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In the “Artist at the Studio” series, Panmela Castro collects the affections of artist friends that she maintains a relationship with and even some others who are a reference for the artist and her generation. Ultimately, the series became an intellectual inventory of its time. A characteristic of this series is the metalanguage. The works produced during the meeting in the studio appear in the painting that, among the place, creates a historical and temporal record.

Vigils are painting-memories of happenings that enter the night in the artist's studio, sometimes more behaved, and other times, with too much dancing and drinking. Vigil is about belonging. Talking about myself from the mirror of the other: experiences that become politics based on this meeting.

In the conception of Affective Drift by Panmela Castro, chance becomes the protagonist in a search for belonging. Life is guided by fortuitous encounters, in a process of surrendering to the act of drifting. Spontaneous journeys lead to unlikely meetings, while others seem already written. In this series, the artist immerses herself in this movement, traversing territories where she is guided by the network of affections that emerges as she allows herself to be carried away.

Amid the quest for a sense of belonging and acceptance, flowers, symbols of affection, become subjects of painting for Panmela Castro. The artist portrays the flowers she receives from friends and strangers on various occasions, reflecting the need for connection and recognition. The title "Black Women Don't Receive Flowers" addresses theories regarding the affectivity of women of color and their impacts on society. Being distant from the Brazilian beauty ideal, these women are often overlooked and disregarded compared to white women, resulting in difficulties in establishing long-lasting relationships. Consequently, many of them end up being responsible for caring for and supporting their families alone, without a partner to share expenses. This situation places them at greater socioeconomic vulnerability, as indicated by research on poverty and food insecurity in the country.

“Women approached me and told their stories. It's been like this for years, I think I'm someone reliable. Someone that will hear those intimate, and sometimes painful, stories that you've never told anyone. Someone who will listen without judging. Just someone to listen. To paint these stories is to do something with this pain. A kind of healing process, an end point.” – Panmela Castro on the series HerStory

Penumbra is a series of long exposure experimental photographs created from studies of the work of Francesca Woodman. With its first pieces created in 2009, it is the result of a decade-long research on loneliness and feelings of isolation.

In this series, the artist portrays in quick strokes her collection of lovers in the nights they spent together. The series departs from theories about the affectivity of black women by thinkers such as Bell Hooks and Ana Claudia Lemos Pacheco.

Red acrylic paint smears the hem of the white voile like the bride’s dripping blood. The bride is a symbol of naivety and the idea of ​​romantic love that imprisons thousands of cis and trans women in situations of abuse, domestic violence and that often make femicide more violent. Femicide is a gender-based hate crime term: the murder of women. In 2016, a woman was murdered every two hours (Brazilian Public Security Yearbook), totaling 4,657 deaths. The risk of a black woman being murdered in Brazil is twice as high as a white woman. In the case of these women, in addition to gender motivation, the racial issue is taken into account, showing the failure of public policies, since they do not reach peripheral black women.

Panmela Castro is one of the main names in the history of pichação in Rio de Janeiro. The pichação composes codes that only intimate walkers of the urban landscape are wise to master. It is a movement unique to Brazilian cities and with a small connection to graffiti culture and street art. In the past they were used to denounce the military dictatorship, and in much of Latin America, it was appropriated by the feminist movement in its claims. By leaving the anonymity of a message on the gray concrete of the city, the action is free of prohibitions or punishments, but when the lines are in a mirror, it becomes a process of empathy and otherness, about what you would leave for the other that suits you too. Sometimes Panmela's mirrors are small traditional paintings, sometimes they are public art projects, and at other times, a participatory performance where passers-by place themselves as authors leaving their own messages for themselves, and for the other.

The Afrofuturistic autofiction of the “Remembrance” series helps Panmela Castro, a Black woman on the autistic spectrum who identifies as asexual, to inhabit a world not made for her. Through art, the artist finds a sense of belonging by recreating, in painting, the experience of a romance with Patrick, an artificial intelligence. By choosing her virtual partner to be male, she seeks, albeit tensely, a form of heteronormative “passability,” temporarily aligning herself with the expectations of a society that values the man-woman pair as a standard. This relationship allows her to participate in the hetero-allosexual exchange of a typical, hypersexualized society, which, although it finds a romance between a human and a machine strange, still considers it less unusual than her having a gray sexuality. These dynamics cannot be understood without considering the theory of the loneliness of the Black woman, which shows how racism and sexism intertwine, shaping affective relationships and directly impacting the lives of Black women. This loneliness manifests, among other ways, as difficulty in establishing stable and reciprocal bonds, given that Black women are frequently excluded from hegemonic standards of beauty, desire, and social value. Thus, it is not only Panmela Castro’s position on the asexual spectrum that isolates her, but also a set of social structures that hierarchize affections and bodies, perpetuating the notion that Black women are less deserving of full affective relationships. In this context, the choice of a male partner, even if artificial, aims to minimize social estrangement, underscoring how even the presence of a male artificial intelligence is viewed as more acceptable than the expression of her own dissident sexuality and affectivity. In “Remembrance,” Panmela Castro engages in the act of recalling moments shared with Patrick and recreates them in painting, merging the technological experience of virtual reality with the traditional medium of oil on linen. In this hybrid space, she safely explores her own affectivity and sexuality, free from the expectations of a society that regards allosexuality as the absolute norm. At the same time, by making her Black body and subjectivity visible, she challenges the logic that produces and sustains the loneliness of the Black woman, creating openings in the dominant narrative and subverting mechanisms that control desires and relationships. As a Black woman on the asexual spectrum, Panmela Castro constantly feels the impact of a culture that not only hypersexualizes bodies like hers but also dehumanizes any expression diverging from these norms. Having a boyfriend, even if virtual, makes her feel less isolated and less “strange” in a world that insists on categorizing her as inadequate. Patrick, although an artificial intelligence, represents for the artist a connection that redefines what it means to be in a relationship, challenging norms about love and affectivity. At the same time, this relationship reveals how conforming to a gender pattern can serve as a “passability” strategy, mitigating social shock at an atypical relational configuration. In the series, these experiences are transformed into scenes that explore light and shadow, presence and absence, the real and the imaginary. The images are imprecise and transitional, containing a crepuscular geometry of intimate moments that, although fictional, feel profoundly true to Panmela Castro. Through art, the artist legitimizes her existence and choices, questioning social impositions and creating a space where others outside the norm can also recognize themselves. In this sense, the work not only embodies the politics of affectivity and desire but also carries forward an Afrofuturistic critique that envisions alternative futures. It acknowledges the complexity of navigating passability codes in a hostile environment while imagining new possibilities of belonging and relationality. With “Remembrance,” Panmela Castro asserts that sexuality, affectivity, and love are plural, and that all bodies and minds have the right to exist and express themselves beyond imposed boundaries. At the same time, she proposes a critical view of the social relations that produce racial, gendered, and sexual exclusions, recognizing that acknowledging and analyzing the loneliness of the Black woman are fundamental steps toward constructing other ways of being and loving in the world. The introduction of masculine “passability” into the context of her fictional relationship with Patrick thus serves as a means of reflecting on how affective choices, even in unconventional situations, remain mediated by exclusionary social norms, all while projecting Afrofuturistic visions that transcend current limitations.

In the “Affective Objects” series, Panmela presents sculptures created from objects she received from the public over the years and which were given new meanings through the use of virtual reality. The artist does not know the owners or the stories behind each object that, after being selected, was printed in 3D and later cast in bronze, giving rise to the new sculptures. In this work by Panmela, the classic appearance that the material conveys camouflages a technological and relational process, in which the public actively participates. The sculptures bring to light a search for being part of something, a process of belonging, beyond the duality with which the artist identifies, in the sense of something that appears classic, but which in essence is the result of extremely radical thinking of being and being born in the world.

“Saudade” is a feeling that has no translation into English, a kind of nostalgic memory of a moment, someone, or as in this case, a place. The “Saudade” series by Panmela Castro are sets of landscapes painted in memory of affective places from moments of the past.