Ventura Profana (which can be translated as Profane Fortune) is a singer, writer, composer, performer, and visual artist from Bahia, in the Northeast Region in Brazil. She is also an Evangelic pastor and gospel singer.
Her art interrogates the implications and effects of the Deuteronomium in Brazil and abroad, as it is diffused by Neo-Pentecostal churches. She portraits the ways of life of Brazilian black travestis, intertwining religious elements and the critique of macro politics and structural violence, as in the collage that illustrates this text.
In the image, up in the sky, she placed a highly contemporary urban city and its gigantic skyscrapers turned upside down. Under it, in what seems to be an Israeli burial ground, there is a tiny picture that portrays a police incursion in a Brazilian favela. This overlapping creates a correlation between capitalism, the Holocaust, and Brazilian state necropolitics against black people. It also reminds us that while Israel, the Jewish people, and the Holocaust are now tropes constantly activated by conservative Evangelicals, these religious actors do not symbolically express the same identification and compassion with the daily victims of state violence in Brazil. Right in the middle of the image we see Maracanã, the main Brazilian stadium, to which an arc topped by a crucifix has been added. The cross, however, remains under one major symbol of Brazilian identity: the soccer World Cup. The stadium is surrounded by debris, evoking gentrification and urban evictions that characterized the preparations for the 2014 World Cup. Ventura Profana gleans and hybridizes scattered elements of Brazilian culture and politics to reveal its economic, religious, and race paradoxes and inequities.
Her video Resplandescent is an ode to black travesti bodies: