Ventura Profana (BR, 1993)
Residency period: September-November 2025
During her time at La Becque, Ventura Profana explored how documents used as tools of control and oppression might be transformed. Through an exercise in biblical interpretation involving cuts, erasures, and re-readings, she wove a new theology, one built atop an artifice of violence, yet reclaimed through gestures, images, and memories of pleasure and liberation. She also began working with ceramics, shaping figures of devout women and missionaries in a state of supplication. Alongside this, she used digital collage to reflect on the state of humanitarian health under colonial structures.
Based in Rio de Janeiro, Ventura Profana (b. 1993) describes herself as the daughter of the mysterious bowels of Mother Bahia. In her artistic practice, she prophesizes the multiplication and abundance of Black and trans lives. Indoctrinated in Baptist temples, she is a missionary pastor, singer, writer, composer, and visual artist, whose work is rooted in research into the implications and methodologies of evangelization from the Abrahamic religion in Brazil and beyond, through the spread of neo-Pentecostal churches.
Ventura Profana, La Becque, 2025, photo Matthieu Croizier