Dei a volta e torno a voltar: visualidades do encantamento na Jurema Sagrada

Abstract

The photographic project “Dei a volta e torno a voltar: visualidades do encantamento na Jurema Sagrada” presents an autoethnographic and visual investigation into Jurema Sagrada, an Afro-Indigenous spiritual tradition rooted in Northeastern Brazil. Based on the author's lived experience in the Casa de Jurema of Mestre Carlos, located in the rural area of Extremoz/RN, the research weaves together spirituality, memory, and image as tools for creation, listening, and re-signification. The outcome is a photobook, structured in four parts, that brings together poetic and performative visual records as a language in itself. Photography, in this context, is understood as a practice that transforms the body-terreiro into a territory of knowledge. Grounded in authors such as Tina M. Campt and the concept of mitopoetics Durand (1993), the work proposes a gaze that values ancestral knowledge, subjectivity, and plural ways of existing. By stitching together memory, image, and spirituality, the work seeks to reconstruct silenced narratives, reinscribe identities, and affirm Jurema as a place of belonging and transformation, resulting in the creation of a photobook.