With the encouragement of the Aldir Blanc Award and production by photographer Ana Angélica Costa and Instituto Pavão Cultural ,, Mãe Preta has a new edition in Campinas, SP, from February 19 to April 18, 2021. The exhibition will be part of the XII Hercule Festival Florence with complete works, as well as a new collection of books for the Mãe Preta library with free access to the public.

The relationship between the city of Campinas (known as Vila de São Carlos in colonial times) and the memorialization of slavery suffered several historical erasures despite the fact that there is a replica of the Mãe Preta monument in the city, with its original in São Paulo. The interior of São Paulo state has a history of enduring the slave economy beyond the abolition of slavery in 1888 whose memory, today, manifests itself in various initiatives for reparations and resistance  from the local black cultural and political movements.

As in all past editions of this exhibition, we worked with a local collaborators who contribute with specific interventions and  activities throughout the exhibition period. Here we collaborate with the Grupo Cultural Fazenda Roseira and the Jongo Dito Ribeiro Community, reference organizations for the material and intangible heritage of the black culture of the city of Campinas. They bring knowledge passed from generation to generation, present in the exhibition through a cycle of activities and an "ancestral herbarium" of ritual plants, healing and food cultivated at Fazenda Roseira (see work Ways of Healing (Ancestral Herbarium). These plants become visible using cyanotype, one of the first photographic techniques developed in the 19th century, which also refers to the early photographic experiments by Hercule Florence, a French photographer and inventor who settled in the region in the mid-19th century, making a significant contribution to the history of photography.

The exhibition also features an original text by Dr. Alessandra Ribeiro, urban planner, mother of a Umbanda priestess, and cultural manager, and the first black candidate for the city of Campinas.

The exhibition can be visited online at the XII Festival Hercule Florence website (In Portuguese).