Mitra - Pólo de Inovação Social / Pavilhão I

Beco da Mitra, 1950-051 Lisboa

10 . 10 . 2026 → 15 . 11 . 2026

thursday - sunday → 02:30 pm – 06:30 pm

Artist

Ian Cheibub

Seven-string guitarist and ogan in an Umbanda house led for five generations by his grandmother, Ian Cheibub is a visual artist born in Niterói who works between Brazil and France. His work questions the conditions of visibility, control, and objectivity inherited from colonial modernity, placing artistic production in tension with the relationships between human and non-human entities, within a logic of listening and counterpoint. Through image, sculpture, video, sound, and installation, Ian develops collaborative processes that displace the authority of the author and challenge conventional logics of image production.

Alumbre na Macaia is a research project in which I incorporate into my artistic practice the teachings I inherited from my grandmother, my father, and my ancestors within the Umbanda temple. I employ the ancestral technology of herbal baths on the very negatives I photograph in the terreiro, literally bathing them before developing them.

To alumbrar means both to illuminate oneself and to become enchanted. Macaia is a sacred place, as well as the term used to refer to the sacred leaves employed in Umbanda and Candomblé. Alumbre na Macaia is, therefore, a process of "macumbalizing" photography and "photographizing" macumba.

There is a dialectical interplay that intersects macumbeira poetics and aesthetics. On one hand, through the herbal baths, I bring forth a visuality shaped and guided by chance, accidents, ruptures, and deviations—much like the religious construction of Brazilian enchantments. On the other, there is the act of literally bathing, in sacred herbs, my irmãos de axé, who are present in the negatives as forms of light.