I am a black woman, quilombola, urbanist, master of territorial studies, I live in the Reconcavo Baiano, specifically in “Acupe”, an ancestral territory. I fight for the demarcation and preservation of the fishing area and the quilombola territory. I am coordinator of the Collective Rainhas do Mar, which works to improve the financial autonomy of women, shellfish gatherers, and rural producers. I also work as a cultural articulator and as a photographer by passion.
Joelma Gomes Ferreira
Floresta: território sagrado
(Forest: sacred territory)
The forest, as sacred territory, is also the umbilical cord that nourishes the bodies and, dialectically, territorializes and is territorialized.
Floresta: território sagrado is a photography exhbition that showcases the territoriality of the saint people (povos de santos) in the Tijuca Forest, Rio de Janeiro, based on the ebós performed in the surroundings and within the forest. Their representativeness, demarcated in this geographical area gives visibility to the feeling of belonging, to religious beliefs, to the strategy of safeguarding ancestral practices and the experience of a place that interweaves the lived, the symbolic, the individual, and the collective.
For saint people (povos de santos) and native peoples, the forest is a sacred territory, home to the NKisese, Yuxibu, Orixás, and Voduns. Home of the energy that nourishes the body and the spirit. An ecosystem of lives and immateriality, which holds the secrets inscribed in different times, languages, plants, and essences. For these reasons it is there that the axé, faith, and the search for balance, for the self and, above all, for the us, are deposited closer to nature.
This look at the territorialities of ebós in times of such incisive religious intolerance, is a political act. An act of resistance that represents the right to Afro-Brazilian religious freedom and the right to use the forest for ritualistic purposes. Such practices are of the utmost importance to unite the material and the immaterial, besides allowing the transfer of knowledge, the construction of memories, knowledge, and culture under the protagonism of the black people.
The forest, as sacred territory, is also the umbilical cord that nourishes the bodies and, dialectically, territorializes and is territorialized.
Realização
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