Your name
Masina Pinheiro & Gal Cipreste
Place of birth
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Place where you live now
Rio de Janeiro (together)
3 words to describe you
Retaliation, perversion and subtlety.
Why do you take pictures?
To create images that replace memories imposed on our community. Especially about gender, childhood, sex and family.
Where do you get your inspiration?
From difficult-to-define facts that happened to us and made us equally difficult to define; everything that makes the idea of gender confusing; real stories considered inconceivable from a normative point of view; and perhaps from the pleasure of telling them with unexpected forms. Also, movies and literature.
Who are your influences?
Claude Cahun & Marcel Moore, Anohni, Greer Lankton, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Silvino Mendonça
What determines the subject matter you choose?
Our subject is us and the people we love and who have experienced something similar to us. Or something that happens because we are all this disobedience, perversion and restlessness. We use archive material and invented sculptures.
What impact would you like your art to have?
A wild answer and the ultimate goal: that people should be able to imagine free childhoods, especially gender-disobedient childhoods.
What artwork do you never get bored with?
Muholi's Somnyama Ngonyama, Hail the Dark Lioness, Momo Okabe's Ilmatar, Rodrigo Braga's oeuvre, Hoda Afshar's oeuvre, Ocean Vuong's novels.
Is there anything you want to add?
We do extensive collaborative work. We believe that dissenters, in general, understand collaboration as something vital. Historically thrown to the margins, where we mix, in ghettos, bathrooms, retreats, silences, we feel a deep tiredness and indifference to the traditions of the artistic world. The idea of being an isolated genius, of being born knowing everything, of having a unique gift, of a glorified name, is ridiculous. Our research is also about the intertwining of dissident autobiographies.

GH, Gal and Hiroshima
Project statement

The series is an interweaving of two autobiographies. The experience of stoning in childhood, suffered for reasons related to gender and the experience of a body that transitions in the face of a religious family and its own resignification.

GH, Gal and Hiroshima is a four-year collaborative work, made of different images: archival objects, self-portraits, performance, installations, photos of our childhood, subjective memories.

At the age of 10, Masina, nicknamed Hiroshima, because they was born on the same day as the bomb, was beaten with stones in Vila da Penha, a neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro. Their appearance was too ambiguous. In another place and time, Gal starts to understand the processes of their own body, it’s transition and their trans non-binary identity. This caused a stir in a deeply religious family. Gal was born on the same day as Harry S.Truman, the US President who authorized the bomb to be dropped. We think this is an expressive coincidence.

GH, those two letters that represent our initials, are also the title of one of the most prominent Brazilian books of all times, written by the writer Clarice Lispector: The Passion According to G.H. Therefore, those two letters are embedded in the Brazilian collective imagination. The book inspires us: an event so horrible and inexplicable that to share it, it needs to be lost. And we quote from the beginning of the book ‘I’m trying to understand, trying to give what I’ve lived to somebody else, and I don’t know to whom, but I don’t want to keep what I experienced. I do not know what to do with what I experienced. I am afraid of that profound disorder. I don’t trust what happened to me’”.

masina pinheiro
@masinapinheiro @galcipreste