Zé Kielwagen

Troca de Entidades, social practice, 2013-2016

A transreligious exchange project in which devotional statuettes are transported and installed across distinct spaces of worship. Each exchange occurs in pairs, following a logic of substitution: two entities swap positions, moving between religious contexts through a process grounded in consent, dialogue, and ritual incorporation.

AWARDS:

Elisabete Anderle Award for the Arts, Santa Catarina State, Brazil, 2014
SIMDEC Joinville Grant for the Arts, City of Joinville, Brazil, 2015

The project is developed in collaboration with priests and priestesses, who agree to receive the incoming entities. Through prayers, rites, and ongoing care, each figure is integrated into a new liturgical environment. These displacements are documented through photography, capturing the objects within their adopted ritual contexts.

The first iteration (2013–2014) established an exchange between Brazil and Haiti, placing an Exú figure within a Vodou temple in Port-au-Prince, and a representation of Dambala within a Candomblé house in Brazil. Subsequent iterations expanded the system: a second phase (2015–2016), supported by the Elisabete Anderle Award, facilitated multiple exchanges between Umbanda and Vodou communities in Brazil and Haiti. A third phase (2016–2017), supported by the SIMDEC grant, extended the project to Japan, introducing exchanges between Brazilian folk religion and Shinto.

The project can be understood as a form of worldbuilding - not through the invention of a fictional universe, but through the construction of a system in which distinct cosmologies are brought into relation. As these exchanges accumulate, the work forms a network of relations between spaces, practitioners, and entities. The objects do not simply represent belief; they participate in it, carrying their agency across contexts and generating new configurations of ritual and coexistence.

Additional photography by Marcos Serafim, Steevens Siméon, and Lazaros.

Exhibitions

2017, XI Salão Nacional Victor Meirelles, Florianópolis, Brazil.
2016, Visa Gallery Brock University, Vai e vem / Back and Forth. St.Catherines, Canada.
2016, Museu de Arte de Joinville, Vai e vem / Back and Forth. Joinville, Brazil.
2015, 5th Ghetto Biennale. Juried, group exhibition. E. Pluribus Unum Musée d’Art, PaP, Haiti.
2013, 3rd Ghetto Biennale. Juried, group exhibition. E. Pluribus Unum Musée d’Art, PaP, Haiti.