DIGESTIVO
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ENTREVISTA | 26/05/2025Embedded Files
Digestivo can mean many things, but in his case, it’s about digesting artistic processes,” says Lucas Barros, better known by his artistic name Digestivo—visual artist, experimental musician, and researcher born in Belém do Pará, in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon. His work emerges from the intersection of territories and languages: image, sound, installation, and performance merge to create immersive experiences marked by rhythm, memory, and a deeply embodied sensitivity.
Now based in Belém do Pará and a member of the ACTA collective, Digestivo works with an aesthetic that blends the organic and the improvised. His practice is deeply rooted in an intimate relationship with the Amazonian environment not as an external landscape, but as a living place imbued with memory, emotion, and presence. From this perspective, the artist constructs works in which his own body merges with the surroundings, in a negotiation between affection, belonging, and displacement.
In his most recent releases, he has developed an aesthetic that oscillates between the organic and the dystopian, combining experimental elements in synergy with the natural world. In one of his latest releases, Labuta, this approach becomes especially clear, fusing avant-garde sonic textures with a sensitivity that evokes almost biological soundscapes and scattered futures. Likewise, in his most recent album, Mofo, Digestivo deepens this aesthetic line, exploring sonic landscapes that feel both intimate and alienating. Through electronic layers and irregular rhythms, the album constructs an auditory narrative that seems to emerge from a post-human ecosystem, where the artificial and the organic coexist in tension and symbiosis.
Photography: Duda Santana
Your work seems to come from a deeply embodied and territorial perspective, with landscapes and the relationship between body and environment often present. How does the landscape show up in your work, and what connection do you see between them?
The landscape is not just a backdrop in my work, it’s a living presence. Since childhood, I’ve had a very close and vivid relationship with nature. I grew up between the city and the forested zones and river regions of the Amazon, so being in contact with rivers, trees, and open land was always something natural to me.
This connection shapes how I approach the territory, not from a distance, but from within. I see the landscape as a body with its own memory, rhythms, and emotions. My own body often enters the work as part of that environment, not to dominate it, but to merge with it, to be affected by it.
There’s a constant exchange between body and territory, both are porous, both leave marks on each other. That’s where my work begins: in the encounter, in listening, in allowing the landscape to speak in its own time and way.
There are clearly dystopian and sometimes post-apocalyptic vibes in your pieces. How do these themes shape the way you think about and create your art?
Yes, there’s a dystopian and post-apocalyptic atmosphere in my work both visually and sonically. My latest album, Mofo, explores that deeply. It imagines a distorted nature, where organic elements are almost unrecognizable transformed into new sounds that suggest a future ecosystem, with unknown organisms. It’s like a kind of genesis a different beginning, narrated through sound.
Beyond the music, the visuals matter just as much: the landscape, the textures, the pieces I wear which I don’t call clothes, but scraps or trapos. They’re not about fashion, they’re about activating something, creating a body that belongs to another world.
This dystopian language is how I process the world around me. I don’t want to repeat generic debates, I prefer to express what truly affects me, but through a unique, poetic lens. That’s how I believe we can speak about important themes, like the environment in ways that are more personal and powerful.
In my next album, I’ll move toward something almost opposite, a more organic sensibility. I want to highlight what is already here, what we still recognize as nature or material, but through a softer, more delicate gaze. Still rooted in the Amazon, but with new textures and questions.
Talking about the environment is essential, especially for those of us who live in or come from the Amazon. It’s not an abstract issue, it’s daily life, it’s survival, and it shapes everything we create.
Photography: Duda Santana
In your latest collaborative work with Yvu, Labuta, there’s a strong sense of the ancestral and the physical. What inspired you to dive into the relationship between rhythm, earth, and collective memory?
Labuta, my collaborative single with Yvu, was born from a deep need to reconnect with my roots to honor the memory and strength of those who came before me. I come from a long line of people who worked the land, who lived in close relation with nature and community. Talking about ancestry is a way of acknowledging that the space I have today as an artist, as a researcher, is not just mine. It’s the result of what others endured, built, and passed down.
The single reflects that: rhythm as labor, as earth, as memory. The title Labuta means hard work, but not just in the sense of exhaustion. It’s about the daily rituals, the collective practices, the cultural strength of people living close to the land in the Amazon.
One of my main inspirations was my experience in a traditional Amazonian community called Nazaré do Mocajuba, in Curuçá, Pará - Brazil, a place that shaped me. My most meaningful memories live there. That’s where I learned what it means to belong, to share, to care.
The rainforest and labor stand out as key elements in the sound narrative of the track. How did you weave these ideas into the music production and the overall sound environment?
In Labuta, repetition is key, not just musically, but symbolically. The beat moves in cycles, like the gestures of those who work the land. That repetition speaks to rhythm as labor, rhythm as memory. Batuque, in particular, became a central element. It’s a sound that carries ancestral presence, but also the pulse of a community in motion. It connects directly to the body, inviting dance, but also grounding like footsteps on soil, like tools in motion.
The production process was very physical. I found myself thinking through movement, the kind of gestures I remember seeing in Amazonian territories, and even repeating myself as a child. That memory lives in the sound: raw, percussive, organic. It’s a rhythm that doesn’t just accompany nature it emerges from it.
A key moment in shaping Labuta was the collaboration with Yvu (Yan Higa). His mix and the inclusion of new textures, especially elements inspired by funk, layers of percussion, and ambient drums expanded the sonic landscape. The track became a fusion of two aesthetics, two ways of listening and remembering. That dialogue made all the difference: what began as a personal memory unfolded into a shared ritual.
The idea was never to describe a community, but to embody one sonically. To let the track become a kind of ritual of work, of memory, of territory. A reflection of an Amazonian community where labor and nature are not separate, but deeply entangled.
Labuta blends ritual and contemporary elements. How do you find a balance between tradition and experimentation without losing authenticity or symbolic meaning?
I didn’t set out to find a perfect balance between tradition and experimentation, I just followed what I was feeling. Labuta came from a moment of inner search: I was thinking a lot about my ancestors, about the land where I grew up, and about discovering new parts of my territory with different eyes. The music reflects that state of being.
The process was intuitive. I let the sounds guide me, experimenting without a clear plan, just sensing what felt right. The repetition in the rhythm, the rawness of the percussion they came from a place of memory and physicality. At the same time, I allowed myself to distort, to stretch, to imagine a new soundscape.
Maybe that’s where the authenticity comes from: not trying to imitate tradition or force experimentation, but allowing both to emerge naturally through what I was living and feeling at that time.
Photography: Charlene Barros
How do you interpret the core message or concept behind Labuta? Would you say your approach to ancestry aims at something utopian or symbolically hopeful?
Honestly, I still can’t define a closed concept for Labuta. I’m not even sure I want to. The track was born more from a need than from an idea. It emerged slowly through sounds, memories, and feelings that don’t always have names. But if I had to point to something at its core, I’d say: memory, body, community, nature.
A lot of people hear Labuta and immediately associate it with ancestry, and I get that. There’s drumming, repetition, an aesthetic that feels old, collective, like it comes from before. But none of that was planned in a conceptual way. It’s as if that ancestral presence just surfaced naturally because it’s already in me, in my body, in the way I listen to the world.
The cover, for example, is a photograph by Charlene Barros taken in 2018, in Nazaré do Mocajuba, the community where I grew up. That image already carried all of this: belonging, time, territory. Bringing that photo back now, years later, to accompany the track felt like a way of saying Labuta already existed in other forms before it became sound. It’s a continuation of something that started long ago and still moves through me.
As for whether there’s something utopian or hopeful in it… Maybe there is, but not a distant, unreachable utopia. It’s a grounded kind of hope one that rises from the earth, from effort, from shared care. Labuta isn’t just about hard work; it’s about daily rituals, about the quiet strength that holds a community together. So if there’s a symbol in it, it’s the act of continuing together, connected, without forgetting where we come from.
Your work highlights a tension between memory, territory, and sound. With that in mind, how do you see the role of art in relation to the current climate crisis especially considering ideas of time, urgency, and memory? Authors like Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, in Is There a World to Come?, suggest the ecological crisis also challenges how we imagine the future. Do you think art can offer new ways to inhabit time amid this planetary emergency, particularly in the Brazilian and Amazonian context?
I don’t think art can solve the climate crisis, but I do believe it can help us feel, remember, and imagine differently. That alone already has power. In my work, I try to create from a place that’s not rushed where time isn’t linear, where memory, land, and sound are all part of the same movement.
When I think about the Amazon, I think about other ways of living with time not as urgency, but as presence. Communities there often live in rhythms that don’t follow the logic of progress or productivity. They live with the land, not against it. I think art, when it listens to that, when it respects that, can offer something: not a solution, but a shift.
Labuta, for example, doesn’t speak of catastrophe, but it does speak of continuity, of what sustains us quietly, every day. I think that’s also a response to this crisis: to stay close, to remember, and to imagine from the ground we stand on.
Could you walk us through your creative and production process? What were some of your earliest encounters with music and art?
My first real contact with art happened when I got into university in 2016. Before that, I didn’t have much access to art in practice, I wasn’t familiar with galleries or artistic processes. It was through university that I started discovering this universe and understanding that I could create too. That moment opened many doors for me.
I began working with performance and video art, and at the same time, image became a central part of my practice. Those early experiments were very instinctive, exploring body, time, and memory through visual and performative elements. Then, I started composing soundtracks for those pieces, and little by little, sound became another layer in the work.
Today, I see that my process has been expanding. I no longer see myself as just a visual artist. I’ve been moving into audiovisual work more deeply, experimenting, mixing forms, and letting one medium influence the other. I don’t separate the languages. Everything blends together in the way I create. It’s all part of the same flow.
Photography: Digestivo
At the crossroads of art, technology, and nature, what opportunities or tensions do you see? Thinkers like Donna Haraway discuss how technology and nature merge in new forms of life and knowledge. How do you think art can play a role in mediating or enhancing these relationships today?
I believe that at the intersection of art, technology, and nature, there are both tensions and very rich possibilities. In my work, I try not to separate these things. Music, for example, is already a space where everything blends: the sounds of ancestral instruments, the rhythms and percussion, come together with electronics and programming.
I also see that there are ancestral forms of technology or engineering that are just as sophisticated as any modern system, but based on different principles: time, listening, care. For me, art can help mediate these relationships, creating new ways of imagining the world without erasing memory or repeating the same patterns of exploitation.
What interests me is using technology in a way that doesn’t silence the territory, but instead opens up other forms of relationship with it.
Photography: Paule Marques
Finally, can you share some of your artistic or conceptual influences? What kind of music do you listen to? Who or what inspires Digestivo?
My influences come from many places sound, image, territory, and the exchanges that shape a life. I listen to a bit of everything: ambient, experimental, carimbó, drumming, techno-melody and also the music that shaped me during childhood and adolescence.
An artist who deeply inspires me is Yan Higa, besides being a friend, he’s someone I share thoughts and creative processes with. He’s been, and still is, an important presence in my journey. I’m also inspired by artists from my region, like Tonny Brasil,Beto maia, Viviane Batidão, Gang do Eletro, and Gaby Amarantos. These are artists I grew up listening to, who have stayed with me since early on, and whom I deeply respect. They are part of the sonic and aesthetic identity that lives in Digestivo today.
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