João do Nascimento (1995) is an artist from Bahia who uses self-portraiture as a way of fabulating the body in its totality. As a social–spiritual–material body, his creation of hybrids is the printing of fragmented, eroded copies, structured by mechanisms, components, and pointed parts, mineral bodies partially made of territory. It’s a formation in the attempt to sculpt through the joining of these members.

As an individual, always a hybrid device, a fusion of historical, social, and physiological bodies, the artist delves into the creation of his hybrids as a process fundamentally shaped by labor, diaspora, time, and territory. In African cosmology, hybrid beings are sometimes messages, sometimes deities, ancestors, or metaphors; symbols that have survived the diaspora, present in Afro-Brazilian religions and culture, sources from which do Nascimento draws. The artist employs the power of allegory as a process of morphing his own body into multiple materialities—skin, mineral, machine, weapon, concrete.

Head I (2023) refers to the important leaders who, throughout the history of Bahia, planned numerous revolts, becoming symbols of resistance and justice that represent, in Afro-diasporic cultures, the power of the head. Do Nascimento believes that this is where everything begins, that “if we keep our heads well ‘armed,’ we are ready for the battles that arise.” He conceives of his head as an arsenal. The work was exhibited in Ecos Malês, at Casa das Histórias, Salvador.