I grew up with these stories.
The Cuca was in our lullabies. Iara lived in the rivers. Vitória-Régia was a flower, but she was also once a girl named Naiá who looked up at the Moon and fell in love.
And Saci was everywhere.
In the little whirlwinds that appeared in the middle of the city. In a horse’s mane that somehow ended up impossibly tangled overnight. In the thing you knew you had left right there, only to find it gone. Any small, unexplained bit of mischief could be answered with the same perfectly reasonable explanation: “It was Saci.”
That may be one of the things I love most about Brazilian folklore. These stories were never confined to books. They entered everyday life. They gave a name to the unknown and turned a sound in the dark, a sudden gust of wind, a river, a flower, an animal, or a forest into part of a much bigger story.
For many Brazilians, we encounter these characters long before we understand them as “folklore.” They arrive through songs, family stories, childhood warnings, jokes, books, television, and school. We grow up knowing them almost without realizing we are learning about them.
But returning to these stories as an adult—and particularly as an artist—also means looking at them differently.
Brazilian folklore is not one single mythology with one definitive version of every story. It carries Indigenous, African, European, and regional influences, shaped by oral traditions and by the people who have retold these stories across generations. The same character can change appearance, gender, personality, or meaning depending on where and by whom the story is told.
That complexity is especially interesting to me when looking at its female characters.
Some are guardians. Some are feared. Some enchant. Some are punished. Some become part of the landscape itself.
There is Mãe da Mata, connected to the forest as a living presence that must be respected. Matinta Perera announces herself through a mysterious whistle in the night. Iara belongs to the rivers. Alamoa emerges from the landscape of Fernando de Noronha. The Mula sem Cabeça carries centuries of ideas about women, sexuality, religion, sin, and punishment.
And then there is Naiá, whose longing for Jaci, the Moon, ends with her transformation into the Vitória-Régia—a star not in the sky, but on the waters of the Amazon.
These stories tell us about fantastic creatures, but they also tell us something about the people who told them: what they feared, what they respected, how they understood nature, and how they tried to explain the world around them.
That is where Living Myths began.
Living Myths brings together, for the first time as a collection, artworks I created at different moments of my artistic practice. They were not originally conceived as a single series. But looking at them together revealed a conversation that had been happening in my work for years.
Brazilian folklore as something alive.
Not something frozen in the past or preserved behind glass, but stories that continue to change every time we tell them. Stories that travel with us. Stories we reinterpret. Stories we pass to our children.
For me, they are also a way of returning to Brazil from wherever I happen to be.
On August 22, Brazilian Folklore Day, these works come together for the first time as the Living Myths collection.
Because perhaps that is what a myth needs in order to remain alive:
someone willing to tell it again.
https://marisalmonson.com/collections/living-myths-brazilian
