In her radiant photographic series Para Tú Altar: Las Fuerzas Divinas de la Naturaleza, Victoria Ruiz channels the vibrancy of nature, performance, and ancestral belief systems to craft emotionally charged visual narratives. Drawing from traditions like Santería-Ifá, Candomblé, Umbanda, and Espiritismo, Ruiz fashions costumes out of faux flora and vivid fabrics that resonate as living abstractions of spiritual forces. Each image stands as a sensory conduit — dynamic, colorful, and deeply connected to rituals of the African diaspora that blend indigenous, colonial, and Catholic elements, hidden from public view yet pulsing beneath the cultural surface.
Raised in Caracas amid both folkloric customs and political unrest, Ruiz learned early that attire — be it celebratory or militaristic — carries symbolic weight. Costumes became a potent narrative device: markers of resistance, solidarity, fear, and remembrance. In Para Tú Altar, she invites motion into her creations by collaborating with dancers in London — activating fabric and form so each photograph becomes more than stillness, but a living homage to those forces that shape cultural memory.
Sustainability and resilience are stitched into this work: by reusing materials, Ruiz honors cycles of regeneration while echoing adaptive practices forged in survival. Her upcoming series of protective masks, inspired by improvised protest gear — from cardboard to stuffed animals — underscores the creativity born from hardship. Together, these projects form a poetic continuum: visual expressions of unseen protectors, cultural endurance, and the transformational power that arises when making becomes a mode of love, resistance, and remembrance.
More info: Website, Instagram.
