“Underwater Shrine (Greynolds Park)”
3 documentary photographs
archival pigment prints
(available as a set)
“Underwater Shrine (Dead River, Upper Minnesota)”
documentary photograph
archival pigment prints
(available as a set)
The exploratory search for an “underwater shrine” included two different bodies of water, one the Florida intercoastal as it ebbs and flows in N. Miami Beach, the other a fresh water lake in northern Minnesota. In both cases the elusive throne has disappeared from view. Is it Mami Wata, or Olokun we are searching for?
The countless millions of enslaved Africans who were torn from their homeland and forcibly carried across the Atlantic between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries as part of this “trade” brought with them their beliefs, practices, and arts honoring Mami Wata and other ancestral deities. Reestablished, revisualized, and revitalized in diaspora, Mami Wata emerged in new communities and under different guises, among them Lasiren, Yemanja, Santa Marta la Dominadora, and Oxum. African-based faiths continue to flourish in communities throughout the Americas, Haiti, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere. <via: Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas>
Photographs of Olokun Priests, Devotees and Shrines in Benin City, Nigeria
Mami Wata: Arts for Water Spirits in Africa and Its Diasporas …