Art as an act of resistance.
About me
I am Patrícia Belo, a Brazilian artist and designer based in Berlin, working under the name Midnight Castanhas. My practice translates inner landscapes shaped by displacement, ancestry, and introspection.
After moving to Germany, a constant state of melancholy led me to search for tools to understand what I was going through. During long, late nights, art, poetry, and cashews (Castanhas in Portuguese) saved me, showing me I was not alone in my suffering, and that there is a lot of dignity in it. This journey led me to explore my roots through African traditions and Indigenous Brazilian cosmologies, engaging with unseen dimensions of identity.
Working across painting and writing, I explore duality, vulnerability, and transformation, often through black, white, and subtle accents of color. My work invites reflection and offers an alchemical space where pain can be transformed into meaning.
I connect with themes of the unconscious and with silent subtleties. I seek to create subjective impacts that lead people to question and deepen their knowledge of themselves. I appreciate silence as much as music. Universal mythologies open my eyes to the collective unconscious. I am interested in philosophy and psychology because I understand that no one gets lost alone. Poetry is the voice of my heart. I am nonconformist with the oppressive system that crushes nature, and all this means being me.
Midnight Manifest
Midnight Castanhas materializes as a manifesto-gallery of resistance to the tangle of symptoms of our time. As yet another victim of civilization's malaise - the lack of self, the constant search for another's ideal - paranoia and depression kept me awake for countless nights.
With my head full of ideas and many problems, as well as some meaningless thoughts, in the darkness of the night, I found poetry and ate cashews. Art helped me cope with suffering, bringing me the awareness that each breath is a new opportunity to live, die, and be reborn.
I also began returning to my ancestrality - listening to the voices that came before me, tracing my roots, and remembering that we don’t understand who we are without understanding where we come from. To reconnect with our origins is not nostalgia; it is medicine. It is a way of reclaiming identity, strength, and belonging.
Here, I express, in sketches, how I used what I know of the world to make my life art. I sketch what I developed about some pains and about almost-misses that didn't become stories. I question, I write, and thus, I develop. And now I invite you to enter my world and help transform your life into art too.
Stay in touch
Whether it's for orders, partnerships, exchanges, or to experience a creative writing session with me :) I'd love to hear from you.