Rivers of Reverence
Virginia Key Beach, Miami, Florida, 2019
In Rivers of Reverence, Charlot captures an Ifá practitioner in the warm, golden rivers of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as she venerates the Orisa Oshun— the guardian of rivers and life-giving waters. Her face veiled, she is adorned in flowing fabric, cascading beads, and a crown of flowers and thorns. In Fort Lauderdale’ s waterways, rituals to Oshun continue as part of the diasporic spiritual practices carried from West Africa to the Americas. Here, the body is an altar, the water a conduit of memory— linking past and present.
Whether through the ritual devotion of the priestess we see here in Rivers of Reverence, or through the Candomblé priestess kneeling at the water’ s edge in Reverence, By the Sea, or the playful self-adornment of a child bathing with flowers in Petals of Youth, Charlot’ s images witness spiritual connection through water. In each, water is a space where the body is tended to with reverence. These moments remind us that the everyday and the divine are intertwined, that rituals— whether personal or spiritual— flow across generations and geographies, shaping how we honor ourselves.
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