Living Myths Featured in Marie Claire Brasil

Mari Salmonson’s illustrations of Brazilian female folklore figures are featured in Marie Claire Brasil’s Brazilian Folklore Day special.

On August 22, Brazilian Folklore Day, Marie Claire Brasil published “Dia do Folclore: conheça as lendas de 8 personagens femininas”, an editorial exploring the stories of female figures from Brazilian folklore, illustrated with artworks from my ongoing research into Brazilian myths, legends and cultural memory.

The feature arrives at a particularly meaningful moment: alongside the launch of Living Myths, my collection dedicated to bringing these stories into contemporary visual culture.

The women of Brazilian folklore

I grew up with these stories.

Cuca was there in the songs we heard as children. Iara inhabited the rivers. The forest had its guardians. Matinta could be recognized by a whistle in the night. Naia looked toward the Moon, and her story continued in the waters through the Vitória-Régia.

They were always present, but returning to these stories as an adult — and especially as an artist — made me look at them differently.

Brazilian folklore is the result of many cultural layers. Indigenous knowledge and cosmologies, African influences, European traditions, regional histories and generations of oral storytelling coexist, collide and transform within these narratives.

Looking specifically at its female figures reveals another layer.

These women can be protectors, spirits, enchantresses, monsters or manifestations of nature itself. They can possess extraordinary power, yet many of their stories also carry ideas about what women were expected to be — or what happened when they stepped outside those expectations.

Why is the powerful woman so often dangerous?

Why does female beauty become a threat?

Who is punished, and who isn't?

And what changes when we revisit these stories today?

For me, those questions don't diminish folklore. They make it richer.

Living stories

This is where Living Myths begins.

I don't approach folklore as something fixed in the past. These stories have never been static.

They traveled orally before reaching books. They changed between regions. Different communities gave characters different appearances, personalities, and meanings. Literature, illustration, television, and popular culture continued transforming them.

That movement is part of folklore itself.

Living Myths explores that space between preservation and reinterpretation.

Through my visual language, I revisit characters and stories including Cuca, Iara, Matinta Pereira, Mãe da Mata, Saci-Taperê, Naia, Vitória-Régia, Alemoa and the Princess of Jericoacoara, among others.

Some are immediately recognizable to Brazilians. Others exist much further from the stories that became nationally popular.

Together, they reveal just how vast our folklore really is.

Brazilian stories beyond Brazil

As a Brazilian artist living outside Brazil, there is another dimension to this work that has become increasingly important to me.

Stories travel with people.

They become a way of maintaining connections with language, childhood, landscape, and cultural memory even when we are geographically far from where those memories began.

At the same time, I want these works to introduce international audiences to a Brazil that is far more complex than the handful of images usually associated with the country.

Brazil is also enchanted forests, Amazonian waters, supernatural whistles in the night, women who become plants, guardians who confuse hunters, mysterious island legends, and stories that have survived because generation after generation continued telling them.

Featured in Marie Claire Brasil

Having these illustrations featured by Marie Claire Brasil on Brazilian Folklore Day gives this research another place to live.

The artworks leave the studio and become part of a broader cultural conversation about folklore, representation, and the women who inhabit these stories.

A special thank you to Fernando Barros, writer of the Marie Claire Brasil feature, for the invitation, for approaching these narratives with curiosity and care, and for creating space for my work within this conversation.

It is particularly meaningful to see these characters reaching new audiences through an editorial dedicated to looking more closely at the women of Brazilian folklore.

Because that is ultimately what Living Myths is about.

Stories are inherited, but they are never preserved unchanged.

We discover, question, and reinterpret them.

And that is how myths stay alive.