Dagger and Wound - Camila Arévalo | BUZZCUT Festival

Dagger and Wound (Puñal y herida) is both a pagamento and an invocation, a performance ritual where the body is offered as an altar and a portal. Inviting passage to a dimension where the wound becomes a site of encounter and flesh becomes both blade and gash.

Arévalo draws on Afro-Brazilian tradition of Quimbanda, a polytheistic religion centered on the relation with Exus and their female counterparts, the Pombagiras. The Pomba Gira is a liminal figure, bound to eroticism, to the night, to the color red, to crossroads, to female sexuality, to gender transitions, to power and destruction. She is the guardian of those who inhabit the margins of desire, which is why many sex workers and trans women in Latin America consecrate themselves to her for protection and strength.

To offer the body as altar is to reaffirm that pact of complicity, materializing in flesh, blood, and fire. An…