Catalina Caseres Saboya

Year of birth: 1999 (25 years of age)
Where do you live: Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Describe your art in three words: Decolonial, straightforward, ancestral
Your discipline: Photography and mixed media
Instagram

Your project Between Earth and Memory explores the connection between Brazil and Nigeria. What inspired you to focus on these two countries and their shared history?

The inspiration came from a deeply personal place. I am a white Brazilian, but my mother is fully Indigenous—she comes from the Yanomami people, whose physical features often challenge common assumptions about indigeneity, with light skin and even blonde hair being part of their
genetic heritage. Growing up, I witnessed how Indigenous and African histories were sidelined in our national narrative, even though they form the very foundation of Brazilian identity.
In Brazil, both Indigenous and African peoples were enslaved, displaced, and silenced. It’s a part of our past we rarely talk about—Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery.
When women in New Zealand were gaining the right to vote, Brazil was still selling children. These are uncomfortable truths that have been buried under a national myth of racial harmony.
Yet this painful history also created something complex and layered: a country of immense cultural fusion. My work is a way to trace and honour that fusion—to recognise the ways Brazil and Nigeria are connected through suffering, resistance, and creativity. Between Earth and
Memory is my attempt to give visual and emotional weight to that connection. It’s about facing the silences in our collective memory and stitching together the threads of a story that deserves to be told—with care, with honesty, and with dignity.

In your work, you use a variety of mediums, particularly collage. How do you feel that collage serves as a metaphor for the fractured yet connected histories of Brazil and Nigeria?

Collage, for me, is both a medium and a method of storytelling. A literal bridge between our continents. It’s about fragmentation—but also about repair. When I layer a Yoruba textile beneath the image of a Brazilian child or stitch an Igbo carving into the corner of a modern cityscape, I’m asking the viewer to see how histories collide and coexist. The fragments don’t just represent rupture—they show resilience.
It connects what was separated by the ocean, but remains spiritually intertwined. Africa has inspired Brazil in profound ways—our famous samba, our rhythms, our traditional garments, our food. Dishes like akara and acarajé, vatapá, and moqueca de peixe com camarão all carry the unmistakable imprint of West African cuisine and ritual. Even our use of palm oil speaks to ancestral continuities.
In many ways, Brazil and Nigeria are like siblings separated at birth. Collage allows me to map those echoes: to gather pieces from both sides of the Atlantic and rebuild the shared visual language we’ve inherited, lost, and are now reclaiming.

Catalina Caseres Saboya | Harvest of Echoes

The colours in your project are deeply symbolic, especially from Yoruba and Igbo traditions. How do you decide which colours to incorporate, and what do they represent in your work?

Colour is language. In Yoruba cosmology, for example, white evokes peace and the presence of Orisha like Obatala, while deep blues and reds speak of power, sacrifice, and ancestral energy. In Igbo traditions, earth tones ground the spirit, linking people to land and lineage. These meanings guide my palette. Sometimes I use colour to honour these spiritual roots; other times, I disrupt the harmony—introducing artificial neons to signify colonial distortion or modernity’s intrusion. It’s a delicate balance between reverence and critique.

Your project references both the Yoruba and Igbo peoples, their heritage, and the legacies of colonialism. Can you share how these influences shaped your personal identity as an artist?

I am a white Brazilian, born to an Indigenous mother from the Yanomami people. While I didn’t grow up living the rural life of the tribe, I carry that lineage with deep awareness and pride. In Brazil, where identities are often so mixed that ancestry becomes a mystery, I’m one of the few who can speak of my roots with certainty. Though I don’t have direct ties to West Africa in my bloodline, what binds me to its people is the shared experience of being colonised, exploited, and continuously silenced.
The Yanomami were among the last Indigenous groups to make sustained contact with the outside world—in the 1940s. That contact brought devastation. Measles and flu epidemics, violent road construction, and waves of illegal gold miners in the 1980s led to the death of thousands. In just seven years, 20% of the Yanomami population was lost. Today, our land is still under siege—invaded by miners and ranchers who kill civilians, polluted, and deforested. President Lula has called it what it is: genocide.
This legacy of violence and resistance lives in me. It’s impossible to separate my artistic practice from it. Like many African nations, Brazil is rich in natural resources and culture, yet still labeled “developing”—a word that often masks ongoing exploitation. These parallels between West Africa and the Indigenous experience in Brazil profoundly shape my work. As an artist, I try to use my voice and visuals to expose, remember, and resist the forces that continue to endanger our people and erase our stories.

Catalina Caseres Saboya | Echoes of Migration

The idea of migration is central to your work. How do you perceive migration, not as a one-way journey, but as a reciprocal exchange between Brazil and Nigeria?

Absolutely! Here’s the updated version, now fully integrating the reciprocal nature of this cultural exchange—what Africa brought to Brazil, and what Brazilian returnees later brought back to Africa:
Migration, for me, is not just movement—it’s dialogue. During the transatlantic slave trade, bodies were displaced, but culture traveled with them. Africa gave Brazil so much—language, spirituality, food, music, resistance. The Yoruba and Bantu peoples brought religious systems like Candomblé, Umbanda, and Ifá divination, which continue to shape Brazilian spiritual life today.
African rhythms gave birth to samba, maracatu, and capoeira, while ingredients like okra, palm oil (dendê), and black-eyed peas became essential in Brazilian cuisine, giving rise to beloved dishes like acarajé, vatapá, caruru, and moqueca.
Then, in the 19th century, a wave of freed and formerly enslaved Afro-Brazilians—known as the Aguda or Amaros—returned to West Africa, especially to coastal Nigeria and Benin. They brought with them Brazilian-style architecture—stuccoed two-story homes with wrought iron balconies, tiled façades, and intricate floral motifs—now iconic in the Brazilian Quarters of Lagos, with builders and architects like João Batista da Costa and Francisco Nobre leading the transformation. They also introduced Catholicism and Afro-Brazilian adaptations of Yoruba religious traditions, creating new syncretic spiritual communities. Even in food, the returnees reintroduced Brazilian interpretations of dishes like acarajé (originally akara) and feijoada, integrating them into West African culinary traditions.
This back-and-forth, this exchange of aesthetics, spirit, and survival, continues today—through music, fashion, activism, and digital storytelling. My work tries to honour that continuity—not just as history, but as a living conversation. Migration is not exile—it’s a loop of influence, full of sorrow but also reinvention, resistance, and return.

Between Earth and Memory includes Nigerian textiles and sacred motifs. How do these elements assert continuity and resist the erasure of African identity in your work?

These elements are more than decorative—they are living archives. Textiles like Aso Oke and Adire, carved wooden reliefs, and sacred Yoruba symbols carry centuries of memory, cosmology, and resistance. When I incorporate these motifs into my work, I’m not simply referencing beauty or craft—I’m centring African identity, honouring its persistence and resisting its historical erasure.
In Brazil, African heritage is everywhere, although often flattened or commodified—reduced to aesthetics without context. My use of Nigerian visual languages pushes against that. By placing these sacred patterns into Brazilian portraits and landscapes, I’m asserting: African identity is not an accessory to Brazilian culture—it is the backbone. It isin the Christ the Redeemer, the symbol of Brazil, in the Copacabana, Maracanā and etc. This is where the story is, and this is how it endures.
Especially in the barrios like Bahia, a region where African spiritual, musical, and culinary traditions are deeply embedded into daily life. Bahia is often called the Black heart of Brazil It is a place where African identity was never fully erased—only transformed and re-rooted in new soil. It is both archive and performance, both memory and revolution.
Scholars like Abdias do Nascimento and Lélia Gonzalez have long insisted that Blackness is not a side note in Brazilian history—it is the narrative. Anthropologist and composer Nei Lopes, and more recently thinkers like Djamila Ribeiro, have built on this, tracing African influence across every corner of Brazilian life. Bahia stands as living proof of that continuum.
My work is in conversation with this legacy. Every motif I use, every fabric I collage, is not only a visual gesture—it is an act of resistance and recognition. These elements refuse to let us forget. They speak of identity, survival, and pride. They remind us that Africa is not elsewhere—it is here, in our music, our skin, our rituals, our streets, and our spirit.

Catalina Caseres Saboya | Leaps of Ancestory

What role does the idea of cultural appropriation play in your art, especially in relation to Afro-Brazilian aesthetics?

Cultural appropriation is the shadow that always lingers when working with historically looted or misrepresented symbols. My work isn’t about borrowing—it’s about returning. Returning dignity to forms that have been exoticised, commodified, or erased. I approach Afro-Brazilian aesthetics
with accountability, recognising that they are not just visual codes but embodied legacies. My goal is to create spaces where these aesthetics can speak for themselves, where they are not consumed but witnessed, honoured, and protected.

Catalina Caseres Saboya | Returning Home