Bembe
Through The King's Eyes
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PRESENTATION
BEMBÉ: THE FESTIVAL OF THE KING’S EYES is a visual exhibition that unveils, through images, the historical, symbolic, and political depth of the Bembé do Mercado — the longest-standing Afro-Brazilian celebration of the abolition of slavery and the only one held by a Black community in the form of Candomblé practiced in the streets. Celebrated since 1889 in Santo Amaro, Bahia, Bembé emerges as an expression of faith, resistance, and the invention of life in the face of the social exclusion that marked May 14, 1888, when the newly freed Black population found itself without work, housing, or rights.
The exhibition is an integral part of the research developed by Roque Boa Morte, who, over the course of five years, constructed a visual body of work through an optical writing approach and a decolonial visual methodology (ch’ixi). The collection of more than 9,000 images is now part of the Afro-Digital Museum of African and Afro-Brazilian Memory, maintained by UFBA, representing an important contribution to academic research and the preservation of Black memory in Brazil and beyond.
Among the records are unpublished images from the pandemic period, captured during the years in which the rituals had to adapt to a time of isolation, fear, and mourning. Roque’s lens followed children who grew up, elders who passed on, and leaders who stood firm — a community that, even in dark times, continued to dance, pray, offer, and celebrate.
More than a visual testimony, BEMBÉ: THE FESTIVAL OF THE KING’S EYES is an act of affirmation, memory, and belonging. The title refers to Xangô, the orixá who is the patron of the celebration — the divinity of justice and fire, the one who sees all — and who watches over the festival, the community, and its people. Xangô, who also guides the path of the founder of the Bembé and of the researcher himself, sees through them.
Here, the image is not just a record — it is also testimony, offering, and the foundation of a possible future.
Dr. João Mouzart / UFS
Anthropologist, Historian, and Professor at UFS
CURATORIAL TEXT
In the Time of Bembé – Memories in the Storm
The Bembé do Mercado transforms the city's most everyday space — the public market — into sacred ground. There, where goods mingle with local memory and history, the orixás arrive and give new meaning to the architecture of everyday life, turning ordinary gestures into extraordinary practices and everyday ground into sacred altars.
Occupying the market with Bembé then becomes a radical gesture: an affirmation that the sacred Afro-Brazilian will no longer be confined to the backstage, but on the contrary, reinvents itself and manifests itself in an open square, among stalls, people, objects, and celebration, as proposed with the exhibition Bembé – A Festa dos Olhos do Rei.
Through the eyes of Roque Boa Morte, an artist born in the land, I feel this manifesto-event as a gesture of living “in the storm,” calling on the dead, ancestors, and the living to resist together in shared territory. The heritage is now the market, and each reference portrayed is the embodiment of the Recôncavo place of memory. There, all the bodies hold what History tried to erase.
Roque sees with his entire body, with a strength that comes from the ground. Since he was a child, he has walked among the rites and affections of Santo Amaro, attentive to memories that cannot be written with words alone. His presence in this work is not that of a visitor or observer, but that of a conscious heir to its history, who transforms memory into language and devotion into a curatorial gesture. Looking at Bembé through him is like rediscovering the festival from within — with tenderness, rigor, and deep responsibility.
Greeting Exu, the lord of the crossroads, the messenger between worlds, Boa Morte, the eye that allows us to look at Bembé, refuses colonial obedience and builds his own trails, offering his work as a force of transformation, communication, and balance between this world and the sacred, where our ancestry lives.
In this context, this curatorship proposes to see the rite as writing, the song as testimony, body as resistance. And, if colonial history produced memories of pain, we continue to (re)exist despite it. We are the trail that the ships left and that Bembé insists on transforming into life.
Through the set of selected photographs, we propose a deep listening of the meanings of history and black resistance, fundamental for the critique of the colonial world and for the emergence of the festival as a counter-colonial tool/device.
In this exhibition, we are invited to see/read the Bembé as an archive inscribed on the skin, resisting the storm of racism with the strength of ancestral winds. This exhibition is also an invitation to rethink the role of museums. By welcoming the Bembé, the street opens up to the sacred, to the body and to orality as legitimate forms of knowledge. Each element on display here is more than an object: it is a sign of belonging, of struggle, of insurgent memory. They do not ask permission to exist in the museum — they force the museum to remake itself in the presence of them.
We demand here a curatorship committed to listening, to historical reparation, and to the recognition of ordinary people as readers and heritage creators.
May this exhibition-travel be received by people with respect, openness, and reverence for the unknown, for what does not bow, for what shows itself while hiding tricks and cunning of war. Those who dreamed of a more just, plural, black, and ALIVE world!
Dr. Jamile Borges da Silva/CEAO-UFBA.
Anthropologist, Professor and Director of Pós-Afro UFBA.
