Contribution short abstract:

Using the video clips Oro Mimá, by the group Bantos Iguape, and Velejo, by Sued Nunes, we reflect on multitemporal traces in the waters of Paraguaçu and Baía de Todos os Santos, reflecting on the way they deal with the ways of life and Afro-diasporic legacies in their aesthetic-political gestures.

Contribution long abstract:

Using the video clips Oro Mimá, by the group Bantos Iguape, and Velejo, by Sued Nunes, we reflect on multitemporal traces in the waters of Paraguaçu and Baía de Todos os Santos, reflecting on the way they deal with the ways of life and Afro-diasporic legacies in their aesthetic-political gestures.

The waters of the Paraguassu River and Baía de Todos os Santos hold traces of the economic history and slavery in the region, but they also appear very explicitly in the artistic and audiovisual expressions produced there. They are the waters of Iemanjá, queen of the sea, sung in verse, prose and musical lyrics, as well as the waters of mother Oxum. It is these waters that enable ways of life, of shellfish gatherers, fishermen and riverside dwellers, that circulate axé, in a movement of biointeraction where transatlantic memories are reissued and generate confluences between the worldviews and ways of existing of the inhabitants of this territory.

We then bring out, from the photography, melody and the lyrics, some fundamental images that reveal these multitemporalities: the waters as a mirror, which reflects and also distorts colonial legacies, in a relationship of the present with the past; of vessels as extensions of bodies that cross large portions of water and that also constitute an archive of memories and documentation, in a relationship between the past and the past; that of waters as the personification of orixás; that move, dance, in the environment, in a relationship with the ancestral future.