Lucas Marques

On Ogun’s railroad is a documentary feature film project of approximately 90 minutes that deals with the entangled stories between gods, people and things in Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian religion. The film follows the paths traced by Zé Diabo, an orixá blacksmith from Salvador, Bahia. At the age of 75, he produces iron sculptures known as orixá tools, artifacts that, after a series of technical and ritual preparations, become the gods themselves materialized. To work with iron, Zé Diabo says he must follow the “path of Ogun”, the deity of technological knowledge. Ogun governs all of his technical and ritual work, and Zé Diabo claims a family lineage of descendants from this orixá, which goes back to Africa and the sacred work of Yoruba blacksmiths. By recording the process of making an Ogun tool and an encounter between Zé Diabo and his ancestry, the film seeks to follow the individuation processes of both the orixá tool and the blacksmith, showing the inseparability of these two paths. The project is born from a partnership between Lucas Marques and Safira Moreira, and explores themes such as memory, technique, African diaspora, and the ecology of forces that crosses gods, people and things in Candomblé.