Tigo Ayres presents immersive performance at the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival in Edinburgh

Edinburgh, Scotland — October 2025 — The British-Brazilian artist, performer, and psychologist Tigo Ayres will present his exhibition-performance Between Worlds and Memories: Birth, Death, and Resurrection during the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival 2025, taking place from 27 to 31 October at Leith Makers, Edinburgh.

Bringing together painting, theatre, and ritual, the work invites audiences on a sensorial journey through the cyclical processes of birth, death, and resurrection — a meditation on transformation, vulnerability, and renewal.

At its core, the project explores how art can be both a source of comfort and disturbance, echoing this year’s festival theme. Through layered imagery and embodied gestures, Ayres transforms psychological and cultural narratives into poetic acts of renewal, intertwining the personal and collective into an experience of deep reflection and transcendence.

“My work isn’t about providing answers,” says Ayres. “It’s about creating a space where we can feel — where we can recognise that life is cyclical, that endings and beginnings coexist.”

A choreography of rebirth

The performance begins with slow, abstract movement — a choreography of emergence and dissolution. Performers, including Ayres himself, invoke elemental forces through gestures that recall ritual, dream, and ancestral remembrance. As the piece unfolds, fragments of poetry and memory surface — whispered recollections of loss and rebirth that merge with the installation’s atmosphere.

The audience is invited not only to observe but to inhabit the work. The exhibition space becomes an emotional and psychological landscape where the boundaries between spectator and participant dissolve.

Within this living environment, the personal and political, the ancestral and the contemporary, converge and transform.

“In a world where we are constantly disconnected from ourselves and from one another,” Ayres reflects, “art becomes a place to remember — to reconnect the broken threads of memory and spirit.”

Art as resistance and care

By merging art and psychology, Ayres builds what he calls “spaces of collective healing” — environments where art becomes both an act of resistance and care. His performances and paintings are inhabited by hybrid figures and archetypal symbols, half-human and half-mythical, embodying trauma, joy, and resilience. These presences move between the visible and the hidden, evoking the unconscious stories that shape our shared experience.

Influenced by thinkers such as Jung, Fanon, and Freud, as well as Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous cosmologies, Ayres approaches creation as a process of self-discovery and social dialogue. The result is an art that consoles the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable, challenging viewers to confront both the fragility and the beauty of existence.

The artist and his world

Born in Brazil and based in London for nearly two decades, Tigo Ayres maintains studios in London and Natal (Brazil), bridging continents both creatively and spiritually. His practice merges painting, performance, and installation, exploring the intersections between psychology, identity, and cultural hybridity.

Ayres has collaborated with major cultural institutions such as the Royal Opera House and People’s Palace Projects (London), and has exhibited his work across Europe, Latin America, and the United States, including at Spectrum Miami, the Brazil Meets Gmünd Festival (Austria), the Embassy of Mexico in London, and CasaCor Sergipe (Brazil).

His aesthetic — luminous, symbolic, and emotionally charged — draws from both European modernism and Latin American spiritual traditions, creating artworks that serve as portals between the visible and the unseen, the material and the symbolic.

A living cycle

A short video installation accompanies the exhibition, offering a glimpse into its visual and sonic atmosphere — a meditation on rhythm, decay, and renewal.

The show will be open daily from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m., with a live performance at 7 p.m., followed by an open conversation with the audience at 8 p.m., fostering dialogue, reflection, and collective engagement.

“Between Worlds and Memories is not only an artwork but a living process — a space to face our shared mortality, to grieve, and to rediscover hope. Through image, movement, and silence, I aim to transform the timeless cycle of life and death into an act of collective remembrance,” says Ayres.

About Tigo Ayres

Tigo Ayres (b. 1983, Brazil) is a British-Brazilian visual artist, performer, and psychologist, with studios in London and Natal (Brazil). His multidisciplinary practice explores the intersections of psychology, mythology, and identity, using art as a space for transformation and connection.

His work has been featured in institutions and festivals across Europe, Latin America, and the United States, including collaborations with the Royal Opera House, People’s Palace Projects, and Spectrum Miami.

Ayres’s art creates a poetic dialogue between cultures, merging spirituality and introspection in works that move between the intimate and the collective.

More information: www.tigoayres.com

Instagram: @tigoayres

Event Details

Exhibition-performance: Between Worlds and Memories: Birth, Death, and Resurrection

Artist: Tigo Ayres

Venue: Leith Makers – Edinburgh, Scotland

Dates: 27–31 October 2025

Hours: Exhibition 3:00–9:00 p.m. | Live performance 7:00 p.m. | Audience talk 8:00 p.m.