Marilene Ribeiro: Photo-Rituals for Disappearance (signed)

In ‘Photo-Rituals for Disappearance’ I expand from my own personal territory –which comprises my own body and story– to confront the social and political territory of misogyny –which has oppressed and violated female bodies from immemorial times to the present day.
By revealing rituals for “disappearance” that I conceive and perform with other women to heal a traumatic experience of love and death I had, this work celebrates the ancient, magical way women have to deal with love and remedy. I absorb the aura of pagan rituals to praise these powers of care and healing we inherited from female shamans, healers and midwives who came before us, to shape this work as a form of resistance, a counterpoint to the stigmatization and persecution of the female being we have lived over time –labelled as “witch”, “hag”. This work deconstructs that misogynistic discourse and brings about a new perspective based on the power of the ‘woman-being’.
It is estimated that 70 percent of the people who were tortured and executed in the witch hunts of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries were women. The horror that permeated daily life at that time reflects the prejudice and persecution against women that are still alive today, all over the world. As a woman born and raised in Latin America, I wonder how much of this image and stigma we inherited from the Global North and how it resonated and still resonates here in Brazil. The United Nations has reported an increase in the number of women murdered around the world in the last decade, accused of witchcraft. As extremism and intolerance regain strength in both the social and political realms, I feel it is urgent for our society to revisit and discuss these issues –in particular, the historical debt owed to all women, past and present, beyond geographical borders.
To articulate this historical debt to women and celebrate our healer-essence, I bring together elements from various sources that connect the Global North with the Global South, past with present, and photography with other media (illustration, video, expired analogue film, 17th-century women’s recipes for natural remedies, current-time fortune teller leaflets, cyanotype, manuscripts and poetry).