First published: December 2025
Non-verbral artist Misleidys Francisca Castillo Pedroso has created a community, inhabited by a cast of theatrical characters, that transcends the spoken word
With Misleidys Francisca Castillo Pedroso, what isn’t said speaks volumes – because it has to. The non-verbal, deaf, mute and autistic artist is unable to express her objectives, leaving viewers to draw their own conclusions about her work, which has been called mysterious and enigmatic but could simply be Pedroso’s way of directly conveying her silent world.
What happens in the transitional space of Pedroso’s work, the tertiary space between her creativity and interpretation, is a communication that travels from her soul to ours, transcending words. Yet decoding her work is a tricky, fascinating task that prompts existential questions about what we can and cannot know about art, why we’re so quick to label things as mysterious when we don’t have language for it, and how we deal with the discomfort that arises when we are uncertain.
Untitled, 2015, 22 x 29 in. / 56 x 73.5 cm
What we do know is that Pedroso was born in 1985 in Güines, Cuba, a rural, agricultural, yet culturally vibrant area replete with fields of sugar cane and tobacco, cigar factories, textile mills and canneries, that lies 35 miles southwest of Havana. At the age of five, having demonstrated severe developmental difficulties, in addition to an inability to hear or speak, Pedroso was placed in a specialised facility. But as symptoms of autism advanced, she returned home, where she grew up in relative isolation, with only her mother and older brother for company, her father having left.
Untitled, c. 2016, 18 x 13 in. / 46 x 33 cm
By her early teens, the trio had moved to Alamar, a housing project to the east of Havana. Pedroso began filling the family’s modest home with artwork that she made sitting at a table in a third-floor room of the blue house, facing a window that overlooked the Caribbean Sea. Her work comprised a lively cast of characters that could easily be renderings of what she observed from her window or on the streets of Alamar when she went out with her mother or on class trips.
Pedroso at home in Alamar, Cuba, in 2015
By Lori Landau
This is an article extract; read the full article in Raw Vision #125.
