Lia D Castro: Everywhere and Nowhere

Castro’s intimate, small-scale works confront the disenfranchisement of racial and gender minorities

Through paintings, engravings, objects, photographs and drawings, Brazilian artist Lia D Castro (born 1978) uses sex work to investigate how race, class and gender dynamics play roles in situations of vulnerability and intimacy, and how affection and care can be tools for social transformation. The title of the book highlights a historical condition imposed on the so-called "racial and gender minorities": often seen as a majority at the very bases of our societies, while widely absent from decision-making positions. D Castro invites us to think critically on how racialized and gendered bodies could occupy positions of power in a system that profits from their exclusion. The book includes reproductions of works spanning the artist’s career, as well as commissioned essays by Ana Raylander Martís dos Anjos, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Tie Jojima.