Aesthetic Manifestations of the ‘Nobody’
Ex-votos and the Biomorphic Forms of Sonia Gomes
by
Laura Harris
…how is it possible that that which should happen to nobody, to 'no human being', has consistently delineated the existence of so many human beings - those whose bodies signify something that seem to escape all that should be comprehended by the Enlightenment notion of humanity, and its ontoepistemological descriptors, namely universality and historicity.
— Denise Ferreira da Silva, “No-Bodies”
Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that, one magical day, good luck will suddenly rain down on them – will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down, yesterday, today, tomorrow or ever. Good luck doesn’t even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day on their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.
The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way.
Who are not, but could be.
Who don’t speak languages, but dialects.
Who don’t have religions, but superstitions.
Who don’t create art, but handicrafts.
Who don’t have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.
— Eduardo Galeano, “Nobodies,” The Book of Embraces
The Modern Art Week staged in São Paulo in 1922, which purported to inaugurate modernist art in Brazil, was, as Nita Nunes and Rafael Cardoso among others have noted, primarily an elite, white, Paulista affair. It was inspired, in part, by the incorporation into European art—in cubism or dadaism, for example—of elements of “primitive” aesthetics that Europeans had encountered in the circuits structured by European colonialism and slavery. European artists replicated those encounters and their attendant modes of extraction; and the long trajectory of modern European art, stretching from the sixteenth century refinements to the twentieth century refusals of representation, restaged the conditions that framed and defined modernity itself.
The Brazilian artists involved in Modern Art Week found themselves ambivalently situated with respect to this primitivism, given their simultaneous proximity to and distance from European subjectivity’s seemingly easy and simultaneous claim on whiteness and universality or, as Denise Ferreira da Silva puts it, “transparency.” Modern Art Week, which coincided with the centennial of Brazilian independence, created an opportunity for those who organized it to define a specifically Brazilian modernism that would resolve that ambivalence, in which uncertainty regarding the personal identity of putatively “white’ Brazilians was bound up with their anxiety regarding the racial character of the Brazilian nation. On the one hand, the capacity of elite, white, predominantly male Brazilians to produce modern selves, modern art, and a modern nation must be compromised when their capacity for self-determination and development, for transparency and universality, had been degraded by close and prolonged contact with supposedly “primitive” indigenous and black people in the brutal, dispossessive, miscegenative and genocidal operations of supposedly “primitive” accumulation. At the same time, these operations were not only essential to the development of modern political economy, they were a quintessential expression of modernity. If the arts of modernity hold and conceal this truth at the level of content, the arts of modernism flaunt it at the level of its form. For Brazilian artists, Modern Art Week was a chance to embrace this revelation and thereby claim a personal and national racial modernity in which Brazilian whiteness and Brazilian humanity come, together and intertwined, into their own, in a specifically Paulista cosmopolitanism.
As Zita Nunes notes, Oswald de Andrade, one of Modern Art Week’s most oft-quoted spokesmen, had already declared in a 1921 article:
Our [Brazil’s] racial question is a paulista matter. The rest of the country, if it sticks with us, will move, like a body that obeys, possessed by our way, by our will (...) And this paulista question is a futurist question. No human agglomeration was ever so destined for futurism in activity, in industry, in history, in art, as the paulista agglomeration. (28)[1]
Later, in his 1924 “Manifesto of Pau-Brazil Poetry” (or “Brazil-wood Manifesto”), Andrade gives his readers a sense of the dramatic and vigorous movement of the national body he anticipates in his resounding of the rhythms and obsessions of futurist or modernist self-assertion:
As the age is miraculous, laws were born from the dynamic rotation of destructive factors.
Synthesis
Equilibrium
Automotive finish
Invention
Surprise
A new perspective
A new scale
Whatever natural force in this direction will be good.
But there were lingering doubts about the “primal” forces animating modern advance. In the same manifesto, Andrade addresses a concern raised by the Swiss-French writer Blaise Cendrars: “You have the train loaded, ready to leave. A Negro churns the crank of the turntable beneath you. The slightest carelessness and you will leave in the opposite direction to your destination” (185)[2]. In response to concerns regarding the source of the energy driving the willed forward motion of industrial development, Andrade insists, that this Negro or more broadly, “the rich ethnic formation” this Negro’s presence figures, belongs to the Brazilian subject emblematized by the “paulista agglomeration.” The “primitive” elements of Brazil are to be incorporated into modernist art through a reassertion of ownership of the land and everything in it. Negros and all that they create are among the natural resources the paulistas claim as their own. Agglomeration updates, intensifies and modernizes accumulation. Ambivalence is overcome when the primitive other, constructed as suitable for dispossession and disavowal, is also understood as proper for consumption. “Carnival in Rio…. Vegetal riches. Ore. Cuisine. Vatapá, gold and dance.” All “ours,” Andrade insists, “barbarous and ours” (184). A specifically Brazilian modernism would then “…encompass the cylinders of mills, electric turbines, factories, questions of foreign exchange, without losing sight of the National Museum,” in which the so-called primitive or non-modernist elements would be preserved while the people linked to them are subject to brutal policing and extermination (187). This is the mode of “synthesis” that will move the laggard national body, and the manifesto’s fast-paced juxtaposition of disconnected and seemingly opposed terms simulates that propulsion.
Andrade goes further still in his poetic and performative “Anthropophagic Manifesto,” published in 1928. Veering away from what he had referred to earlier as the “indigestions of erudition,” he adopts anthropophagy, or cannibalism—a key sign, in European writing of the primitivity in and of Brazil—as a metaphorical model for a specifically Brazilian modernism, tied to a specifically Brazilian national identity (187). If Europeans viewed the Brazilian subject as debased due to its intermingling and miscegenation with the so-called primitive, and if cannibalism as imagined in European writing is a key sign of primitivity, then Andrade’s occupation of the position of the cannibal, his proposed cannibal incorporation of the very idea of cannibal incorporation, constitutes his, and Brazil’s, reply.[3] The ideal Andrade announces and performs here (rewriting Brazilian history in this document by dating it “the 374th year of the swallowing of Bishop Sardinha”), suggests another mode of synthesis, a more complete incorporation of everything that is “not mine” — both the European “Law of Man” and the “Law of the cannibal”— which would leave no trace behind (44, 38).
Andrade’s proposals for Brazilian modernism anticipate and extend the conversations that took place in the context of the Modern Art Week.[4] Again, these conversations occur in the context of the broader intellectual and political discussions about how to secure Brazil’s status as a modern nation, led onward by the Brazilian subject whose will and capacity to determine and stay the forward course depends on the revaluation of the taint of those considered to be its primitive and, as Denise Ferreira da Silva has argued, “affectable” racialized others.[5] If completely consumed, everything that is considered primitive becomes nourishing, even invigorating, and those associated with it are absorbed and ultimately disappear.
As Nunes and Cardoso have noted, Andrade’s is not the only modernist aesthetic to emerge in Brazil at this time. They point to many other contemporaneous modernist practices, understanding Brazilian modernism to be, as Cardoso puts it, “a diverse and dispersed historical phenomenon.”[6] I am interested, however, in another aesthetic practice that is not generally thought of as modernist, or as art, or even as specifically Brazilian. And while it is contemporaneous, it is not strictly so, thereby troubling the timeline that is supposed to allow the charting of the primitive, the modern and the contemporary. I am referring to the practice of making and offering ex-voto objects, particularly the iterations of that practice that seem to be a key focus for Brazilian scholars: those found in Northeastern Brazil. I do not intend here to re-define this practice as Brazilian modernist art. I want to suggest, instead, that this practice constitutes another way of representing and contending with modernity, with the meeting of different social formations and aesthetic traditions, with the brutal effects of modes of contact still structured by colonialism, slavery, and their afterlives.
The European modernist incorporations of “primitivism” that inspired Brazilian modernists restage and, at the same time, renegotiate this contact. While they appear as disruptions, formally speaking, in prevailing forms of representation, most fundamentally Renaissance realism, they work, I would argue, to represent, and in so doing, manage, contain, and perhaps even compensate for the violent social disruptions that modernity produced, often by figuring fragmentation or jarring juxtaposition resolved by various modes of synthesis. The Northeastern ex-voto tries, too, to register and contend with these violent disruptions, but in a very different way. It does so without regard for art as institutionalized in and by imperialist formations in Brazil, though not without regard for aesthetics. More appropriate here would be the term offered by curator Naine Terena who, when presenting indigenous “works” in art contexts where their force cannot quite be registered, prefers to call them “aesthetic manifestations.”[7]
The ex-voto, promised and offered by those who are suffering and in need of support, in gratitude for the assistance of a saint, has both attracted and frustrated scholars, who have had difficulty interpreting the ex-voto. Among the causes of that difficulty is the fact that the ex-voto cannot be definitively placed, historically or geographically. Its origins are nebulous; it appears in many disparate places at the same time, and across time. It does not seem to belong or to express ideas and values proper to anybody.
For art historians it is also “vulgar,” “mediocre,” “unseemly,” and persistently so. It seems, as Georges Didi-Huberman has noted in his study of some of its European iterations, not to significantly transform or evolve, stylistically speaking, resisting placement within usual art historical narratives of progress and improvement. “Their aesthetic mediocrity, their formulaic and stereotypical character, sets them apart,” he observes, “from any ‘grand’ history of style” (7). While J. von Schlosser tries to place the ex-voto in a lineage that would arrive, ultimately, at the realist Renaissance portrait, Schlosser’s efforts are frustrated, Didi-Huberman argues, by the fact that the older forms don’t disappear.[8] They seem instead to proliferate and accumulate, overwhelming, in some settings, the very Renaissance portraits Schlosser valorizes.
Moreover, even when provisionally understood as materially diverse and even motley “portraits” that take the form of a recognizable head and face, the ex-voto can just as easily be given in the deformation of a hand, or a hypertrophic testicle, or even a lump of wax of the same weight as the vow-maker that is shaped and reshaped through contact with the vow-maker and the objects around it. Resemblance, Didi-Huberman notes, might also be established through multiple overlapping forms of representation. If this is portraiture, then what kind is it? The ex-voto, Huberman argues, might best be understood as “a…field in perpetual constitution” that requires alternative heuristics of resemblance and meaning (11).
As I have noted, in Brazil the focus has often been on the ex-voto’s appearance in the Northeast, considered, due to its racial demographics, one of the most “primitive” regions of Brazil and, therefore, most threatening in its seeming backwardness, its potential to derail the direction set by the precarious will of the modernist artist and subject of Brazil even as Andrade tries to define him. The ex-voto of Northeast Brazil appears to have been “discovered” inadvertently by Luís Saia, an architect who participated in the Modern Art Week and was later sent by Mario de Andrade and Oneyda Alvarenga on an ethnographic expedition to the area to search for raw folkloric material.[9] Observing similarities between the ex-votos he found there and African sculpture, Saia compared them to the works of European modernism, to cubism in particular, which standard European art history tells us introduced African aesthetics into European art forms and which been a crucial inspiration for Brazilian modernists.[10] What does this comparison suggest? How might we make sense of this modernist’s discovery, of what appears as either another, popular modernism or as a non-modernism that seems nevertheless to resonate with modernist forms and concerns?
Later studies take care to reframe the ex-voto of Northeastern Brazil by tracing the geographical and historical trajectory of the form through Portugal to the ancient Greeks and Romans and to the pagan antecedents to Western “Civilization.” They also take great care to differentiate the ex-voto of Northeastern Brazil from these precursors, understanding it less in art historical and more in anthropological terms. What art historians consider to be the vulgarity of the ex-voto, these scholars describe as its simplicity, which they attribute to the “extraclassical,” non-Mediterranean or non-Iberian components of Northeastern Brazilian culture.[11] Experts try to detect and parse the “primitivities” of the African and Amerindian traditions that were dislocated there by identifying their specific marks, in a type of forehead, for example, or a style of carving. Such marks, featured in the individuated specimens displayed in exhibitions or catalogs, are often given as the discovery of the astute collector. Or they are given as the discovery of the photographer whose discerning vision is able to draw out what Mário Barata, when describing photographs taken by Mario Cravo Neto, refers to as the ex-voto’s most significant “planes, depressions and saliences” (136). It is this discerning vision of the photographer or the “sociophotographer” whose practice is “imbued with a scientific approach” that the anthropologist Gilberto Freire likens to his own, that is able to illuminate, literally and figuratively, and to “reveal and fix” the ex-voto’s exoticized “primitive” features (129).[12] The precise signs of “pure” Africanity or Amerindianness are elusive, impossible to pinpoint and almost always understood to be rapidly disappearing as they are overtaken by the modes of production and the aesthetics of the modernizing nation. The identification and interpretation are, as Mário Barata notes in his discussion of Saia’s study, not necessarily reasonable or proven, and as others have noted, often a matter of conjecture (132).
But what if we decline to treat the ex-voto of Northeastern Brazil as a site in which primitive aesthetics—understood to have infiltrated a fundamentally European or proto-European art form, however lowly—might be filtered, fixed and studied as relic, or raw material to be more deliberately or willfully deployed by Brazilian modernists and absorbed into Brazilian modernist art? And what if we refuse to treat it as another, alternative modernism that restages this absorption on a lower frequency? What if, instead, we understand it as representing the meeting of different social formations and aesthetic traditions through the colonialism and slavery that create the conditions of possibility for such absorption? The ex-voto of Northeastern Brazil is non-modernist insofar as it resists and confounds the progressive or developmental historical narratives upon which modern thought relies and insofar as it defies resolution through absorption or any other kind of synthesis while registering, instead, and in many instances, the brutality of this meeting and the marks it leaves behind.
The “marks” that capture my attention are wounds. Sometimes explicitly and sometimes more implicitly rendered, these are wounds that the vow-maker has endured. The objects—for example, a torso bearing a large scar, a head and torso with a broken neck, or a detached breast or foot, or a crutch no longer needed—memorialize the wound, keeping it open even if it has been soothed. Why does this offer of thanks for an answered prayer, this testimony to the miracle of survival, seem to demand that these wounds be kept open and on display? [13]
Also striking is the way these objects are offered and arranged. The ex-voto, which I have been discussing in the singular form, does not usually appear as such. Rather, it appears together with others, not in galleries or museums, but in chapels, in sheds adjacent to chapels, or in informally and provisionally sacralized spaces that can be created almost anywhere. They might even appear on the side of the road, at the site of a violent death of someone “very young and innocent or…socially exploited” or upon “the passing of a charismatic figure,” either of which might be unofficially canonized by those who return there as a saint capable of healing.[14] They are arranged, Fatima Bercht notes, in what appear to be messy, haphazard piles, excessive heaps, overflowing bins, “chaotic assemblages,” in a “total disarray” (11-12) not unlike the “rockery” Didi-Huberman describes, that surrounds and seems to overwhelm and overtake the real art, the realist portraits they are supposed to merely prefigure (10). It seems, from these descriptions, that the disorderly jumbles in which ex-votos appear, without names or dates, touching, intertwined, indistinct, also pose difficulties for scholars who generally separate them, treating them as individual works or specimens that they then try to place within the standard interpretive frameworks art history or anthropology have produced and depended on. As I have been arguing, however, ex-votos, especially in the plurality of their form, resists such placement.
Can we think of these images as poor images? Poor, not merely because they are associated with poor people, or because they are considered vulgar and unseemly or simple and humble, but in the sense that Hito Steyerl proposes when discussing unidentified bone fragments found in the mass graves of those killed during the Spanish Civil War? Are they, as she puts it, “subaltern and indeterminate object[s], excluded from legitimate discourse, from becoming fact, subject to disavowal, indifference…” that nevertheless record the conditions that brought them into being and, perhaps, vengeful resistance to those conditions and to those who make and maintain those conditions? Are they then, what Steyerl calls, in her account of poor images, “fossilized diagrams of political and physical violence”? (156) A vow can be a wish, a desire, a prayer that expresses a longing, but a vow can also be a curse.
But if ex-votos record and prophesy violence, the chapels in which they are placed are not mass graves. Nor do the ex-votos refer to an image of a whole body, individual or national, from which they have been detached .[15] In these chapels on the side of the road in Northeastern Brazil, in the expansive and ever-expanding assemblages that form there, we find not the fragments that remain of once whole, individual bodies, “now generic, faceless, all mixed up,” as Steyerl describes (151), but displays of the wounds left on no-bodies, on flesh that does not make up any originary or newly synthesized whole.[16] In these sites, where the wounds that proliferate and accumulate are held open, as local versions of the continental open veins Eduardo Galeano describes, the affectability of resources for extraction and consumption is also a reservoir of alternative modes of generativity. [17] This generativity is aesthetic and social. It passes from the vow-maker through the saint, through the artisan who might be a friend or neighbor or even the vow-maker herself. It passes through the material, the bits of wood and clay, “vegetal riches and ore,” that elude the Paulista agglomeration’s grasp. It passes through the offerings amassed in these sites and the alternative kinds of mass that are performed there.[18]
This generativity also passes through the social circuits in which the kinds of objects or aesthetic manifestations that Sonia Gomes has been making emerge. These aesthetic manifestations (black, feminine and marginal, Gomes reminds us), are layered, multitextured things.[19] They are composed from scraps of fabric and other materials: a dress, for example, a T-shirt, a tablecloth, a wedding invitation, a book of fables, or even driftwood carried across the sea. These materials hold memories of their making by various hands (including those who operate the machines at the textile factory in Caetonópolis, where Gomes was born), as well as memories of the occasions they have helped articulate.[20] They bring together cast-offs and gifts that are stained, stretched and torn, marked by contact. Gomes works with accumulations of remnants that bear the imprints of all that have held and worn and passed them on. The materials she gathers and arranges are draped, layered, woven, twisted, knotted, bundled, and stitched together. The complex forms that emerge include voids and hidden cavities marked by pointedly exposed seams that resemble the scars that come from what physicist Karen Barad calls a “cutting together-apart” of a physical history of sharing against stealing. [21]
These new forms are biomorphic. Gomes insists on pointing this out because no one seems to notice:
I was [from early on] delighted with drawings of internal organs of the human body that I found in science and biology books. The tissues of the body, the vertebrae, the cartilages and muscles, lost me for hours in the colors and textures, do you know that this reflects my work a lot and nobody has said it? It’s a lot about my interior, about a hidden part of the body, the part that we do not see, my work has a lot of this…. I think my relationship with aesthetics also came first from this imagery.[22]
These forms are not recognizable, however, as bodies or even body parts. They envision and produce instead new arrangements of flesh that do not forget either the brutality or the tenderness by which it has been touched and thereby cut. The seams—which Gomes learned to sew from her grandmother, who was a healer and a midwife—do not resolve but keep open the question posed by the ex-votos of Northeastern Brazil: why is the healing of the wound bound up with laying it bare?
[1]I am citing the translation Zita Nunes offers in Cannibal Democracy. Nunes notes that she found the citation in Mário da Silva Brito’s História do modernismo brasileiro: antecedentes do Semana de Arte Moderna (1978).
[2] Zita Nunes also calls attention to this passage in Cannibal Democracy (37).
[3] The anthropophagy proposed here is Andrade’s own invention. As Denilson Baniwa has argued, indigenous understandings of anthropophagy are quite different.
[4] For a fuller account of these conversations, see Zita Nunes’s Cannibal Democracy and Rafael Cardoso’s Modernity in Black and White.
[5] See Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of Race.
[6] Rafael Cardoso, Modernity in Black and White.
[7] Naine Terena, guest lecture in “Indigenous Arts in the Americas: Old and New Media,” course taught by Natalia Brizuela, Julia Bryan-Wilson and Beth Piatote, at the University of California, Berkeley, March 16, 2022.
[8] The study Didi-Huberman cites is J. von Schlosser, Histoire du portrait en cire [1911].
[9] Saia’s 1938 expedition, undertaken under the auspices of the Departmento de Cultura da Prefeitura de São Paulo, echoes the one taken in 1924 by several other participants in the Modern Art Week (including both Oswald de Andrade and Mário Andrade) with the Swiss-French poet Blaise Cendrars, to Minas Gerais.
[10] As noted in Mário Barata, “The Sculptured Ex-voto in Brazilian Popular Art”. See also Luís Saia’s Escultura popular brasileira, the first published study of the ex-voto in Northeastern Brazil.
[11] I am taking the term “extraclassical” from P. M. Bardi’s preface to Exvoto by Mario Cravo Neto. See also Luís Saia’s Escultura popular brasileira).
[12] Gilberto Freire’s “Introduction” to Exvoto by Mario Cravo Neto.
[13] I take this understanding of the ex-voto as testimony from Fabiana Lopes de Paula, “Misrecórdia e Triunfo: As dobras de Fé”.
[14]Fatima Bercht describes in detail one of these unofficial chapels, as well as Saia’s speculation about this phenomenon, in her essay “Miracles: Votive Offerings in Northeastern Brazil”. Lélia Coelho Frota also discusses these and the pilgrimages made to them in her essay “The Ex-Voto of Northeastern Brazil: Its Antecedents and Contemporary Expression”. Both appear in House of Miracles: Votive Sculptures from Northeastern Brazil. Mário Barata discusses Luís Saia’s documentation of this phenomenon in his 1944 book. See Mário Barata, “The Sculptured Ex-voto in Brazilian Popular Art”. See also Luís Saia, Escultura popular brasileira.
[15] Nor do they refer to the body Oswald de Andrade invokes when he declares that “the rest of the country, if it sticks with us, will move, like a body that obeys, possessed by our way, by our will…” in “Reforma Literária,” cited above.
[16] I am invoking Hortense J. Spillers’s use of this term in the context of slavery and the many studies that use has inspired. See hers “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”. See, for example, page 67, where she writes: “…I would make a distinction…between “body” and “flesh” and impose that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions. In that sense, before the “body”, there is the “flesh,” that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography. Even though the European hegemonies stole bodies—some of them female—out of West African communities in concert with the African “middleman,” we regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, as the person of African females and African males registered the wounding. If we think of the “flesh” as a primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or “escaped” overboard.”
[17] See Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent.
[18] They are, as Lélia Coelho Frota notes, “living works which attest to the capacity for invention, transformation and preservation of shared memories” but living, here is perhaps not fully encapsulated by Van Gennep’s account of the “rite of passage” which Frota uses to explain the pilgrimage that, for her, ultimately defines the ex-voto (rather than the form).
[19] Sonia Gomes interviewed by Júlia Rebouças, 19th Edition of the Festival de Arte Contemporânea Sesc_Video Brasil: Panoramas do Sul, Association Cultural Videobrasil (São Paulo, 2015), exhibition catalog. Cited in Sonia Gomes, “Sonia Gomes,” Artists, Pace Gallery, https://www.pacegallery.com/artists/sonia-gomes/, accessed May 27, 2022.
[20] This list includes items mentioned by several different writers, including: Ricardo Sardenberg, “Weaving the Morning” in Sonia Gomes, Sonia Gomes, eds. Isabel Diegues and Julia Barbosa (Rio de Janeiro: Editora de Livros Cobogó, 2018), exhibition catalog; Jill Langlois, “Fabrics with Powerful Stories to Tell,” New York Times, August 28, 2020; and Maximiliano Durón, “Sonia Gomes Creates a Sculpture: The Brazilian artist finds the poetry in fabric and materials she makes her own,” ARTnews (October/November 2021).
[21] As Gomes says, “My sewing makes a mark. I make sure I leave the seams exposed” (15). See also Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway.
[22] Sonia Gomes, “Sonia Gomes’s Life Doesn’t Frighten Me,” Broadcasts, Blum and Poe, https://www.blumandpoe.com/broadcasts/sonia_gomes, accessed May 27, 2022.
WORKS CITED
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Barros, Janaina and Wagner Leite Viana, “Haptics as Healing Method for a Politics of Affect”. Sonia Gomes, I Rise: I’m a Black Ocean Leaping and Wide. Editors Patria Kamp, Translation Adriana Francisco. Edition Cantze, 2020.
Bercht, Fatima. “Miracles: Votive Offerings in Northeastern Brazil”. House of Miracles: Votive Sculpture from Northeastern Brazil. Editors Marguerita Feitlowitz and Elizabeth Ferrer. Translation Jeffrey S. Ruth. Americas Society, 1989.
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de Andrade, Oswald. “Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry.”
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de Andrade, Oswald. “Cannibalist Manifesto.” Latin American Literary Review Vol. 19, No. 38, 1991. Translation Leslie Bary
de Paula, Fabiana Lopes, “Misrecórdia e Triunfo: As dobras de Fé”. Ex-votos do Brasil: Arte e folkcommunicaçao, editor José Cláudio Alves de Oliveira. Quarteto Editora, 2016.
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