Cecilia Sordi Campos (b. 1989, Brazil)

Growing up in the countryside in Brazil, I wanted to be an astronaut.
Instead, I was given a camera at age nine as a prize for winning a contest at primary school. I took photos of everything and everyone. Unfortunately, many of the rolls of film I went through were never developed. I still think of those never seen photographs.

I migrated to Australia when I was 17 years old. I am now a Melbourne-based visual artist, writer, educator and creative researcher. My practice sits at the intersection of autofiction, socially engaged art and postcolonial feminism, and is methodologically grounded in practice-led research, autoethnography and sensory ethnography.

My work is process-driven and relational, developed in ongoing collaboration with both human and more-than-human through embodied and spiritual practice. I am interested in the possibilities of language, visual, oral and written, as a means of articulating complex, lived or inherited experiences of migration, hybrid cultural identities, ancestry, spirituality, gender and the body. My work is informed by my experience as a Brazilian migrant of Afro-Brazilian and European ancestry, and by Afro-Brazilian religious and spiritual traditions, which shape not only the subjects of my work but the methods through which I create. Equally present is my experience as an infertile, chronically ill woman of colour. This is an embodied position carrying particular awareness of care, repair and gentleness as radical practice: a deliberate refusal of the abjection imposed on bodies marked by race, gender and illness. Rooted in the personal, my work understands the personal as political — situated within broader sociocultural, socioeconomic and sociohistorical contexts — with the capacity to contribute to broader public dialogues.

I exploit the evocative and aesthetic capacities of materials, such as biomaterials, fabric, thread and paper, to disrupt traditional art-making conventions. I work across photography — particularly experimental and alternative processes — installation, moving image, textiles and sound, exploring the aesthetic capacities of material. Making for me is a ritual of magic, a form of prayer. Each body of work approaches the conjuring of ancestry, memory and presence through different rituals and processes, but the intention is consistent: to produce knowledge and aesthetic expression through encounter, contact and transformation rather than distance or extraction. I seek to develop vocabularies that communicate what exists outside colonial narrative structures, not through decolonial reversal, which presupposes an undoing that may not be possible, but through a counter/un-colonial practice of doing differently, making otherwise.

For full CV, click here.

I respectfully acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the lands and waterways on which I work, live and travel.
I pay my respects to Indigenous Elders past, present and emerging.
Sovereignty has never been ceded. It always was, and always will be Aboriginal land.