“I'm a travesti, a gender identity that exists within Brazilian or Latin American culture and cannot be translated,” says multi-disciplinary artist Ode, not so much to define herself but to introduce the context of her practice. “I was born and live in Brazil, a country that kills more trans people than anywhere else in the world. I'm also Black and in my country there is an ongoing race war. That being said, through my work I tell my story and exorcise my ghosts by turning them into poetry.”

Ode’s ability to channel her trauma into beauty, and her work into healing, is evident in her latest short film, When There Is No Sun. Invited by fashion brand NAMESAKE to contribute to its Family Matters programme, the São Paulo-based artist headed back to her hometown of Itajubá, Minas Gerais, to shoot a work that unveils her own life’s journey from darkness into light with the help of spirit guides. “Sun Ra was one of those spirits who consoled me in times of darkness and made me realise that this is a process inherent to cosmic ascension. Exu Tranca Rua, a deity worshipped in Afro-Brazilian religions, also taught me this,” Ode explains of some of the divinities she embraces. “The title of the film comes from a Sun Ra song and also references a Brazilian song called Quando O Sol Aqui Não Mais Brilhar (When the Sun Doesn't Shine Here Anymore) that salutes Exu Tranca Rua.”

With cinematic nods to Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (1973) and Hector Babenco’s Pixote (1980), Ode’s cast (which includes herself, her mother and father) moves from domestic spaces and out into wild nature, where they encounter childhood memories and cast off religious guilt. Sonically magnetic and visually bold, each scene is packed with meaning. The red celestial being that energetically cleanses Ode and her younger self represents “an Egungun, the spirits of important dead people who return to Earth, according to Yoruba mythology” while the giant yellow rose on the front of a motorbike symbolises the Pomba Giras, “the spirits of free women who help us overcome life's obstacles”. In the same scene you’ll notice a sun, star and crescent moon, “this is postulating that it's a film about the process, not the final form,” Ode says, adding: “Ultimately, the message I want to convey with the film, is that we are the embodiment of Divine Love.”

To accompany the film, London-based curator and writer, Cairo Clarke penned the following poem.

“When I am talking with myself,
I am talking with you.
You are talking through me.
This body is guided by knowledge older than the ship that stole us here against our will.
So to think I wasn’t equipped for living,
Ha! Shame!
For I have lived and died many times already,
Shed skin from one world into the next.
Dead matter returning to the soil,
Nourishing it as I rise through a new body.
One made from the past,
brought to the present,
With the power to shape my future self.

Transmission/Rematerialisation.
A cosmovision where the eternal sea of darkness is an invitation to reconceive time.

Ancestral intervention where darkness is in fact full vision.
When there is nothing, there is also everything.
Pure,
Clarity.

The water runs again and your energy leaks into the universe.
The energies that were stuck call us to spin, spin, spin.
Earthly rotation,
Orbiting sun.

Yemanjá travels in order to revive.
You find me there stuck in the mud,
Calling you.
Waiting to be unstuck, but not knowing when.
Holding tightly onto the knowledge like a flickering flame,
That there is something in this stuckness that will also set me free,
Allow me to walk your paths again,
Step into shaping my body because it is yours too,
An ancestral vessel remoulded each time we commune.

There is no final form,
What is has always been.
We inhabit time together.
I die and re-die to be born anew.
Spin, spin, spin.

Let darkness light the way.

When There Is No Sun is currently on view as part of Diadorim at NONADA, São Paulo, until 31 August 2024.