Daiara Tukano and Gustavo Caboco are participating in ARCOmadrid, which takes place from March 5 to 9. The artists are featured in the exhibition Wametisé: ideas for an amazofuturism curated by Denilson Baniwa, María Wills, and the Institute for Postnatural Studies.
The curated sector reflects on the growing presence of Indigenous artists in the contemporary art circuit, presenting works that contribute to the creation of new perspectives towards the world, inspired by both ancestral and contemporary ways of life in the Amazon.
The paintings Yaymahsã, Miriãporã mahsã, and MahkãPirõ mahsã (2021) by Daiara Tukano depict hybrid entities in vibrant colors, with bodies that merge women with a jaguar, a macaw, and a serpent, respectively. In Tukano cosmology, these beings are responsible for protecting the forests and preventing the intense sun from scorching the fertile soil. A large painting, measuring over two meters in height, completes the selection. The work alludes to the common ancestors of the Tukano people—women who were responsible for the origin of plants, animals, and humans that inhabit the world.
Gustavo Caboco, in turn, is featured in the exhibition through a selection exemplary of his multidisciplinary practice, including painting, photography, and video. Pé no chão, pé no céu (2017–2024) and Inversões e autonomia 1 (2022) are paintings that explore a metaphorical image recurring in the artist's approach and invite a radical change in the perspective through which we observe the world, recovering the Wapichana knowledge linked to agriculture and the connection with the land.
For the artist, these inversions require unveiling the colonial mechanisms that displace and erase Indigenous knowledge. In the video Erva do diabo (2020), the artist uses pieces from the collection of the Museu Paranaense to trace a narrative that shows how yerba mate, an herb used in rituals by the Guarani peoples, was condemned by the Catholic Church and has now become a popular industrialized beverage.
The ruins of the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro are the focus of a photographic work by Gustavo Caboco, Roseane Wapichana, Lucilene Wapichana, and Wanderson Wapixana. Titled Não apagarão nossa memória (2021), the work addresses the Indigenous objects that were destroyed in the fire that engulfed the museum in 2018. More broadly, it reflects on the presence of these objects in museum institutions worldwide and the ways in which they were acquired.
