The practice of Manauara Clandestina mobilizes performance, video, photography, costume, and objects to construct a poetics marked by displacement and reinvention. Her works stem from both personal and collective experiences to craft chronicles of trans identity in its multiple dimensions — as identity, political existence, and radical fabulation. The daughter of evangelical missionaries, she began her artistic practice in childhood, during Pentecostal church services. This intersection of spirituality, ritual, and representation remains present in her work, which operates on an intimate and symbolic level, moving between the street and the altar, the body and the camera, desire and denunciation. The name she adopts as an artist already signals the forces that guide her work: Manauara evokes her place of origin and the notion of crossing; Clandestina points to the violence of identity erasure, but also to the creative power of migration and movement. In her work, the artist combines technology and precarity, script and spontaneity, documentation and fiction — crafting narratives that weave together subjective affirmations, marginalized culture, and emotional bonds amid the contradictions of contemporary society. By remixing materials — like someone reconfiguring found elements to create new costumes — Manauara Clandestina transforms remnants into a language for moving between worlds and imagining other ways of existing.

Her solo exhibitions include: Sala de Vídeo: Manauara Clandestina (2024, MASP – Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo – Brazil), Saltação (2021, Casa70, Lisbon, Portugal), and Pitiú de Cobra (2021, Delirium, São Paulo – Brazil). She has participated in major group exhibitions such as: Encruzilhadas da Arte Afro-Brasileira (2025, CCBB Salvador – BA; 2024, CCBB Belo Horizonte – MG; 2023, CCBB São Paulo – SP), Foreigners Everywhere (2024, 60ª Bienal de Veneza, Venice – Italy), Composições para tempos insurgentes (2024, MAM Rio – Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro – Brazil), 1ª Bienal das Amazônias (2023, Belém – Brazil), El tiempo es una ilusión (2023, Collegium, Arévalo – Spain), Festival Internacional de Cinema de Edimburgo (2022, Edinburgh – Scotland), and a group exhibition at IAB-SP – Instituto de Arquitetos do Brasil (n.d., São Paulo – Brazil).