Denise Milan

Does Pelourinho's name not come from "pilori" then, a stonework pillar, with bronze metal rings, where those to be beaten in "colonial times" were tied to?

As the embiem or purification, we re-interpret the repressed object, the same shape now stands for change. Our look, while humanizing it, cannot overlook this stone has bled.

The time has come for baptism. The object of grief is to be renamed for the transformation to take place.

Among local richness the green quartz fragments from mountains -- a part of Bahia´s wilderness no more -- are here to protectively frame the stone once deadly and the foundation for malaise. And the gold, the highest stage of matter transmutation according to alchemy tradition, that which in the highest reflects the being, is here for metamorphosis to take place, depetrifying past history for symbolical ritualization. Water washes and takes all evil away; compassionate tears consecrate this contemporary ritual.

The course of such energy is reversed at last. Its destructive feature vanishes, its regenerativepower is extracted.

From condemned matter sacred power is extracted, the sacred power of the condemned, whose sacredness is in knowing how to reinvent life through rituals, over and over, again and again...