Mandinga

(witchcraft)

My commentary

Once someone, a curator and Museum director, asked me to make a new piece to show in an exhibition of works commissioned in size and shape. It happens that I was an employee of the institution and I thought that presenting myself would be unethical. (I had already refused, for the same reason, on another occasion, to present myself in the exhibition entitled "New Work"). The fierce insistence has bothered me a lot. By that night, in my way home, I stoped in a bar of a friend of mine and, very upset,  told him what was happening. The guy who was an artist and connected to the Candomblé practices, with a very calm ironie, busy with glasses over the counter, said:  "why don't you make a "mandinga" (fetish)?"
I did.

It must be said that I had already made some of it, just for fun or to see how it would be like, in appearance I mean.
Some of them became very African-descendent Stylish, others wher compounded with elements I had used somewhere else as cross stitch or nail and threads

_{Gabriel Borba 2004}