Guided by Eleguá: Collective Knowledge-Making at the Crossroads
At every crossroads lies an opportunity: a moment to pause, to listen, and to imagine otherwise. In Afro-diasporic Candomblé cosmologies, Eleguá is the guardian of such thresholds. He opens paths, disrupts certainties, and reminds us that no future is ever predetermined. Futures emerge in encounters between people and places, between memory and imagination, between ancestral knowledge and academic inquiry. Seen through this lens, the crossroads also become a site of collective knowledge-making, where different ways of knowing meet.
Guided by this understanding, the workshop “Eleguá and the Crossroads of the Future: Sustainability, Health, and Justice” took place on November 25-26, 2025 in the Comunidade Quilombola de Mangueiras in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The workshop brought together members of the Quilombo community, researchers from Heidelberg University and the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), representatives of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and activists from social movements in Belo Horizonte. More than a meeting across institutions, the event was conceived as a space of encounter across territories, experiences, and knowledge traditions, explicitly oriented toward collective and relational forms of knowledge production.
Importantly, this workshop did not begin with an invitation letter or a finished program. It emerged from a long-standing collaboration with Quilombo communities in Belo Horizonte, developed over several years of encounter, dialogue and trust-building. This collaboration is embedded in ongoing ethnographic fieldwork and constitutes the empirical and relational foundation of my doctoral research within the project: “Kitchen and Garden: Home-Making Practices of Latin American Activists”, based within the Collaborative Research Centre CRC 1671 “Home(s): Phenomena, Practices, Representations”. The workshop was therefore co-conceived with the Quilombo community from the very beginning: from the choice of the name and guiding cosmology, to the structure of the program, the themes addressed, and the form of collective exchange.
Quilombos are historically formed Afro-Brazilian communities, founded by formerly enslaved people and their descendants. They continue to be key sites of Black resistance, collective organisation, and struggles for land, autonomy, and cultural survival. Situating the workshop in Quilombo Mangueiras meant engaging with a living territory shaped by historical memory, political struggle, and ongoing practices of collective care, world-making, and the crafting of futures.

Photo credit: Anne Cathrin Ziegler.
At the heart of the workshop was a shared question: What might just and sustainable futures look like when imagined from the perspectives of peripheral Black communities in Brazil; particularly Quilombola communities? Rather than treating sustainability, health, food, energy, or digitalisation as separate policy fields, the discussions emphasised their entanglement in everyday life, territory, and collective care. Participants reflected on how such futures are already being practised in the present through communal organisation, ecological knowledge, and forms of resistance shaped by historical and ongoing experiences of marginalisation. These reflections unfolded as a process of collective knowledge-making, grounded in lived experience as much as in analytical reflection.
The workshop was deliberately designed as a participatory and dialogical format. Contributions by community members and university-based researchers were combined with collaborative group work, collective reflection, and shared presentations of results. Knowledge was understood not as something to be transferred but as something to be co-created. This approach opened pathways between academic research and Quilombola ways of knowing, grounded in reciprocity, careful listening, and mutual respect.
Equally central was the engagement with the territory of Quilombo Mangueiras itself. Participants visited the community garden, sacred spaces, and the community centre currently under construction. These moments made tangible how questions of housing, food, spirituality, and collective life are inseparable, and how visions of the future are embedded in material practices and spatial relations. The territory itself thus became an active participant in the process of collective knowledge-making.
Throughout the two days, participants were welcomed and nourished by the community through traditional Quilombola food. Cooking and eating together became another form of knowledge exchange, reinforcing the workshop’s emphasis on relationality and care, and allowing culinary practices to function as embodied, situated forms of knowing. The event was audio-visually documented by the Programa de Formação Transversal em Saberes Tradicionais at UFMG and accompanied by a graphic facilitation, foregrounding visual, oral, and performative modes of knowledge as alternatives to exclusively written academic forms. These materials capture not only key discussions but also the emotions, encounters, and collective imaginaries that emerged during the workshop.

Photo Credit: Anne Cathrin Ziegler.
The workshop was conceived and organised by Heidelberg University through the Heidelberg Center Latin America (HCLA), the Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies (HCIAS), and the Heidelberg Center for the Environment (HCE) in close collaboration with the Comunidade Quilombola de Mangueiras, and with the collaboration and financial support of the German Centre for Research and Innovation (DWIH São Paulo). It also marked the starting point of a new institutional cooperation between the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and Heidelberg University that is executed by the HCIAS, laying the groundwork for future joint research and academic exchange. Beyond the event itself, it demonstrated how futures can be co-created at the crossroads of academic inquiry, community knowledge, and political commitment.
Guided by Eleguá, the workshop invited all participants to dwell in moments of uncertainty and decision and to recognise that from such crossings, new paths toward sustainability, health, and justice continue to unfold.
***
Anne Cathrin Ziegler is a doctoral researcher in sociology within the Collaborative Research Center 1671 Home(s): Phenomena, Practices, Representations (2024-2036), subproject B07 “Kitchen and Garden. Homemaking practices of Latin American activists”, based at HCIAS.
The text only may be used may be used under licence Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives 4.0 International. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
HCIAS Blog, anneziegler (January 20, 2026). Guided by Eleguá: Collective Knowledge-Making at the Crossroads. HCIAS Blog. Retrieved February 8, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15iyx
