MILAN.- One beautiful day… we are insects is a title that evokes the epilogue of a fairy tale, in which the transfiguration of human beings is usually understood as a punitive and temporary “impairment” (think of the prince transformed into a toad), whereas in Diambe’s vision, metamorphosis is not a misfortune, but an awakening of consciousness; perhaps the desire to abandon an anthropocentric ethos to pursue the anima mundi through all its creatures. It is an invitation to wake up de-monumentalized, fluid, collective, and organically connected to matter and the earth.

According to the founding myth of Rome, before drawing the main axes of the urban plan, Romulus dug a circular pit on the Palatine Hill and called it the mundus. Into it, every citizen threw a handful of earth and the first fruits brought from their homeland. A heavy door covered the pit and opened only three times a year; on those occasions, the world of the living swung open to that of the underworld, ancestors, insects, and tubers. With their prophecy, Diambe reverses these relations and brings the earth—its lush and relentless teeming of life—back to the foreground, drawing out large stick insects and long, thick millipedes that testify to this shift in perspective and hierarchy.

The new bronzes made at the Antica Fonderia Battaglia (following a recently completed residency) belong to the Novas Mucosas cycle, steeped in religious animism and ritual symbolism. These sculptures were born from the assembly of organic elements (fava beans, fruits, roots) combined with beeswax, which becomes the core of casts later poured in bronze. In the casting process, what is perishable burns or transforms, petrifying into metal. The result is a chimaera of hybrid bodies in which the boundary between animal, vegetable, and mineral completely dissolves. These works directly recall the practice of assentamento: the ritual in Candombl� cosmology (an Afro-Brazilian religion of diasporic origin), in which offered food and natural matter anchor and materialize the divine presence (orix�), transforming the bronze casting into a permanent offering.

This continuous crossing of boundaries between the realms of the living finds its foundation in a truly "digestive" and metabolic stance, directly linking back to the lesson of cultural anthropophagy. The concept has its roots in 1920s Brazilian Modernism, synthesized in Oswald de Andrade's famous Manifesto Antrop�fago(1928), following the Semana de Arte Moderna of 1922 (a cultural and artistic festival held in S�o Paulo that marked the birth of Modernism in Brazil). In the modernist formulation, anthropophagy proposed a strategy of cultural emancipation in which "devouring" and assimilating European aesthetic and conceptual models, and recombining them with indigenous and local roots, generated an autonomous and hybrid Brazilian art.

Diambe seems to reclaim this legacy yet reinterprets it through what they frame as a "food vocation". The anthropophagous principle translates into the metabolization and metamorphosis of matter: feeding on external influences—whether seeking African sculptures in European ethnographic museums or engaging with the canons of art history—serves to chew and digest these references, fusing them with their own roots. From this perspective, Brazilian modernism and traditional techniques are never simple citations; they are absorbed and transformed into artworks.

In their paintings, Diambe uses egg (specifically the yolk, rich in natural emulsifiers, fats, and water) as a binder for mineral, vegetable and artificial pigments. This practice dates back to antiquity and is widespread in Northeast Africa. The egg is not merely a technical tool, but also an organic and vital element (linked to fertility and the origin of life) that preserves the vibrancy and brilliance of natural pigments on canvas. Thus, even in their paintings, the artist incorporates organic matter to depict layered landscapes—sometimes more figurative, other times chromatic abstractions. These are vertical-format canvases (which are typically used for portraits rather than landscapes) that Diambe defines as "portraits of landscapes". Some feature inserts, drapes, and thresholds, as if stepping into a dreamlike dimension—heavily inhabited by the artist, who told me that they experience intense dream activity. The paintings seem to act as seismographs of their internal monologue. Some feature intricate layers of soft-colored vegetation with almost autumnal foliage, painted during a period of mourning for the artist, when the pictorial matter literally blended with tears. Others are ferrous, warm, and magmatic, characterized by sharper outlines and fauve colors; inhabited by incandescent volcanoes and glowing deserts, much like Brazilian land has become in recent years due to global warming.

To frame the cultural and historical context of Diambe’s practice, it is helpful to trace several historical references within the Afro-Brazilian sphere. One is Mestre Valentim (Valentim da Fonseca e Silva, 1745–1813), an Afro-Brazilian sculptor and urban planner who was the principal architect of the Baroque era in Rio de Janeiro and the author of numerous public works and historical monuments. Valentim redefined Rio de Janeiro's urban and sacred space by weaving his oppressed sensitivity into the forms of Brazilian Baroque, whereas Diambe aligns with a genealogy of sculptors who use matter as a vehicle for counternarratives. Diambe treats the African diaspora in Latin America not as a simple iconographic theme or folkloric repertoire, but as a precise methodology of action—a memory embodied in gestures, reuse, and the layering of natural and symbolic materials.

The surreal aspect of their sculptures immediately made me think of Maria Martins (1894–1973) and her anthropomorphic, chimerical works, with which she managed to bend surrealist aesthetics to an ancestral, fluid force deeply rooted in the mythology and mythical landscape of the Amazon, freeing herself from the exoticizing readings of the Eurocentric gaze. In Diambe, we find the same morpho-genetic tension, where sculptural volumes reject anatomical staticity to become vital tangles, expanding organs, and forms that seem to emerge from the encounter between the plant and animal worlds, expressing a non-binary identity on all levels.

Beside this plastic genealogy sits another tutelary figure of decolonial culture: the theorist, anthropologist, and political-feminist activist L�lia Gonzalez (1935–1994). Rejecting Eurocentric categories of "Latin America" and Anglo-Saxon lexical hegemonies, Gonzalez coined the concept of Amefricanidade and defined aframicano/a to indicate the historical experience, the condition of cultural and racial mixing (ladinidade), and the resistance strategies shared by Black and indigenous populations across the continent. This theoretical framework—essential to later developments in South American queer, trans-feminist, and non-binary culture—allows Diambe to position their identity and work not within the enclosures of assimilation, but within the fluidity of a living, collective, and intersectional diasporic memory.

What emerges forcefully from this exhibition project is a profound animist-spiritualism that rejects any escape into abstract transcendence. The spiritual dimension in Diambe’s work is firmly grounded in matter, territory, and biological and historical contingency. The sensory experience of wax, the intensity of pigments, and the weight of bronze are not contemplative devices, but embody a political response to the urgencies of the present. Themes such as land access, ecological justice, the memory of oppressions, and the re-appropriation of traditional knowledge are reinterpreted through the lens of the spiritual, for there is no separation between the world's matter and the spirit that animates it.

- Eva Brioschi