Beatriz Chachamovits
Curandeiras · Film by Sammy Hunter · Shot on 16mm
Curandeiras
2023 - ongoing
Curandeiras is an evolving cosmology of hybrid beings that merge feminine archetypes with the forms, behaviors, and ecological relationships of marine life. Drawing from South Florida’s marine ecosystems and extending into imagined ocean depths, the project moves through coral reefs, sponge flats, seagrass meadows, and open waters, weaving ecological knowledge with mythology and lived experience. The Portuguese word curandeiras extends beyond its English translation as “women healers.” It evokes women whose practices tend to physical, emotional, and spiritual life through ritual, inherited knowledge, and relationships with the natural world. Here, healing encompasses the connections between bodies, communities, environments, and the unseen. Through drawings and ceramic sculptures, the project develops an oceanic ceremonial language in which bodies, markings, objects, and gestures express distinct powers of protection, desire, creation, and transformation. As the figures enter shared ceremonies, their encounters imagine ways of belonging to the ocean through reciprocity and interdependence.
The Archetypes
The twelve original drawings introduce the Curandeiras through individual portraits, each joining a feminine archetype with a marine being whose behaviors and ecological relationships inform her character and powers. Their identities emerge through their bodily markings, habitats, animal familiars, surrounding species, and ceremonial objects. Together, these elements establish each figure’s role within a shared cosmology. Handwritten passages give voice to their characters, revealing distinct expressions of tenderness, ferocity, curiosity, seduction, creativity, and wisdom.
Weapons of Power
Created alongside the twelve original drawings, these six hand-built ceramic sculptures give physical form to selected weapons carried by the Curandeiras. Each belongs to a particular figure, extending her identity through its shape, color, and symbolic associations. Their powers encompass protection and healing, desire and vulnerability, instinct and transformation. Presented among the original portraits, these objects brought a material dimension to the cosmology, extending the Curandeiras’ presence beyond the page.
Ceramic Figures
Translated into clay, the Curandeiras take on physical presence as wall-mounted hybrid figures. Marine forms and ecological markings become part of their bodies through modeled surfaces, texture, and color. Each sculpture carries traces of touch and the material transformation of firing, bringing vulnerability and strength into the same form. As guardians and witnesses, they invite close encounters with the beings who inhabit this cosmology.
Acts of Becoming
The Curandeiras enter shared ceremonies of exchange, care, and transformation. Across seven drawings, the figures offer, touch, gather, tend, and release, forming a choreography in which bodies, species, and environments become increasingly intertwined. A sequence of changing forms, from shells and a coral fragment to an egg case and a spawning cloud, carries the ritual toward the emergence of renewed habitat. Color creates shifting emotional fields through backgrounds, bodies, and capes, while gestures and bodily markings connect each encounter to its ecological world. Marine witnesses accompany every stage, their varying numbers shaping the intensity of the ceremony. The drawings function as ritual scores, imagining regeneration through collective acts of attention, vulnerability, and reciprocity.
