Dancing Bodies, Axé Architectures: Washing Rituals in Penedo-AL

Abstract

This article aims to think of the city as a ritualized body, based on the immersive experience in the lavagem of the stairway of the Nossa Senhora do Rosário dos Pretos Church and of the Beco da Preguiça in the city of Penedo, in the state of Alagoas. It sought to understand how the gestures and ancestral knowledge involved in the lavagem act in the reconfiguration of the urban landscape, understood here as living matter made of axé, memories, and presences. Festivities such as the lavagem celebrate ancestry and produce other ways of seeing and analyzing cities, updating bonds, territorialities, and modes of inhabiting. For the development of the research, a sensitive methodology was adopted, in which the body in crossing becomes an instrument of reading and later of writing and image-making, resulting in a performative cartography. The article challenges hegemonic notions of time, memory, and heritage, proposing to present an architecture made of gesture, gira, and listening. By incorporating epistemologies of crossroads and circularity, a city is outlined that insists on existing as festivity, gesture, and reenchantment, leading to a rethinking of traditional urban planning practice.