“For me, costume has always been part of everything,” says photographer and multidisciplinary artist Victoria Ruiz. “Culturally, I grew up in Venezuela seeing costume not as something separate from daily life but as something deeply embedded in it, especially through the lens of carnival. Carnival is in our blood. It’s not just a festival; it’s a way of expressing history, resistance, joy, and grief. A costume, at the end of the day, is something you wear that tells a story.”

In striking, saturated images, Ruiz channels a fascination with nature, dance, spirituality, and African diasporic religion. Citing belief systems of the Americas like Santería-Ifá, Candomblé, Umbanda, and Espiritismo, the artist delves into the histories and cultural resonance of religion as modes of resistance and adaptation. These faiths often blend “African spiritual traditions with Indigenous and colonial influences,” she says in a statement.

Currently based in London, Ruiz draws upon her childhood experiences in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, where she and her family encountered both nuanced ancestral practices and urgent political violence. “I grew up surrounded by characters, some from folkloric traditions, others from more disturbing scenes like military or police repression,” the artist tells Colossal. She continues:

I realized early on that uniforms are also costumes. What people wore during those moments of violence or protest created powerful symbols. It was a kind of dark carnival. And I became very curious about what those garments meant and how they could inspire fear, power, or solidarity.

In her series Para Tú Altar: Las Fuerzas Divinas de la Naturaleza, which translates to For Your Altar: The Divine Forces of Nature, Ruiz draws upon a seminal music album by Cuban salsa artist Celia Cruz, who incorporated ceremonial Santería music into one of her early albums. Para Tú Altar references one of Cruz’s songs about different types of flowers used to honor the divinity of nature.

At the time, African diasporic religions like Santería, in which Yoruba traditions, Catholicism, and Spiritism converge, were largely hidden from view due to widespread prejudice and marginalization. Ruiz adds, “It could be said that Celia did not truly understand that what she was doing at the time was transcendent for Cuba’s musical culture and the religion itself.”

Music and performance are central tenets in Ruiz’s work. Since she was young, she studied ballet, flamenco, and contemporary dance, but it was only when she moved to London and began collaborating with dancers that elements of her practice began to truly gel. “Seeing them embody the costumes—activating them with movement and intention—transformed my whole practice,” she says. “It became a way to make the pieces alive and to create immersive, emotional storytelling.”

Ruiz works with a range of fabrics and materials like faux flowers and other props, depending on the theme of the series. She often reuses the costumes to emphasize sustainability. “Each costume and each image is a portal to the divine; it is a visual offering, a spiritual invocation,” Ruiz says. “They’re my own interpretations of how these forces have shaped and protected me. I’m still on that journey, and this work is a kind of gratitude, a love letter to those unseen powers that have carried me.”

The artist is currently working on a series of protective masks, drawing on the ingenuity of handmade masks used during protests that Ruiz witnessed while living in Caracas. “At one point, gas masks were actually banned from entering the country, so people responded with creativity and survival instinct creating masks from water bottles, cardboard, even stuffed animals,” she says. “I found it so powerful: this creativity in the face of danger—this need to resist and survive through making.”

See more on the artist’s website and Instagram.