MamíFERAS Vulcânicas Collective Concludes Residency at MAC-BA with Performance by Sofia Boito and Public Conversation

Next Thursday, July 30, at 2:30 PM, the MamíFERAS Vulcânicas Collective, in partnership with Pivô and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Bahia (MAC-BA), will present the closing event of the MamíFERAS Vulcânicas: Fabulations with the Earth installation and residency, on view at the museum throughout July.

The installation is the outcome of Module #4 – Artistic and Audiovisual Installations of the Creative Lab: Art and Technology in the Museum, an initiative developed by Pivô in partnership with MAC-BA. Led by visual artist and researcher Virginia de Medeiros, with the participation of Claudia Chávez and Yuli Andrea Martínez Gaitán, the module was designed exclusively for women and proposed a creative process grounded in fabulation as a relational, situated, and collective practice.

The work brings together figures such as the volcano, the horse, and the Headless Mule, articulated through projections, soundscape, earth, red clay, plants, and performance in an immersive environment shaped by practices of listening, care, and fabulation. Organized around the themes of Eroticism, Nourishment, and Transmutation, the installation reflects on interdependence, transformation, and resistance, imagining alternative relationships between bodies, territories, and the Earth.

First presented in June as the culmination of the Creative Lab, the installation led to the formation of the MamíFERAS Vulcânicas Collective, bringing together the participants of the program to continue their research collaboratively. Throughout July, the collective’s residency at MAC-BA expanded the project, transforming the installation into a living space for gathering, creation, exchange, and experimentation.

The closing event on July 30 offers the public an opportunity to learn about the process behind the project through an open conversation with members of the collective. The program also features Headless Mule, a lecture-performance by performer, playwright, writer, and researcher Sofia Boito, invited by the collective especially for this concluding moment of celebration.

Headless Mule is part of Boito’s postdoctoral research on lecture-performance as a strategy for producing insubordinate forms of knowledge. Beginning with an investigation into modern epistemology and the historical split between body and mind, writing and orality, the artist develops an embodied mode of thinking that questions the place historically assigned to women and their voices within modern Eurocentric culture. The first version of the work was presented at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Austria, in April 2026. The research is being developed at the Institute of Arts at Unicamp, with funding from CNPq.

ABOUT MAMÍFERAS VULCÂNICAS COLLECTIVE

The MamíFERAS Vulcânicas Collective was founded in 2026 through the Creative Lab: Art and Technology in the Museum, an immersive educational program developed exclusively for women by Pivô and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Bahia (MAC-BA), with support from PNAB Bahia (National Aldir Blanc Policy).

Led by visual artist Virginia de Medeiros, filmmaker Claudia Chávez, and voice orchestrator Yuli Gaitán, the lab introduced participants to artistic installation and audiovisual practices through fabulation as a relational, situated, and collective methodology.

The collective’s first project was the immersive installation MamíFERAS Vulcânicas: Fabulations with the Earth, presented as the outcome of the lab and later expanded into a month-long museum residency. The work emerged from the poetic device Fabulating with the Earth, which guided a collaborative process based on listening, fabulation, and audiovisual composition.

At the conclusion of this process, the collective carried out the action Returning the Earth to the Earth, conceiving the dismantling of the installation as a continuation of the artwork itself. The soil used in the installation was returned to Parque São Bartolomeu through a collective gesture of restitution and regeneration, followed by a ritual at Oxum Waterfall. Documentation of this process was incorporated into the video installation, reaffirming the research’s process-based nature and the collective’s commitment to artistic practices that intertwine creation, care, territory, and ecology.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

MamíFERAS Vulcânicas Collective functions as a collaborative creative hub—an ecosystem in which individual and collective processes sustain one another. The collective understands artistic collaboration as a space for creative encounters, experimentation, learning, and the shared production of knowledge, where individual research is nourished through listening, care, constructive critique, and exchange among its members.

Its practice brings together art, education, territory, feminism, and ecology as inseparable dimensions of artistic creation, learning, and political action, committed to imagining new ways of inhabiting the world and fostering social and ecological justice.

The collective includes: Virginia de Medeiros, Claudia Chávez, Dani Curvelo, Yamuna Souza, Yuli Gaitán, Juliana Freire, Alexandra Martins, Marcela Carvalho, Mamirawá, Amanda Hauane, Eduarda Canto, Luz Morena Cerroti, Patrícia Paixão, Flora Leles, Maria Mariô, and Mariana Passos.

Sofia Boito is a performance artist, writer, and researcher. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Arts at Unicamp. She holds a PhD in Performing Arts from the University of São Paulo (USP), where she also served as a visiting lecturer. Interested in performative processes, transdisciplinary practices, and non-hegemonic methodologies, Boito develops embodied theoretical and practical research. She is a member of Coletiva Palabreria, the editorial board of Sala Preta journal, the feminist artists’ network Room to Bloom (European Alternatives), and the international feminist research group Ecologies of Care.

Closing Event – MamíFERAS Vulcânicas
July 30 (Thursday), 2:30 PM
Lecture-performance: Headless Mule, with Sofia Boito. Followed by: Conversation with the MamíFERAS Vulcânicas Collective
Museum of Contemporary Art of Bahia (MAC-BA)
Free admission