Ateliê do Centro: How an art school in Brazil turned into a cult in 2016

At a high enough level, all schools break down the poor people who sign up for them and build them back up again. This is somewhat understandable if said school is for something life-changingly important like medicine or surgery, but the truth is that few schools seem to take more pleasure in this than those that teach art.

Not for nothing is the Central School of Speech and Drama in London nicknamed “Central School of Screech and Trauma” by the people who’ve suffered through it, and the same is true of several art schools across the world as well. This seems to make perfect sense on the surface. After all, not only is the pursuit of art as a career an incredibly tough one that you need a thick skin for, but there’s also this idea that to create great art, you first have to suffer.

These schools offer that in spades, and yet none of them have done so quite as literally as Ateliê do Centro, an art school that was operational in São Paulo, Brazil, for 20 years. It was the brainchild of the artist Rubens Espírito Santo, who also ran the school as the equivalent of its head teacher. I say equivalent because there wasn’t really any official hierarchy in the school. In fact, there wasn’t really an official anything about it.

Espírito Santo claimed that the school began life as nothing more than a notice on the communal board of his apartment block and grew from there. Thus, it was never an officially sanctioned school – at least, this was something that the school claimed with pride, it was a collective of like-minded souls united in the pursuit of artistic excellence, and nothing could get in the way of working with Espírito Santo to make each person who signed up the best artist they could be.

If this is beginning to sound like a cult, you’re right to be suspicious.

How did this school become a cult?

One of the people who signed up to this school in 2016 was a 24-year-old film graduate named Mirela Cabral, and while she was at first tempted to make a documentary about the school, eventually she fell completely for it, signing up and throwing herself into its communal, practical curriculum, if you can call it that – what she didn’t realise was that part of the reason that she fell for the school and for Espírito Santo’s teachings so hard is because she arrived with baggage of her own.

By her own admission, she was borderline anorexic when she arrived, something that the teacher forced her to confront within her first week signed up to the school proper. At first, Mirela felt that this was a sign of his good nature and desire to help people. However, then she realised that basically everyone there was in the same boat as her. A young woman, looking for direction in life, suffering with their mental health, who’d been seemingly helped by this one charismatic man.

Not the end of the world, even if it is somewhat unnerving. No, the really unnerving stuff came later, when Espírito Santo sent around a list of over 50 Commandments that were to be followed by the letter. When he instructed everyone to address him as o mestre (the master). When he began bullying, insulting and sometimes physically attacking his students in full view of others. When he began making his students perform sex acts on each other and photographing them in the name of “creating art”.

How did it all fall apart for Espirito Santo?

After two years of this, Mirela finally decided that enough was enough and didn’t just leave, but decided to devote her life to taking it down. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the specifics of Espírito Santo’s behaviour, but Mirela documented it into a ten-part podcast series built around exposing his behaviour to the rest of Brazil. The final episode, which is a truly harrowing interview with Espírito Santo himself, one where he brushes off any idea of wrongdoing. Taking the true cult leader belief that anything that he can bully someone into saying “yes” to is fair game.

However, he seemingly knew that something was up after that interview. Two days before the podcast premiered, he shut the school down without warning. Before the third episode was aired, a warrant was issued for his arrest and dozens of his former students were summoned to testify about his financial, physical and sexual abuse of them.

At least one cult leader faced genuine justice for their actions. Many more of them are a lot luckier.