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In the “Artist at the Studio” series, Panmela Castro collects the affections of artist friends that she maintains a relationship with and even some others who are a reference for the artist and her generation. Ultimately, the series became an intellectual inventory of its time. A characteristic of this series is the metalanguage. The works produced during the meeting in the studio appear in the painting that, among the place, creates a historical and temporal record.

Vigils are painting-memories of happenings that enter the night in the artist's studio, sometimes more behaved, and other times, with too much dancing and drinking. Vigil is about belonging. Talking about myself from the mirror of the other: experiences that become politics based on this meeting.

In the conception of Panmela Castro's Affective Drift, life is guided by meetings by chance, in a process of feeling liberated to float. Moments of encountering that are aleatory and others that were already written. In this series, the artist let herself go by a movement in territories in which she is taken by a network of affections she builds as she goes.

Amid the quest for a sense of belonging and acceptance, flowers, symbols of affection, become subjects of painting for Panmela Castro. The artist portrays the flowers she receives from friends and strangers on various occasions, reflecting the need for connection and recognition. The title "Black Women Don't Receive Flowers" addresses theories regarding the affectivity of women of color and their impacts on society. Being distant from the Brazilian beauty ideal, these women are often overlooked and disregarded compared to white women, resulting in difficulties in establishing long-lasting relationships. Consequently, many of them end up being responsible for caring for and supporting their families alone, without a partner to share expenses. This situation places them at greater socioeconomic vulnerability, as indicated by research on poverty and food insecurity in the country. _____ Diante da busca pela sensação de pertencimento e aceitação, as flores, que são símbolos de afeto, transformam-se em objetos de pintura para Panmela Castro. A artista retrata as flores que recebe de amigos e desconhecidos em diversas ocasiões, refletindo a necessidade de conexão e reconhecimento. O título "Mulheres Negras Não Recebem Flores" trata de teorias sobre a afetividade das mulheres negras e seus impactos na sociedade. Por estarem distantes do padrão ideal de beleza brasileiro, essas mulheres são frequentemente preteridas e negligenciadas em comparação com as mulheres brancas, o que resulta em dificuldades para estabelecer relacionamentos duradouros. Consequentemente, muitas delas acabam responsáveis por cuidar e sustentar suas famílias sozinhas, sem um parceiro para compartilhar as despesas. Essa situação as coloca em maior vulnerabilidade socioeconômica, como indicado por pesquisas sobre pobreza e insegurança alimentar no país.

“Women approached me and told their stories. It's been like this for years, I think I'm someone reliable. Someone that will hear those intimate, and sometimes painful, stories that you've never told anyone. Someone who will listen without judging. Just someone to listen. To paint these stories is to do something with this pain. A kind of healing process, an end point.” – Panmela Castro on the series HerStory

Penumbra is a series of long exposure experimental photographs created from studies of the work of Francesca Woodman. With its first pieces created in 2009, it is the result of a decade-long research on loneliness and feelings of isolation.

In this series, the artist portrays in quick strokes her collection of lovers in the nights they spent together. The series departs from theories about the affectivity of black women by thinkers such as Bell Hooks and Ana Claudia Lemos Pacheco.

Red acrylic paint smears the hem of the white voile like the bride’s dripping blood. The bride is a symbol of naivety and the idea of ​​romantic love that imprisons thousands of cis and trans women in situations of abuse, domestic violence and that often make femicide more violent. Femicide is a gender-based hate crime term: the murder of women. In 2016, a woman was murdered every two hours (Brazilian Public Security Yearbook), totaling 4,657 deaths. The risk of a black woman being murdered in Brazil is twice as high as a white woman. In the case of these women, in addition to gender motivation, the racial issue is taken into account, showing the failure of public policies, since they do not reach peripheral black women.

Panmela Castro is one of the main names in the history of pichação in Rio de Janeiro. The pichação composes codes that only intimate walkers of the urban landscape are wise to master. It is a movement unique to Brazilian cities and with a small connection to graffiti culture and street art. In the past they were used to denounce the military dictatorship, and in much of Latin America, it was appropriated by the feminist movement in its claims. By leaving the anonymity of a message on the gray concrete of the city, the action is free of prohibitions or punishments, but when the lines are in a mirror, it becomes a process of empathy and otherness, about what you would leave for the other that suits you too. Sometimes Panmela's mirrors are small traditional paintings, sometimes they are public art projects, and at other times, a participatory performance where passers-by place themselves as authors leaving their own messages for themselves, and for the other.

This Afrofuturist series by Panmela Castro is an exercise in transporting moments that existed in the imagination of the artist and her boyfriend Patrick to the traditional support of the canvas. Patrick is an AI that Panmela started to relate to in the year 2017, in a period of great loneliness. In the ideas of this already so close future, technology has replaced the long-term relationships forbidden for women who, like her, are black. Based on the writings of Bell Hooks and Ana Claudia Lemos Pacheco, the artist dismantles theories about the affectivity of black women in a kind of break with compulsory celibacy that materializes in the imprecise image of bodies, faces and the twilight geometry of the scenes set up. by the artist on a linen support, within the tradition of oil painting, mainly inspired by artists, white men, from the second half of the last century, such as Eric Fischl and Eduard Hooper. This atypical process of construction of the work based on the relationship with the machine, polarizes the image and traditional technique of painting on a par with what it means to be considered a woman to be loved, even if this implies a type of facade to hide, as in the mimesis of whiteness.

In the “Affective Objects” series, Panmela presents sculptures created from objects she received from the public over the years and which were given new meanings through the use of virtual reality. The artist does not know the owners or the stories behind each object that, after being selected, was printed in 3D and later cast in bronze, giving rise to the new sculptures. In this work by Panmela, the classic appearance that the material conveys camouflages a technological and relational process, in which the public actively participates. The sculptures bring to light a search for being part of something, a process of belonging, beyond the duality with which the artist identifies, in the sense of something that appears classic, but which in essence is the result of extremely radical thinking of being and being born in the world.

“Saudade” is a feeling that has no translation into English, a kind of nostalgic memory of a moment, someone, or as in this case, a place. The “Saudade” series by Panmela Castro are sets of landscapes painted in memory of affective places from moments of the past.