Xenia França: “Black Brazilian women can finally be seen and heard for who they are”

A Latin Grammy nominee with her first solo album, a winner with her second, a cover model for Vogue, a spokesperson for a generation of progressive, creative Brazilian women – Xenia França is one of the most exciting artists to emerge from Brazil in recent years. She mixes the iconography of Lady Gaga with the musical intelligence of Erykah Badu.

When you know how she’s done it, Xenia’s achievements seem all the more extraordinary. For she has no label, no PR team, no manager and no career strategist. Everything she sings, every image she casts into the world, are of her own making.

“I am an unedited person,” she tells me, grinning over a decadent-looking cake in an arty little faux-Parisian café in São Paulo’s Vila Madalena district. She’s wearing big, dark sunglasses and a chic designer tracksuit, and she looks every inch the famous singer in disguise. Yet there’s nothing pretentious or arrogant about her. She laughs at herself.

“Of my generation of Black women in Brazil, I am the first to make my own artistic statement, defined by me alone, shaped by me. My CDs, my image, my lyrics are my own – from conception to representation. I’m not a political revolutionary, but in Brazil, this is in itself a revolutionary act.”

To understand what this means, Xenia tells me, those unfamiliar with Brazil need to understand how Black people in general and Black women in particular have long been seen in the country. “I grew up in a culture which told women who look like me that we didn’t have permission to define our own image, let alone our own lives.” Black Brazilian women have long been seen as decorative objects, she explains, signifiers of forbidden male desire. Even in intellectual circles. The painter Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, one of the key figures in the 1922 São Paulo Art Week – which shaped the manifesto for Brazil’s artistic modernity – principally painted Black women in varying states of undress. And when Xenia grew up, the ident on TV Globo during carnival was a smiling, naked, Black samba dancer.

“But that wasn’t me,” she says. “As a schoolgirl, I dreamed of being an intellectual, of learning other languages, of moving in serious circles, of wandering the world as an artist. For reasons of history, poverty and race, my family could never step beyond the threshold of where they’d been for centuries.” She would make that dream a reality: “I would honour my family by being different.”

Singing along to Marina Lima and Gal Costa in her bedroom, she formed a plan – to use music and image to claim her place in the artistic pantheon, but entirely on her own terms, not as the industry or dominant culture would define her. She would be no Di Cavalcanti muse. She’d be her own artist and her own object of art.

So, like generations of Brazilians from the impoverished northeast before her (including the current president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva), Xenia left Bahia, taking her plan and suitcase 2,000km south to São Paulo, Brazil’s cultural and commercial metropolis. It was a daring move for a teenager, alone and far from home: Bahians are figures of fun in São Paulo, the butt of jokes. And dreams can easily be exploited.

At first, Xenia worked as a model for small fashion houses in São Paulo’s plush Jardins neighbourhood. It was a means to an end. Through modelling, she learned how to defend herself from the wrong kind of offers and how to craft her photographic image. At night, she gigged in small clubs and cocktail bars, and she learned how to perform, to sing, to find talented musicians and write collaboratively and to shape a band and a sound all her own.

“I heard so much new music, too. I remember so vividly when I first heard Milton Nascimento’s Clube da Esquina [with Lô Borges]. I bought it by chance on the way back from a casting. When I got home, it was raining heavily, and I just slipped the CD on. Then Milton’s voice floated from the speakers, and I felt like I’d been hit, I just collapsed on the floor and began to cry. It was as if I felt his spirit was communing with me.”

In the 2010s, after years of hard graft, she finally got her break through a self-funded, self-promoted and produced music clip on YouTube, which went viral and earned her the chance to enter a talent competition. This generated enough funds for her to record a debut album, 2017’s Xenia. It produced a hit, the mesmerising ‘Pra Que Me Chamas?’, which threw a bomb into lazy political correctness and came accompanied with a video filled with imagery from African-Brazilian spirituality.

‘Sometimes a person speaks without sincerity,’ Xenia sings, wearing the golden crown of an African queen and swirling on the sand in scarlet robes or lying seductively in a bath filled with flowers, ‘… defining the standard of beauty, of struggle, of talent… but with such empty prattle.’ Dancers in orixá masks twist and turn in half-light; dolls’ faces burn on stakes; and a mysterious figure gyrates in the middle of crossed pathways in a jungle. Then Xenia looks straight into the camera and challenges us: ‘For what reason are you calling out to me? When you don’t even know me?’ she asks in the song’s rousing chorus.

The debut was followed in 2022 by Em Nome da Estrela, a deeply personal, spiritual album suffused with devotions and meditations to the orixá Oxum, spirit of fresh water and femininity, and like Xenia’s first album, this one was written collaboratively with a pool of talented, young Brazilian musicians. “The record pulled me out of a time of great sadness and loneliness during the pandemic. I began to connect with my spiritual heritage, rooted in African-Brazilian tradition and with Oxum herself.”

If her debut challenged, Em Nome da Estrela comforted, cajoling the listener to discover their deepest self. As with Xenia, the music was collaborative, but the lyrics were all her own. ‘I came from far away, to tell you where you come from,’ she sings seductively on ‘Ancestral Infinito’, ‘where this will lead is my gift to you, my cupcake: come here and play.’

Now, Xenia is beginning her new album. It will be about love, but don’t expect anything expected. The new album will be a Xenia album, above all else. “The way I see it,” she smiles, “the moment we’re living in Brazil now is completely new. Black Brazilian women can finally be seen and heard for who they are. And I can sail my own ship and form my own tribe. So, for too long, romantic music sung by women has been the remit of Taylor Swift or Adele. Billie Holiday, Elza Soares, Etta James, they don’t get to sing about love; it’s all about loss for them. So, I am going to stake out my claim to love music for Black women songwriters!”

And she has plans to do so, at least in part in the UK. “I am now the person I dreamed of being when I was a little girl. I am beginning to wander the world as an artist, and this year, I will make it to Britain, to London! My dream now is to gig in Britain and record part of my new album in the city. Maybe even at Abbey Road!”

So you can be pretty certain we’ll see Xenia here in 2025. Her dreams have a habit of coming true.