Ayrson Heráclito

Ayrson Heráclito was born in 1968 in Macaúbas, Bahia, Brazil. He is a visual artist, performer, professor, curator, and Ogã Sojatin of a Jeje-Mahi Candomblé community in Salvador. His artistic career began in Bahia in the 1980s, and his practice has developed through installation, performance, photography, video, and other forms of visual and ritual practice. Alongside his artistic activity, Heráclito has pursued an academic career, holding a Master’s degree in Visual Arts from the Federal University of Bahia and a PhD in Communication and Semiotics from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo. His work is deeply connected to Afro-Brazilian culture, the history of the African diaspora, and the spiritual dimensions of Candomblé. A central concern of Heráclito’s practice is the historical legacy of the enslavement of African peoples in Brazil and the ways in which this history continues to shape the present. Rather than approaching this past solely through historical representation, he engages with it through ritual, material transformation, memory, and processes of healing. His works establish connections between Africa and its diaspora in the Americas, bringing together historical violence, ancestral memory, spirituality, and the possibility of repair. Ritual actions such as *sacudimento*, understood within Candomblé as a form of spiritual cleansing and healing, become important strategies through which the artist confronts histories of violence and seeks to symbolically transform their effects. Heráclito’s research has focused particularly on three organic materials: sugar, charque, and palm oil, or dendê. He uses these materials as symbolic and physical elements through which to reflect on the formation of an Afro-diasporic cultural body. Sugar evokes the colonial sugar economy and the exploitation of enslaved labour, while charque refers to the violence inflicted upon Black bodies and also carries ritual associations with the orixá Ogum. Dendê, meanwhile, assumes a particularly complex symbolic role, functioning in his work as a vital substance connected to the body, ancestry, ritual, and the cultural history of Bahia. Through these materials, Heráclito links the histories of colonialism and slavery to the persistence and transformation of Afro-Brazilian cultural practices. Ritual and healing are therefore fundamental to Heráclito’s understanding of artistic practice. His work draws on Candomblé ceremonies and forms of knowledge in which the body, the spirit, food, plants, water, and material substances participate in processes of transformation. Herbal baths, fresh water, and *borí*, the ritual offering made to the head, appear within his broader investigation of how balance between body and spirit can be restored. These practices allow him to approach the historical wounds of the African diaspora not simply as subjects of representation, but as experiences that can be addressed through gestures of cleansing, remembrance, and renewal. His installations, performances, photographs, and audiovisual works often bring together the sacred and the historical, placing Afro-Brazilian ritual knowledge in dialogue with questions of colonial memory and cultural heritage. Works such as *O sacudimento da Casa da Torre* and *O sacudimento da Maison des Esclaves* (2015) use the ritual of *sacudimento* to address places associated with the history of slavery, connecting spiritual cleansing with the memory of those who suffered and died within these spaces. In other works, including *Borí* and *Transmutação da carne*, the body and ritual become central means of addressing ancestry, violence, transformation, and continuity. Heráclito has exhibited extensively in Brazil and internationally, including participation in the Venice Biennale, the Luanda Triennial, the Bamako Biennale of Photography, the Mercosul Biennials, and exhibitions at institutions such as the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles, MALBA in Buenos Aires, the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, the Museu de Arte do Rio, MASP, and the Pinacoteca de São Paulo. His work is held in collections including the Weltkulturen Museum, Museu de Arte do Rio, Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, Videobrasil, and the Itaú Collection. Across these different contexts, his practice continues to articulate a relationship between artistic creation, Afro-Brazilian cultural memory, ritual knowledge, and processes of healing, proposing art as a space in which histories of violence can be remembered, transformed, and confronted through the living presence of ancestral practices.