Several artists have built paths outside the expected and even impossible literalism of what it would be to give a face to Malunguinho. His image in the terreiros de jurema, many times built through plaster—a material that reproduces diverse images in different religions—is often seen in the form of a naked black child with his arms around his legs, as well as exhibiting the form of a young adult wearing a necklace with animal teeth and another with feathers. The figure appears dressed in pants and carries a small wallet and a knife and is generally called Malunguinho Caboclo. We also have the image of Malunguinho Rei, which presents an image of a black man with more pompous clothes, generally in red and yellow, and presents a crown on his head.
These are the most common images in public markets, spaces that sell these images, and which are gifts mainly in Pernambuco. This imaginary helps us to perceive how beyond what is known by the practitioners of jurema, there is also something unspeakable that is not heard, but felt. Thus, these images are not what Malunguinho is, but they continue to be exercises that also mix fiction; not here as something false, but as something that expands or limits layers.
This fact teaches us to understand the complexity of the narrative creation of those who made and make these images, crossing also the artistic processes and leaving us in a dimension of non-finitude, although not infinite either, because it is linked to knowledge and knowledge cultivated within this de jurema cosmology. There is a growing interest in signs and systems, language and symbology, subjectivity instead of representation, vision instead of gaze and experimentation between texts and images.
We walked with Paula and Cyrino, and now I would like to show some other art people who are geographically closer to the imaginary about the sacred jurema in their territory. Natália Ferreira, or simply Nathê, is a graffiti artist and social educator, inhabitant of Jaboatão dos Guararapes; she has been bringing the presence of black women in her graffiti. The artist, painting on an idea of protection that is not limited to the care of the living, brings only the symbol of the bead—an element used by the juremeros—as the incarnation of Malunguinho, in a 158m2 graffiti painted in the Josué de Castro Tunnel, in the city of Recife, entitled Corporificação de Malunguinho Menino (2023). Likewise, the multimedia artist biarritzzz brings in her musical album Eu não sou afrofuturista2 (2020) passages of teachings present in religions of indigenous and African matrixes, but without allowing her artistic process to fall into the demand for transparency and literalism.