Rio de Janeiro is a city where the symbolic and the spiritual converge. By foregrounding this creative expression within cultural variation, Na Terra de São Jorge offers a hopeful perspective, visualising communities generating strength and meaning within adversity as pathways to change, through an enchantment of urban life.

Drawing from Afro‑Brazilian traditions such as Candomblé, Umbanda, and carnival, the project explores how performance and ceremony shape collective identity and transform urban environments into terrains of meaning. Here, carnival, central to Rio’s identity, is considered a cultural stage where pride and politics collide; embodying contradictions of representation and race.

Na Terra de São Jorge depicts carnival uniting diverse communities while exposing inequalities, thus serving as both a unifying symbol and a site for struggles over meaning. Equally vital are the spiritual traditions of Candomblé and Umbanda. These practices sustain communities, creating spaces of resilience and transcendence amid social strain. They demonstrate how myth isn’t static but continuously performed, re‑created, and contested in the fabric of everyday life.

The images purposefully mix myth as both spectacular vibrance and humble inhabitation to show the popular and sacred blending into the vital dynamics of Afro‑Brazilian life.