In this interview with LAB’s Linda Etchart, artist Marilene Ribeiro explains the inspiration behind her recent projects rooted in humans’ relationship with the earth. Her new photobook Photo-Rituals for Disappearance is out now with eKphrasis.
Award-winning Brazilian photographer Marilene Ribeiro is an artist, ecologist, and activist. Her most recent work is a handcrafted book of images and artefacts entitled Photo-Rituals for Disappearance, which transports the reader into an alternative reality, along rivers to the sea, into the stars in the night sky, from the human to the non-human, with life flowing from earth into eternity. Marilene’s work transcends the boundary between the real and the spiritual, humans and nature, science and magic.
The images and artefacts contained in the work transit between the personal and the collective: immortalized by rituals performed with other women to celebrate and honour female healers and midwives, also to record the collective loss of the tens of thousands of ‘witches’ burned at the stake in medieval Europe, their legacy kept alive by scribbled notes of recipes and magic cures, of which only fragments remain. Photo-Rituals for Disappearance expands from personal pain to a remembrance of the stigma suffered by Indigenous women, in Europe and in Europe’s colonies, who did not conform to Christian precepts.
Marilene’s artworks in this collection can be viewed in the context of the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, by which the continent of Indigenous South America was divided in perpetuity between Spain and Portugal, as colonies. A line was drawn vertically through the continent, granting Spain all the land west of the line, and Portugal all the land east of the line, which is the land now occupied by Brazil. This was following a Papal Decree issued in 1493, which gave the Spanish religious authority over the Indigenous cultures of Central and South America, providing them with a justification for suppressing Indigenous beliefs and cultures.
The book is thus a homage both to pagan European women unmourned, erased by history, and to Indigenous women and men of Abya Yala who were persecuted on the grounds of their spiritual practices from the first days of the European occupation.
The book was designed in collaboration with the Mexico-based studio HagoLibros, which is dedicated to crafting artist books by hand. Throughout this process Marilene exchanged reflections and ideas with curator, researcher, and artist Ângela Ferreira – who wrote the critical text featured in the book.
Photo-Rituals for Disappearance was launched at the Photographer’s Gallery in London in March 2025. It was nominated as one of LensCulture’s Favorite Photobooks of the Year and included in The Royal Photographic Society WE ARE magazine’s favourite photobooks list. It was also recently featured at the French photography festival Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles in July 2025.
LAB’s Linda Etchart caught up with Marilene to find out more about the meaning behind the images she creates, and the inspiration behind her recent projects, rooted in humans’ relationship with the earth.
Linda: Fire is a theme that runs through your work. What is the significance of fire for you?
Marilene: Fire is the theme of my prior project and exhibition ‘Open Fire’, which exposes the use of fire as a weapon to destroy – to erase – our culture and our environmental heritage. This is done in various ways. The most common way of doing it is that you light a fire and you leave, leave the fire to consume what it needs to consume for your purposes. Fire is an easy weapon, because it’s easily available. Once it starts, and attracts people’s attention, the perpetrator is no longer on site. It’s a convenient weapon because you can destroy without being identified. This is what is done by soybean farmers, cattle ranchers, and the mining industry. We’re talking about commodity production in Latin America, and in Brazil specifically, which is the place where I developed my work, because I’m from Brazil.
Fire is also the strategy employed in conflicts with Indigenous communities, such as the Guarani-Kaiowá people in Mato Grosso do Sul, in Brazil. For the extractive industries, fire is a convenient way of getting rid of what you don’t want, because you won’t be charged with murder, or the crime you have committed. You just leave the fire, and it will do the rest of the work for you. We’ve seen this many times, especially in the case of the conflict with the Guarani-Kaiowá Indigenous communities engaged in the process of ‘retomada’, taking back their land, which was stolen by the people who now claim that it’s their land. This conflict has been going on for centuries. We have seen this happening repeatedly: the Guarani-Kaiowá’s villages, houses, and temples are burned, after which their leaders are murdered.
There’s always violence in which fire plays an important part. With ‘Open Fire’, I wanted to show the role of fire, the ecological implications of fire. Fire can play a positive role in nature, and is important for cultures as well. But it can also be destructive, political. And it’s a way of erasing ecosystems and people, identity, and memory.
Linda: Can you explain the importance of witches and witchcraft in the book?
Marilene: It started when I realised that what I was doing was documenting rituals that, at that time, I didn’t understand as rituals. I was engaged in a process of healing rituals with my female friends and colleagues, and my sister. I began to realise that ritual and healing are inherent to the female being. We should be proud of having these characteristics, these skills.
In studying rituals, we find ourselves looking back at female healers. We start to understand the historical aspect of these skills when we research the late 15th century until the late 18th century, 300 years of persecution of witches, in Europe. There are intersections between the economic, political, and religious contexts, but there is also a cultural context. We are talking about 300 years of women being prevented from doing anything that could be interpreted as magical, or associated with supernatural power.
These women had skills that they would pass on from generation to generation. They were midwives, they treated diseases, and worked for the wellbeing of their community. They were persecuted because of that. If something weird happened, it was said that these women were doing the devil’s work. This is what happened in villages and towns throughout Europe.
I ask myself how can my perspective contribute to the discussion in a way that we can overcome misogyny, overcome social and environmental injustice, and start understanding and valuing what is in our world in a different way
There is a stigma attached to these practices that endures to the present, in Brazil and in other countries in Latin America. We are talking about former colonies of the Catholic Iberian peninsula, where if you were not Christian, you were regarded as being possessed by the devil, which was used as a way of generating fear among the colonizers and of justifying oppression of the colonized.
The figure of the ‘evil witch’ was perpetuated in literature, in film, in art. Nowadays, when someone is called a witch, it’s charged with negative meanings. We need to rewrite this.
The so-called “witches” of those times – brutally treated and stigmatized ever since – were in fact knowledgeable women, who had a deep understanding of the medical properties of plants and their use, and were the cornerstone of their communities. The point I want to make here is that we all in Western society have been so intensely brainwashed with this negative image of the witch, which has been convenient for the many (religious, economic, political, cultural, and colonial) forces that have wanted these cultures and people erased. We urge people to be critical instead, and to rebuild a counter-story, in which the ‘witch’ embodies a positive meaning, in order to achieve justice for them, to honour these women and the work they have done – and continue to do – in every corner of the globe. They have an important role in society.
This is at the core of Photo-Rituals for Disappearance: the book invites readers to delve into the realm of magic as a way of talking about these powerful women and their legacy, and in doing so, contributing to this reshaping of History. And that’s why I also wanted this work to take form as a book, because the (recipe, ritual) book has long been an important platform for women to pass on their knowledge.
Linda: Your work covers a wide range of themes, spanning hundreds of years of history over two continents… Is there a unifying element? How do you see the role of the artist in society, in politics? How do you see yourself as both a visual artist and environmental activist?
Marilene: People can see that I engage with what may appear to be disparate subjects – the environment and social impact of dams in Brazil, destruction by fire, witch hunts, and misogyny. Well, photography and visual arts are my way of bringing themes and issues that I consider urgent into the public realm for us to be able to discuss them. The ideas evolve over time through the work that I am developing, but it all comes out of my own experience.
I am someone who has lived through fire, someone who has witnessed and studied the impact of it. I am also a woman who has lived through misogyny. I am from the Global South, I am a Latin American woman. This is my own perspective. I ask myself how can my perspective contribute to the discussion in a way that we can overcome misogyny, overcome social and environmental injustice, and start understanding and valuing what is in our world in a different way which acknowledges and respects – not just human beings, but all forms of life that share this planet with us. This is how I understand the function of my work in society.
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Photo-Rituals for Disappearance will be showcased at the Encontros da Imagem International Photography and Visual Arts Festival, Braga, Portugal, in Foto Féminas, at Centro Cultural de España en Buenos Aires (CCEBA)/Argentina, in September, and in the Festival Internacional de Libros de Fotografía y Artes Gráficas / FELIFA, in October.
Photo-Rituals for Disappearance is available for purchase worldwide (posted from the UK, France, Brazil, and Mexico). Email mcardosoribeiro@gmail.com
A video of the book is available here.
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Marilene Ribeiro was born and raised in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. She has an MSc in Ecology and Wildlife Conservation and Management from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, and a PhD in Creative Arts/Photography from the University for the Creative Arts, UK. She has been recently nominated for the Prix Pictet. She is the co-author (with Sue Branford) of “The hydroelectric threat to the Amazon Basin”, Chapter 6 in Voices of Latin America: Social Movements and the New Activism, edited by Tom Gatehouse (Latin America Bureau 2019).
Dr Linda Etchart is Associate Lecturer in Human Geography at Kingston University, and a correspondent for Latin America Bureau. She is the author of “Indigenous Peoples and the Rights of Nature”, Chapter 5, in Voices of Latin America: Social Movements and the New Activism. London: Latin America Bureau 2019, and Global Governance of the Environment, the Rights of Nature and Indigenous Peoples: Extractive Industries in the Ecuadorian Amazon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2022).
