Gustavo Caboco

Gustavo Caboco, of the Wapishana people, works in the fields of visual arts, literature, and cinema. His work explores multiple media, such as drawing, painting, textiles, installation, performance, photography, video, sound, and text. Creating devices for reflection on the displacement of indigenous bodies, the processes of (re)territorialization and memory production. His artistic training began in childhood, in his mother’s Lucilene Wapichana sewing studio, who has always told him about the family, the landscape, and the memories of the maloca of Canauanim, in Roraima, from where she was taken at an early age.

The lessons learned from the threads and the stories of his mother are the foundation of Caboco’s research, whose driving force is the pathways that lead to the original territory, the steps to “return to earth”. His artistic practice takes shape in this transit, strengthening the threads that weave together the memory of the ancestral relationship with the land, a memory nothing can erase. An important part of his propositions also take place in educational spaces, such as schools, universities, cultural centers, and indigenous and quilombola communities, in which he proposes practical anti-colonial pedagogical activities. In addition to countering the hegemonic narratives of colonialism by means of his autonomous research in museum collections and archives.

Caboco has published the books Baaraz Kawau in 2019, and Baaraz Ka’aupan and Recado do Bendegó in 2022, all under the independent label he founded, Picada Livros. In 2023 he started the residency project Ateliê-Lavrado and held the seminar Strengthening Threads at the British Museum, in London. In the previous year, he held the solo show ouvir àterra, at Millan, São Paulo, and was invited to the aabaakwad indigenous meeting at the Sámi pavilion at the Venice Biennale in Italy. That same year, he was invited artist for the 32nd exhibition program of Centro Cultural São Paulo, where he presented the show Coma Colonial; he also developed an original work for the project Respiração 25: Devir Indígena, at Casa Museu Eva Klabin, Rio de Janeiro; he presented the performance encontro di-fuso at the University of Manchester, England, during the Festival of Latin American Anti-Racist and Decolonial Art. In 2024, he was invited to join the curatorial team of the Brazilian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale, alongside Arissana Pataxó and Denilson Baniwa.

Among his notable group shows are: Um Século de Agora, Itaú Cultural, São Paulo; Parábola do Progresso, Sesc Pompéia, São Paulo; and Atos de Revolta, Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, all of which took place in 2022. In the previous year he participated in the  34th Bienal de São Paulo and the exhibition Moquém Surarï, at the Museu de Arte Moderna, São Paulo; previously he was part of Véxoa: We Know, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2020), and VAIVÉM, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Rio de Janeiro e Brasília (2019).

His work is featured in the collections of institutions such as ISLAA – Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, New York, USA; MAR – Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil; MON – Museu Oscar Niemeyer, Curitiba, Brasil; Museu da Língua Portuguesa, São Paulo, Brasil; Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Paraná, Curitiba, Brasil; Museu Paranaense, Curitiba, Brasil, and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brasil.

Artist’s website