Raziel Perin

spiritualiteit , mens , Lichaam , installatie , Educatie , Diaspora , Dekolonisatie , collage , Artistiek onderzoek

After researching the spiritual traditions of his Dominican roots through Latino communities in Italy, Raziel travelled to the Netherlands in November 2023 to meet his mother’s spiritual guide, a Dominican woman named Vicky. She invited him to learn her practice, but died shortly after his arrival. He decided to embrace this event as part of his journey and artistic path, and to stay. In 2024, he applied to the Master’s programme at the Piet Zwart Institute and was accepted.

Across 2024 and 2025, he developed a relational drawing laboratory, The Drawing Experience, engaging with the local community in Hillevliet through Stichting CORPO. Building on “Deep Listening” by American composer Pauline Oliveros, Perin asks how drawing can become a practice of deep observation.

In 2025, he was awarded an Italian Council research grant by the Italian Ministry of Culture for his multi-site performative research project Vitruvian Man (Healing Masculinity). Starting with Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic figure of the “Western man” as an ideal of perfection and a measure through which architecture, design and knowledge have been organised in Western society, the project examines constructions of masculinity as experienced by European Black bodies. Perin seeks guidance from non-Western epistemologies and uses his own body to examine interiorised structures of power and imagine his art as a reparative practice. The research has also fuelled Perin’s master’s thesis, The Intimate Labor of Self-Repair, and the creation of his installation Mosquitero (2026) for his graduation show.

He is currently starting a collaboration with the gallery Working Title in Amsterdam, where he will present a solo show in October 2026. Raziel will also take part in the Antwerp Art Fair in December 2026.

**Confronting the Self in Stillness and Confinement (2025)** - Performance 40 min Yam, iron, mirrors, calabash, polenta, candles; Costume by Papa Oyeyemi Installation view at BRUTUS, during Traces We Keep Exhibition, WSOA, Rotterdam (NL) Installation view at BRUTUS, courtesy of SiliquiniLaura-Brutus In BRUTUS, the yam breathes beside me — cracking, softening, expanding. Its surface remembers dust and skin, its roots remember exile. I think of it as a body that refuses to die, one that keeps transforming, shedding, and blooming again. In this stillness, roots stretch across the concrete floor, tracing invisible lines toward the darkness. Each sprout carries a fragment of memory, a pulse of those who travelled, those who fed us, those who dreamed of return. The work becomes a ritual of repair, a slow choreography between what survives and what transforms. The body, the root, and the ruin breathe together here, whispering that healing is not return but metamorphosis — the quiet courage to become otherwise. The yam kept growing after I left. Its roots travelled through the drawings on the floor, through the air, through time. But after few weeks the organic part of the work had mysteriously disappeared.

**Mami (2022), Feeding my Ancestors (series)** - «In the Yoruba culture, and in many other American Afrodiasporic cultures, the female deities who protect and support men and women are called Yabas, from Iya: mother. Ancient knowledge has nestled in the matrilineal wombs of many Africans for millennia. The Iyami are the dreaded and revered ancestral mothers. Iyalorisa are the women in charge of the Ile Axé, the sacred temples of African religions in Brazil. Iya, the mother, is the term anyone would use to address an older woman, who may not have given birth to you, but who, respecting and carrying on traditions, takes care of the community as she would a child and, by doing so, every day she gives birth to the future. Female deities embody every aspect of femininity: impetus, wisdom, procreation, sensuality, abundance, courage and lightness. The women and men who worship them, honor and respect every aspect related to them. Mami Wata, the Vodun who holds the snake on her shoulders is among the most revered in West Africa, and like Yemoja (from the Yoruba, the mother whose children are fish), she followed her people on the infamous route of slavery; thanks to them their human sons and daughters clung to life and found a way to rebuild another one beyond the Calunga Grande (the Atlantic Ocean). Because as Iya they protected them. Because in the womb of women, like a precious stone, the secret of life is kept.» - Simao Amista, researcher and American afro-diasporic religions expert catalog text for A Tale of Tamarindo, Raziel Perin's solo exhibition at MA*GA Museum, Milano Gallarate (Italy)

**The Drawing Experience (2024 - ongoing)** - Relational Drawing Laboratory Tables and chairs, paper and pens/pencils, speaker, objects of various materials and textures (provided by the artist)  Image : TDE x Village Des Artistes, Dakar, Senegal, 2026, courtesy of Noura Bourahima

**Corpi Liberi (Free Bodies) 2020** - Graphite, charcoal, oil on paper 28 drawings, 36 × 27.5 cm each Overall installation: 205 × 150 cm NCTM for Arts collection

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