Ventura Profana (BR, 1993)
Residency period: September-November 2025
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.
In 2019, she received the Leda Maria Martins Award for Black Performing Arts for Best Show of the Year and she was one of the artists honored at the Pipa Contemporary Arts Awards with the Natural Musical Award in 2021.
For her residency at La Becque, Ventura Profana will offer Temple of the Wind, an installation that challenges and transforms prevailing notions and thoughts about what she believes a place of worship should be. The establishment of a space-time for congregation, love, creation, and faith, Temple of the Wind is ethically based not on the affirmation of one party through the negation and demonization of the other, but on the dissensual complexity that emerges from contemporary societies. The building of a temple, as an exercise in radical inventiveness, adjoined to art and the reimagining of the world itself, does not reproduce the structure of ecclesiastical altars or the ambition of statuary monuments, but nurtures the healing, care, and love that characterize the congregational experience, rooted in life. Temple of the Wind takes up the tradition of itinerant temples, reflecting, in its architecture and materialities, the wisdom and ontology of pilgrimage, combining digital collages that merge the “natural” with the “technological” with apparent constructive structures and spatialities woven through the ancestral practices of braiding bamboo, wood, threads, fabrics, and metals.
Ventura Profana, photo Fe Avila