“For me, costume has always been part of everything,” says photographer and multidisciplinary artist Victoria Ruiz. “Culturally, I grew up in Venezuela seeing costume not as something separate from daily life but as something deeply embedded in it, especially through the lens of carnival. Carnival is in our blood. It’s not just a festival; it’s a way of expressing history, resistance, joy, and grief. A costume, at the end of the day, is something you wear that tells a story.”
In placing, saturated pictures, Ruiz channels a fascination with nature, dance, spirituality, and African diasporic faith. Citing perception techniques of the Americas like Santería-Ifá, Candomblé, Umbanda, and Espiritismo, the artist delves into the histories and cultural resonance of faith as modes of resistance and adaptation. These faiths typically mix “African spiritual traditions with Indigenous and colonial influences,” she says in an announcement.
At present based mostly in London, Ruiz attracts upon her childhood experiences in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, the place she and her household encountered each nuanced ancestral practices and pressing political violence. “I grew up surrounded by characters, some from folkloric traditions, others from more disturbing scenes like military or police repression,” the artist tells Colossal. She continues:
I spotted early on that uniforms are additionally costumes. What folks wore throughout these moments of violence or protest created highly effective symbols. It was a sort of darkish carnival. And I grew to become very interested by what these clothes meant and the way they might encourage concern, energy, or solidarity.
In her collection Para Tú Altar: Las Fuerzas Divinas de la Naturaleza, which interprets to For Your Altar: The Divine Forces of Nature, Ruiz attracts upon a seminal music album by Cuban salsa artist Celia Cruz, who integrated ceremonial Santería music into one in all her early albums. Para Tú Altar references one in all Cruz’s songs about various kinds of flowers used to honor the divinity of nature.
On the time, African diasporic religions like Santería, by which Yoruba traditions, Catholicism, and Spiritism converge, have been largely hidden from view resulting from widespread prejudice and marginalization. Ruiz provides, “It could be said that Celia did not truly understand that what she was doing at the time was transcendent for Cuba’s musical culture and the religion itself.”
Music and efficiency are central tenets in Ruiz’s work. Since she was younger, she studied ballet, flamenco, and up to date dance, however it was solely when she moved to London and commenced collaborating with dancers that components of her apply started to really gel. “Seeing them embody the costumes—activating them with movement and intention—transformed my whole practice,” she says. “It became a way to make the pieces alive and to create immersive, emotional storytelling.”
Ruiz works with a variety of materials and supplies like fake flowers and different props, relying on the theme of the collection. She typically reuses the costumes to emphasise sustainability. “Each costume and each image is a portal to the divine; it is a visual offering, a spiritual invocation,” Ruiz says. “They’re my own interpretations of how these forces have shaped and protected me. I’m still on that journey, and this work is a kind of gratitude, a love letter to those unseen powers that have carried me.”
The artist is at the moment engaged on a collection of protecting masks, drawing on the ingenuity of handmade masks used throughout protests that Ruiz witnessed whereas residing in Caracas. “At one point, gas masks were actually banned from entering the country, so people responded with creativity and survival instinct creating masks from water bottles, cardboard, even stuffed animals,” she says. “I found it so powerful: this creativity in the face of danger—this need to resist and survive through making.”
See extra on the artist’s web site and Instagram.
