Alumbre na Macaia
Alumbre na Macaia is the research project where I incorporate into my artistic practice the teachings I inherited from my grandmother, my father and my ancestors within the Umbanda terreiro.
The encounter between the African diaspora and Euro-indigenous knowledge created subjectivities that we only find in Brazil. The knowledge stored by Ossain in Africa met with Tupã and turned the European Saint Sebastian inside out.
This encounter, deeply marked by violence, but also by the invention of new ways of living, is no longer African, nor indigenous, nor European.
35mm film bathed in cachaça and beer
Alumbrar is, at the same time, to illuminate and to be enchanted.
Macaia is a sacred place, as well as being the set of sacred leaves used in Umbanda and Candomblé.
Alumbre na Macaia is, therefore, is to enchant photography with spiritual practices and spiritualize the aspects of photography.
Using different media such as photography, installation, video and archive material from my family, the research combines different approaches to thinking and producing images, using macumba as a fundamental language in the construction of the works.
“Kosi Ewe, Kosi Orisa" is a saying in Yoruba that says that without leaves there is no vital energy that sustains beings. It is with them that we protect and cleanse ourselves.
The herbal bath is one of those rites where the technology developed by the people of the saint serves as a survival device for the violations we suffer.
I use this ancestral technology on the negatives that I photograph in the terreiro, literally bathing them before developing them.
There is a dialectical game that intersects poetics and aesthetics.
On the one hand, I bring through the herbal bath a visuality, impacted and intended by coincidences, accidents, tears and deviations, as in the religious construction of the Brazilian enchantments.
On the other hand, there is the act of literally bathing my axé brothers and sisters, who are present in the negatives, in the form of light, in the sacred herbs.
Movido pelos ensinamentos, pontos e toques que aprendi, o trabalho busca caminhar na direção oposta da descrição etnográfica que historicamente asselvajou as nossas práticas através de imagens estereotipadas.
Driven by the teachings, songs, and rhythms I have learned, the work moves in the opposite direction of the ethnographic description that has historically savaged our practices through stereotypical images.
Here, subversion is the genesis of the final product: good and evil, poison and medicine, sin and miracle are diluted, coexist and intertwined.
Triptych Owner of the Cabaret , 2023
35mm negatives bathed in beer and cachaça
100cm x 210cm (100cm x 70cm)
Circulation 1/7 (+ 1 AP)