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"To a foreign gaze, Brazilian spiritual imagination may appear extraordinary. It is a plural field, where manifestations intertwine in living networks. Within this pulsating rhizome, Christian matrices coexist with Afro-Atlantic and Indigenous knowledge systems, announcing a philosophy of enchantment. Here, Encanto is a real presence."
— Nathalia Grilo
In the south of Maranhão, it reveals itself in embodied, land-based practices that for centuries have functioned as communal technologies in the face of historical violence. These are the forces that make the body, the home, and the forest into places of memory and invention. In Brazil, to speak of spirituality is to touch the forces that sustain life at its very root.
Zuilla was the name of the mãe de santo of artist Pedro Neves’s great-grandmother, a spiritual leader and guardian of a terreiro dedicated to Saint Francis, whose presence vibrates in Ceará in the form of a powerful river. During the drought of the 1930s, Pedro’s family journeyed from Ceará to Maranhão, carrying with them prayers, small relics of earth, and the memory of that house of care.
Zuilla is not merely a memory, but a trace of spiritual lineage, a gesture of passage, a point of encounter between popular faith, displacement, and the reorganization of life.
The Green Flags (Bandeiras Verdes) were a pilgrimage movement inspired by a prophecy attributed to Father Cícero, foretelling the existence of a “promised land.” These groups traveled mostly westward, toward Eastern Amazonia, in slow trajectories marked by devotions and temporary settlements. Their communities organized themselves through popular religious practices, a truly counter-hegemonic juridical and social system.
Some of the precepts associated with the movement, such as refraining from cutting the forest or hunting, are today understood as expressions of environmental care. Thus, the Green Flags form a singular chapter in the history of internal migration in Brazil, weaving together faith, community reconstruction, and alternative modes of territorial belonging.
Pedro Neves is the son of these many Brazils. His family has traversed migrations, gathering popular culture and forms of faith that shape his body and imagination. From the Ceará of Father Cícero to the Maranhão of his Indigenous ancestors, earthly and supernatural knowledge flourishes, guided by a unique cosmogony that leads Pedro along the paths of his forebears. In this crossing, he encounters sertanejo dreams that scatter migrant traces along the country’s roads.
This exhibition, therefore, summons the enchantments safeguarded in the veins of terecozeiro masters, visionary priests, forest beings, and invisible presences that nourish the faith guiding his clan and so many other communities.
“Zuilla: Bandeiras Verdes is a collective memory of a past... of one of the enchanted Maranhão landscapes, where the people of the freshwater once lived and planted in peace,” says the artist.
To tell this story, Pedro ventures beyond the human. Extinct fruits, plants of power, forest creatures, and old huts appear as beings that breathe and speak. Visagens and encantados traverse his works, offering other possibilities of existence.
Across fourteen pieces, he composes a remembrance of devotional murmurs coming from the world of Encante - from a time when religion and reality were indistinguishable, for religion was reality.
The first section of the exhibition presents music as a mediator between life and Encante, a bridge sustaining the passage between the material and the invisible worlds. Here, sound assumes the role of narrator for popular cultures, holding rhythms, memories, and displacements.
The path then leads to the realm of the surrupiras, where the human body and nature touch. These works respond to the expansion of agricultural frontiers, the disappearance of native plants, and the retreat of encantados who cease to dance in the terreiros when their rivers, forests, and animals no longer exist. They are images of loss and persistence, crossed by ways of living that continually reconfigure themselves.
Time flows through this body of work - from precolonial thought to a present marked by environmental tensions, always sustained by the desire for a more fertile tomorrow.
The works bring forth scenes of nature tied to dreams and enchantment, asking what images were once held by the ancestors who lived without television or photography. These paintings and objects invent another landscape, one born of memory and listening, where myth, passage, and renewal coexist.
In the artist’s words: “I am drawn to the stillness of secrets that are born, live, and die with me.”
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