Artists-scientists - NOCIOUS AND SUSPECTED VENOMS

Category: Artist-scientists

The association between women and "poisonous, harmful and suspicious" plants is marked by narratives of female demonization and prejudices linked to otherness. Inspired by the stories of pioneering female scientists whose legacies were recognized too late, I reimagined their trajectories through fictional portraits created with AI, which blend their images with the plants and aesthetics that defined them, representing them at the age of their deaths.

Índia Sabina (Belém do Pará, c. 1715 — date and place of death unknown)

In the Amazon of the 18th century, Índia Sabina gained renown by combining indigenous knowledge and elements of Christianity to break spells and make predictions. In her rituals, she used crosses, holy water, and prayers to the Virgin Mary, but also pipes, local herbs, cinnamon-flavored rum, and incense. She conducted intense ceremonies, inducing patients to purifying vomiting, in which, it was said, lizards, wasps, and fantastic creatures, such as fish-headed centipedes, were expelled.

Luzia Pinta

(Angola ≈1700 - Portugal, date of death unknown) Luzia Pinta was enslaved as a child and lived in Minas Gerais. She bought her freedom from her brothers João Pinto Dias and Manoel Pinto Dias, her masters, and a small plot of land in Sabará, where she lived. She took part in calundus, collective rituals of possession and trance, with divinatory and therapeutic functions, [...]