I am Suelen Calonga, an artist, researcher, and educator whose work challenges colonial legacies and reclaims African diasporic narratives. I was born and raised in Contagem, Brazil, but I am based now in Berlin, Germany, with my husband and our son (*2022). As a practioner of Esin Orisa Ibile as Iyalosun and Ifá, I bring spirituality to the center of my academic and artistic practices, emphasizing the importance of ancestral knowledge and cultural heritage.
Currently pursuing a PhD in Art History at TU Berlin, Germany, supervised by Dr. Prof. Benedicte Savoy and co-supervised by Dr. Prof. Félix Ayoh-Omidire at Obafemi Awololo University at Ile-Ife, Nigeria, I explore the formation of European museum collections as spaces that perpetuate colonialism while advocating for the decolonization of traditional knowledge and practices. My academic and artistic work spans Brazil, West Africa, and Europe, tracing the spiritual, political and cultural trajectories of African-diasporic heritage collected in Brazil and kept for more than a century in Germany and their stories.
I hold a master's in Public Art and New Artistic Strategy from Bauhaus-Univerisität Weimar, where I defended my thesis "Why do the Archives Archive? A journey from the hunkó to the counter-ethongraphy and back" in 2020. I graduated in Social Comunication in Puc Minas, and have a diploma in Images and Media Cultures from UFMG, both in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
In 2018, I founded Calonga Arte e Cultura, a microenterprise dedicated to offering workshops, courses, comissioned/independent researches, and curatorial services. Through this platform, I produce educational and artistic content that fosters critical reflection and creative engagement with African-Brazilian culture and counter-colonial strategies. Within this framewrok I created also Calonga Edições, and editorial label dedicated to register ourstories in first person. "Ours" because it acts to strengthen a collective self-recognition; and "in the first person" in a sense that goes beyond grammar, but as a gesture of affirming who we are based on our own references. The first publication, Aconteceu na Saga dos Carrascais, is the third book written by my father, Helio dos Santos Pessoa, edited by me, and to be released in December 2025.
As a Black woman, mother, daughter, and grandaughter, my practice is deeply rooted in the metonymies between the personal and the collective, bridging art, education, and activism to reimagine the ways we connect with the past to build a self-determined future.
Member of:
ASWAD - Association for the Study of Worldwide African Diaspora
SARA - Society for Artistic Research
I am moved by what resists capture: the whisper that the archive cannot contain, the gesture that remains when the body is no longer there... I see the invisible not as absence, but as another form of presence. Invisible is what is not seen, but also what cannot be seen. And it does not cease to exist, nor to be perceived through more subtle senses. My work proposes to listen to these transmissions, these continuities that survive through silence. Silence, to me, like the invisible, is not emptiness. It is a form of knowledge, a way of speaking through other paths. To keep silent is a foundation of knowing. It can hide, protect, resist, but also reveal. Between art and research, I work with performance, installation, sound, and writing to explore the poetic and political force of the invisible and of silence — how they shape what we perceive, remember, and understand. I am interested in their different scales: the silence of a museum label, of a record in the colonial archive, of a name omitted when a story is told. The invisible mobilization of the energies of things and their interaction. The silence of breathing, of ritual concentration, of waiting. Each carries its own kind of power. Ritual and sound are at the center of my practice — the sound of the spoken word, the sung melody, the rhythm felt. They open paths toward forms of knowledge that escape translation, yet not precision. Through them, I investigate African-Brazilian heritage as a living field of relations that continually claims and gives back what has been displaced. Instead of reproducing the colonial order of naming and possessing, I seek gestures that realign, acts that return, unsettle, and make visible what institutions have bewitched us not to see. I understand this trajectory as a practice of epistemic justice: a commitment to questioning the motivations that structure knowledge, often invisible and silent, disguised as neutrality. I am less interested in how things happen and more in why they happen — in the desires that sustain systems of visibility and belief. To work with the invisible is to expose these structures and imagine other ways of perceiving, knowing, and relating.