FIGA
ANCESTRAL HANDS
PRESENTATION
It all began with a jacarandá figa amulet.
An old object, left behind by my grandfather, that one day found its way into my hands — and stayed there, like a whisper asking to be heard. It was through it that I discovered: the amulet figa was not born in Africa, but it arrived in Brazil mostly through Black hands, reimagined in the body of the diaspora as protection, gesture, prayer, blade.
This work traces that rooted memory. Each figa in the series was shaped from the actual hand of a child of an Orixá, with whom I built, in communion and listening, visualities that weave together axé, ancestry, and endurance. Every detail matters: the chosen metal, the precise bead color, the gold cowrie, the Oxóssi arrow shaped as a bracelet, the pure white of Oxalufã. Each symbol is a key.
The series reflects on the Afro-Brazilian presence within this Western amulet — a presence that, until now, remained at the edges of books and sight. To bring it forward, I walked between Gantois (in Salvador) and Ilê Axé Ojú Onirê (in Santo Amaro), where oral tradition and living axés taught me what the museum has yet to name.
This project is ritual gesture. A body-object crossing time. A hand that wards off evil — and draws in what is good.
CURATORIAL TEXT
Figa: acts and gestures for symbolic transfiguration – ritual
The human hand inscribes the gesture — ritual.
At times right, at times left, it traces crossroads, mysteries, and ancestral knowledge, becoming a figa: a gesture where the thumb pressed between the index and middle finger transcends movement and materializes as symbol.
The body of work “Figas, Ancestral Hands” represents an investigation aimed at reactivating the meaning of the figa symbol through the Afro-Brazilian experience-gesture. The twelve hands — their forms and signals — reflect the photographer’s own unrest, shaping a visual composition of the elements and practices that surround him. Roque was born in Santo Amaro da Purificação, in the Recôncavo of Bahia — a space-body, a territory of cultural and religious resistance. In this locus, his sensibility expands, becoming a Force that manifests genealogies and memories through visual language.
In a moment of deep self-perception, the Figa Omolu suddenly opened a sensory field within me, triggering a psychic state of remembrance — childhood clinical images tied to skin, ancestral marks, skin conditions… In a matter of seconds — a flash of memory; a scream. Then came the silence that twisted my mind. What had begun as an individual experience unfolded into something larger: an expanded perception, a growing totality I could only name as an ancestral connection to the power of the ritual-gesture — or the “trance” evoked by the images choreographed by Roque Boa Morte.
Juci Reis
Curator
