Maya Quilolo: SNAKE ORI IS A MYSTERY OF THE WORLD

Ori de Cobra d’água is a poetic-performative experiment that allows black female’s body narrative in its Atlantic dimension. The artist approaches visuals and performative languages to investigate connections between the body and self-transformation. Born in a Quilombo (Maroon community) Maya Quilolo is an artist and researcher who carried waters from the Watu River (Rio Doce) to the Yoruba Goddess Osun in Osogbo – Nigeria. She crosses the world seeking alliances to restore life’s agreement between peoples and that cut through the American territory. Maya invites us to feel and experience this crossroad that mixes images of her own body with the rivers and routes of her work.

Each crossroad reveals the ODU (route), where we sustain the EBÓ (offer/work)

ORI DE COBRA IS A RAILROAD

The world ended when the monsters exploded their belly of reptilian magma. They had long been making wounds in their earthly flesh deepening their pain more and more. The dust from the wars of another time emerged to see the end of the world again, so it would cover iron and water secrets. When I stepped into caboclo (indigenous) soil I raised the dust of Atlantic rust. With the dust of the end, I made myself and my skin of blood and mud is a shield of war. My name is Maya Quilolo and with my subterranean snake body, I fertilize apocalyptic soils.

SNAKE’S ALIAS IS A WAR TRAIL

While captured aura whispers blows in the ear. My ori (head) appoints the way of the narrow yet inevitable body. The white space squeezes sensitivity. Against the siege, the street, the margin – the edge in which I also make myself. My name is Maya Quilolo and my alias is a war trail.

SNAKE PLOWING IS YUCA

Soils of the end requires to plant yuca/cassava/maniva/uaipi/aipim/mandioca. Yuca is a plant that heals the earth, the one spirit who recovers the impoverished soils from destruction: to her we owe respect. In order to plant it is necessary to know the spirit of Yuca, to reverence the wisdom. I became a human animal to commune with Yuca: I fed on her flesh and marked her skin, I gave her a little of myself, I took a little of what is hers. My sister Yuca skin now houses my prophecy, and to make it visible it is necessary to use the red urucum (annatto seeds) of the people who keep its secret. My name is Maya Quilolo and with my shamanic leguminous tentacles, I hoop the soils of a new time.

MAYA QUILOLO’S NAME

The name Maya comes from the affective recognition of her Atlantic families, Quilolo refers to the one who goes to the front in the Quilombo wars. Trajectory and body are those of a water snake, anatomy under construction since birth. When we are born into the world we receive every drop of life that precedes us… the liquid and amniotic miracle in which we live is formed. My body has a spring head and a tidal tail, a creeping snake that changes skin and finds an artist being, a theorist, a shaman. The work springs from the fertility of the womb and thinks about black women as umbilical cord in the diaspora.
I was born at the meeting of the clear waters of the Araçuaí River and the dark waters of the Jequitinhonha River. It could be that before I was transparent like the Araçuaí, clear water, reflecting the light within me, as I encountered the world I became immense like the Jequitinhonha, turbid, muddy, opaque. An opacity that was proper to those who need to walk miles around the world.

My water snake body blooms inside me. As I was born in the encounter, I glimpsed Eshu’s wisdom, my body is divided in half, I am Dan (African snake ancestors) and also Boiúna (American snake ancestors). My amphibious snake body is used to the floods. Every time the Jequitinhonha comes heavy, with its turbid water of the world, I open my nostrils of a headland snake and smell the course of the Calhauzinho stream, drinking from the water of the Araçuaí to avoid drowning. When I don’t drown, then it is because I am born and breathe the quiet, light air, like a being who has just arrived.

Maya Quilolo, 2021