Disco Séance is an exhibition displaying an unseen body of work by Brazilian artist Augusto Cascales at We Are Cuts.

This series of photographs, created during lockdown in their former studio/darkroom in Hackney Wick, documents an embodied experience of queer joy and spirituality through self-portraits, portraits of friends, still life, and abstractions.

"In the absence of clubbing, my studio became something of a space of worship. Embalmed by candlelight, incense, music, and coloured lights, I would go into a state of trance through ecstatic movement."

Displayed on the walls of We Are Cuts, an iconic hair salon in the heart of queer Soho, there will be a selection of photographs from a slideshow titled Disco Séance, which will be playing on a continuous loop in the basement of the building. The space will be bathed in a trance-inducing soundtrack composed by London artist Richard Lockett, commissioned specifically for this exhibition.

The audience is invited to take part in this immersive installation, through dancing and communing with other beings—human and otherwise.

Augusto Cascales (he/she/they – b. 1992, São Paulo, Brazil) is an artist based in London working across live art, photography, and film. They consider their practice as an embodied inquiry into deviancy, appealing to art’s emancipatory and political potentials to challenge long-held colonial and patriarchal systems of our passing time. Through a mischievous reimagining of the social and political body, Augusto seeks to create glimpses of other possible worlds. Augusto holds a BA in Fine Art and History of Art from Goldsmiths University of London (2018) and a master's degree in Live Art from Queen Mary University of London (2023).

Richard Lockett (b. 1983) is a multidisciplinary artist working across various media including drawing, digital, video, collage, installation and sound/music. The works attempt to record sensorial experiences in a sculptural and spatial manner. Areas of interest include the arrangement, potentiality and psychology of interior spaces; neurodivergence through recording and drawing/mark making; mapping as aesthetic tool for finding different connections between subject and object.

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augusto cascales ©