Defying norms, redefining humanity / Aun Helden

In conversation with Aun Helden.

In the presence of Aun Helden’s art, time fractures, and perception dissolves. This is no ordinary narrative of self-expression—this is an unrelenting act of transfiguration, where the body becomes both the battlefield and the masterpiece. Emerging from Brazil’s oppressive frameworks as a trans artist, Aun has wielded distortion as survival; a “glitch of perception” that dares to dismantle the structures of identity, beauty, and belonging. Through synthetic materials and natural forms, Aun’s creations unsettle and provoke, challenging us to confront the fragility of our definitions. Each movement, every piece of work, is a rebellion—a visceral reaction against invisibility and erasure. Art does not seek to comfort; it exists to deconstruct, to reimagine.

Growing up in Brazil as a trans person and artist, when did you first realize that art was your survival mechanism, a tool that allowed you to breathe in an oppressive environment?
I believe that was in the first distortion I created in my image and in my supposed destiny… I like to trace that moment as perhaps one of my first moments as an artist. It was as if the first movement I made as a dancer, the first photograph I took, the first poem I wrote, were so incisively urgent and rebellious within everything I desired and regurgitated, that what was technically just an artifice also created a mark on
my reality, on my flesh, on the cornea of my eye. There isn’t a dance I do that isn’t a desire to transfigure what my feet dance on a daily basis, there isn’t an image I build that doesn’t carry the will to destroy or transfigure something my eyes see.

Your work has been described as a “glitch of perception” – but would you say it’s reality that’s glitched, or simply the way people see it? Where does this ‘glitch’ leave you as both artist and individual?
The glitch is perhaps the curse of my body. I say, there is a price to pay for deprogramming reality, when you sacrifice the failed structure of the human being and become an unknown abject. Often not by choice, but by a process of dehumanization that comes from the other. The glitch is this body that carries almost a carcass of its human meaning, it is an immigrant being of the futile truth. Walking through the world with this glitch is the sentence of violence and not belonging. But it is also a permission to exist for other realities, it is as if this body that lives in collapse with the world, becomes its vulnerability a sensitivity capable of inhabiting mystery and claiming its existence for other forms and knowledge. Not fitting in makes you inhabit other places. That’s why I say curse, the tone of this word is almost dubious, it’s like carrying something that will make you bleed one moment and transfigure you with its sap the next.

What drives you to distort the body so radically, and what truths emerge from these distortions?
I think my answer has different tones, truths and explanations. There was a time when the reason was a repugnance of my body and meaning, there was a time when obsession became a reason to blossom into new petals and sometimes I wanted to understand and also question the meaning of beauty to crush it, to cry with it, to cling to a form and understand that I exist. It seems almost odd to demand distortion to prove that you exist. But for a long time I’ve felt that I didn’t have a body. My dreams forged the bird I am through everything I’ve distorted and experimented with.

In using your body as a vessel for such intense transformation, do you feel closer to liberation or further entangled in the act of constant self-reinvention? Is there peace in this cycle, or only more layers to reveal?
The strangeness remains when I think of peace, it’s so unknown that it becomes a blur. It’s as if I couldn’t desire such an alien feeling. This abjection of the body in this process of transfiguration distances us from what is consolidated as a structure and consequently from everything that is architected within the score of what it is to be, feel and desire as a human being. I always think about feelings, the feelings that are so human and that are often denied to certain bodies. I think that sometimes the cycle of having to build everything in order to exist can be exhausting and unhealthy. Building a new love in order to experience love. Building a stage in order to have a place to talk. It’s either that or giving in, camouflaging yourself. But I’ve also felt that we’re learning to look elsewhere as a reference point for feeling and existing.
There’s no point in camouflaging ourselves, because one day what explodes inside us, the strangeness of having spat it all out, knocks on our door and we get even sicker. The power of this transfiguration is carried by the mystery of those who feed on the end of the world, it’s not easy.

From lichen to synthetics, your materials provoke and unsettle. Are they your armor, or something closer—tools to redefine the body itself?
My materials are my curiosity, my contradiction. I fall in love with the synthetic with the desire to be something else, and I find myself creating allegories of my existence with nature when I realize that everything I want to become already exists in some form. The objects I use, from a scenic construction in a performance to a painting technique that I translate into a photograph, are my most sacred semiotics. The sign for me is spiritual, it’s to circumvent so many images that have already been made and that hurt my existence and others. There’s a fascination that makes my mouth water when I think that a certain shape can change a person’s social imaginary. I have a lot of faith in this, because it’s what happens to me. Shapes, colors, they bring me freedom, they liberate me from what I used to believe to be true. I face the figures I create in my performance and see it as an iconoclasm of the world and of myself. It’s important to dare to destroy images.

Your exploration of beauty sits far outside the “comfort zone” of mainstream aesthetics. Is ugliness an intentional weapon in your work, a way to destabilize and make viewers confront their biases head-on?
Thinking about ugliness, I feel that for example I don’t believe that ugly is the opposite of beautiful. I believe it’s an extremely powerful scar in the concept of it. There’s an image I’m fascinated, taken by the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. It’s from a series where he takes pictures of geckos next to roses.

I saw this image when I was a pre-teenager, and it was as if my mind had been comforted, I remember that I felt what I wanted with my work, the feminine and erotic sensitivity beauty of the rose, with the grotesque and texture-laden ugliness of the gecko. And later I realized that it wasn’t the dichotomy that interested me, but the disordered symbiosis that those two figures had together. I think my work turns me into a Gecko-Rose.

Creating within a conservative framework isn’t just difficult—it’s dangerous. What does bravery mean to you as an artist and as an individual in Brazil today?
I believe that bravery is the bond that connects us collectively. Us, feminine ghosts. A bond with many subjectivities and pluralities. Bravery has the strength of a plague. I am able to walk the streets in Brazil not just because of my courage, but because of the courage of another who is also scratching out reality. By the one who came before me, and the children will walk the streets from the courage we have now. Bravery is the layer that makes hope a possible dream. And is not only about facing the world and bleeding, but also about creating forms of life. Learning to face our vulnerability, our crying, as an intimate way of coping. To delve into our memory, into everything that has been written and not written, with a desire to ensure that many things are not repeated. I have great faith that this bond is also a choreography that we create through bravery in order to get around the cycle.

Your art reflects your body’s changes at any given time. How has this ongoing visual diary impacted your own understanding of self-identity and belonging?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, especially now that I have a lot of material that allows me to look back and see these changes. I’ve been trying to find the word to define this feeling of looking down this path of transfiguration, but the line I can draw is that my work is almost like a disruptive awareness of my identity. It doesn’t let me lie, it uses fantasy as a way of destroying truths and making sure that when I stand in front of a mirror I see freedom as the main brush with which to paint myself. It’s not just a splendorous process, as it seems, because my work also triggers me to question what I decide is transfiguration. But it’s a tension that feeds me and makes me increasingly create incisions in my body and reach layers of the unknown. It can become something as obsessive as it is spiritual, or a fine line between the two. I remember when I started to atrophy in my transition, I had a moment of questioning what I was doing, but my work showed me that I was decomposing rather than dying.

In works like “Eternidade”, you embody a ghostly presence. How does this ghostly metaphor relate to your own experience of feeling invisible or overlooked within certain spaces?
The figure of the ghost emerged as a desire to dilute language until it ceased to be my human endeavor. The ghost is the representation of opacity within the visualization of an identity, the possibility of being unknown to oneself and, above all, unlearning and relearning how to deal with the totality of a body’s structure. I created this figure in ‘Eternidade’ mainly to deal with my feminine, which emerged at a time when I decided to go through a process of death in transition, through synthetic and aesthetic technologies. The ghost was the receiver of femininity in this body that was decomposed and that was built not by looking at the structure of what we already know as the fate of a body, but through forms, landscapes, and so to speak, non-human.

You’ve redefined beauty through “fantasy flesh” and unconventional materials. What do you want people to confront when they feel uncomfortable or even repelled by your work? What specific realities are you hoping to disrupt or transform with your art?
I hope they confront their own strangeness, what makes them find something repulsive or beautiful. It is in this strangeness that transfiguration exists and it is precisely this place that is castrated in the human gaze. The beauty of not understanding something, of crossing a border, of becoming an immigrant to your own definitions. This place is something that society skips when it looks at the new, there is a vast path when looking at an image, whatever it may be, and strangeness is the mother of creativity.

Your art seems to ask viewers to expand their definitions of identity and self-perception. What do you believe mainstream society gets wrong about these concepts?
I feel that people always feel very conflicted about the freedom of others. And often what we create with our bodies is much more linked to maintaining and enjoying our own than the masses, especially thinking about today’s world, which is falling apart and we don’t seem to have any time left. But honestly, fuck these perceptions, I can list dozens of things that they think are threats to them but in reality we don’t
even remember they exist. But if there is this explosive reaction, let it also be about destruction. I feel that our freedom does have the power to bring down structures. Let those mens to bark like rabid dogs and swallow their own saliva. They don’t affect those who have already gone through the journey of understanding the wonder of being what they want to be.

Defying norms, redefining humanity / Aun Helden

Artist: Aun Helden / @aunhelden
Interviewer: Elena Murratzu / @elena.murratzu
Editor: Anca Macavei / @ancamacavei

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