Ancestral breath

About the work

Ancestral breath foregrounds the ritual pipe and sacred smoke as instruments of healing and diagnosis in traditional Indigenous medicines. The painting approaches the act of blowing the smoke of plants of power not merely as a symbolic action, but as a legitimate technology of care and purification acting directly upon the physical and spiritual cleansing of the body.

In this composition, the green tobacco leaves and the angico flowers at the base of the canvas speak directly to living botany and to the therapeutic properties of the herbs that make up health pluralism. The smoke rising towards the starry sky draws a decolonial bridge where the active principle of plants merges with the force of enchantment and with the healing breath of the pajés. In resignifying this knowledge, the work affirms that traditional healing resists in the continuous gesture of blowing life, keeping alive the memory of communities and the sovereignty of their own health processes.

Jurema and sacred tobacco are conduits of millennia-old rituals, where smoke lifts prayers and intertwines the material world with the spiritual.