). So, I have been thinking about this sense of transcorporeality in relation to ‘Ascensão’. Within the film the psyche becomes multiple in the form of the beings that present themselves.

Whether human, metaphysical or anthropomorphic, form is not necessarily of importance, all could be true at the same time. But in these drawn-out moments with each of them we see an externalisation of self outside of the physical body - whose physical body we don’t know, maybe ours the viewer? Through the course of the film, we watch this externalisation expand and pluralise. Not bound to a specific body, gender or environment. The self is removable, transmutable, multiple. This is an ascension before our eyes. One where the hosts of Afro- diasporic spiritualities are both messenger and message, both receptacle and transmitter.

From wings to stars,
From angel to Pomba-giras,
Before us, in motion ‘Ascensão’ speaks to me as a pathway towards freeing oneself from Eurocentric/Western notions of “identitarian interiority”. Instead, ‘Ascensão’ gathers together the beautiful possibilities that we can host. It centres Afro-diasporic philosophies that radically differ from the Western philosophies that have trapped black bodies into a purely physical image to be projected onto. The layers of the film challenge this trap by offering time inside and outside of the body and mind. ‘Ascensão’ explores the spiritual dimensions of love and community.

In your work, I read images as manifestations of energies, ones that move across time, defying liminality. I’m thinking about the secret, obscured beings that present themselves in a grainy black and white texture throughout the film. They feel like a memory, another spiritual dimension. One we must listen to closely. After talking to you, I was moved to hear that these are manifestations of friends created through your imagination as a child. Ones that protected and comforted you at times of loneliness. I can relate to this feeling of loneliness, for me writing was my way of moving through turbulent times as a child. I wonder how bringing forth visualisations and relationships through your imagination have led you to an artistic practice. A visual storytelling that is rooted in the everyday and the surreal, blurring both until we see clearly and are moved to think deeply.

‘Ascensão’ is an offering to the Divine to reach a new vision of love. To bear witness, to be in motion. To be a vessel and a host. Names veiled in secrets we need not uncover, but rather surrender to an air of the unexplainable. Red rose as loving surrender. ‘Ascensão’ as an externalisation of one’s multiplicity. To quote bell hooks “love does not bring us to an end, it provides us with the means to live.” Sometimes on that journey we find ourselves at the crossroads of a seven-pointed star and must attune our ears to the whisperings of angels.

With love, Cairo