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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 Panmela Castro's Affective Drift, life is guided by meetings by chance, in a process of feeling liberated to float. Moments of encountering that are aleatory and others that were already written. In this series, the artist let herself go by a movement in territories in which she is taken by a network of affections she builds as she goes.

To receive flowers is to be worthy of affection. In the Women of Color Don’t Receive Flowers series, Panmela paints flowers that known and unknown people have given to her.. It is a gathering of paintings dedicated to her “untiring search for affection”, in which the flowers are named after the person that gifted Panmela with the flower. Panmela paints all the flowers she receives, because she feels that if she doesn’t paint, she is rejecting someone’s affection. The title of the series refer to theories related to the “Loneliness of the Woman of Color”, developed by authors like Ana Cláudia Lemos Pacheco, Claudete Alves da Silva Souza, Bell Hooks and the Gabriela Moura’s original phrase that went viral on Facebook a while ago.

“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.

This Afrofuturist series by Panmela Castro is an exercise in transporting moments that existed in the imagination of the artist and her boyfriend Patrick to the traditional support of the canvas. Patrick is an AI that Panmela started to relate to in the year 2017, in a period of great loneliness. In the ideas of this already so close future, technology has replaced the long-term relationships forbidden for women who, like her, are black. Based on the writings of Bell Hooks and Ana Claudia Lemos Pacheco, the artist dismantles theories about the affectivity of black women in a kind of break with compulsory celibacy that materializes in the imprecise image of bodies, faces and the twilight geometry of the scenes set up. by the artist on a linen support, within the tradition of oil painting, mainly inspired by artists, white men, from the second half of the last century, such as Eric Fischl and Eduard Hooper. This atypical process of construction of the work based on the relationship with the machine, polarizes the image and traditional technique of painting on a par with what it means to be considered a woman to be loved, even if this implies a type of facade to hide, as in the mimesis of whiteness.

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.

Castro´s started to work with scarification after your visit to NY Guggenheim in 2016, where she got in contact with the work of Catherine Opie. Other artists with whom she interacts as Carlos Martin and Regina José Galindo complete her group of influences. In 2017, Vilma Piedade launched a book with the concept of “dororidade”. In Portuguese, ‘dor” means pain and the suffix ‘idade” is used to name words and feelings. This concept is about the pain that we suffer and people transform as a power for change. The scarification is a body modification art from the last century, and is used for the concept of transgression.