Dismantling Colonial Epistemicide: Exorcism and Transmutation in Brazilian Contemporary Art.

The article examines how contemporary Brazilian visual artists Ayrson Heráclito and Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro integrate Afro-Indigenous spiritual practices into their work, challenging Western colonial notions of art. By incorporating rituals, trance, and ancestral cosmologies, their poetics disrupt the universalizing and formalist frameworks of Western modernity, revealing art as a historically contingent category shaped by colonial epistemicide. Heráclito's performances, such as the cleansing rituals linked to Candomblé, and Vitorino Brasileiro's Umbanda-inspired ceremonies, including the channeling of the transvestite ancestor Xica Manicongo, foreground spirituality as an existential field rather than a mere theme. These practices question individual authorship and aesthetic contemplation, while addressing the ongoing violence and erasure faced by Afro-Brazilian and transgender communities. The article situates their work within broader debates on decolonizing art and expanding its epistemological boundaries beyond Eurocentric paradigms.