Mamulengomania

This afternoon, a friend and I headed to Olinda for its annual Arte em Toda Parte festival. Essentially a type of Doors Open event, during the twelve days of Arte em Toda Parte all the resident artists and artisans of Olinda throw open the doors to their centuries old houses and workshops, and we, the nosey people, get to enjoy the art as well as a peek at the insides of Olinda's colonial gems.


One of our stops was the newly reopened Museu do Mamulengo or Puppet Museum on Rua Sao Bento. Not stictly a workshop or atelier, we took advantage of the fact that the museum was actually open [things in Olinda tend to have custom opening hours] to pop in and admire the exhibit. Puppetry has a long tradition in the Northeast, a region in which literacy is a rather new phenomenon. The puppets usually represented the common person and the shows the situations that they would be likely to face on a daily basis. The women above are part of a larger scene in which the villagers are preparing the macaxeira or manioc or cassava which forms the basis of the Northeastern diet. I refrained from taking pictures of the rather violent puppet scene of Lampiao's men ransacking and massacring an entire village. Who ever said that puppets were all sugar & spice & macaxeira & nice?