Bene vixit qui bene latuit*

Resting beneath the stone
he who lived hidden.
Spare him the outrage
of the tumult.
* “He who lives well lives hidden”, Lema de Descartes (N. A.)

– Paulo Leminski, minioração fúnebre para rené descartes [Short Funeral Prayer for René Descartes], Toda Poesia (1976)

I.Where does the invisible touch?

I call on the Paraná poet Leminski (1944-1989) and French philosopher Descartes (1596-1650) to identify certain understandings in this encounter: neither the conversation we are starting here, the exhibition in question, nor the works presented in this publication are intended to “make visible” or have the pretense of “revealing” the mysteries of the hidden or unconscious.

In Leminski’s “short funeral prayer,” it seems to me that an invitation to “close a cycle” or “close a time” is being made. The time Descartes lived lays under the stone, a time when the strategy of being invisible related to staying alive — and so those who lived invisibly lived well.  Yet, this still sounds to me like a reality to Indigenous populations in Brazil. In the philosopher’s time, the Catholic church condemned and threw onto the bonfire those who believed the world was not the center of the universe. In the modern time of the poet, the failure of Western logic is expressed in those who survived the repressions of the Brazillian dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s and in the crisis of constructing the contemporary-modern individual.

In this initial conversation, there is a conscious, temporal choice to consider Leminski and Descartes. Leminski was from Paraná, one of the places from which I propose the work that follows Vom Paraná Zum Roarima¹. The poet died the year I was born, 1989, so I see him as a reference of what was said, coming from Paraná, before I found myself in this Wapichana-Brazil-world. Descartes, the great father of reason, reveals in himself a timeframe closer to when colonial Brazil was created.

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Vom Roraima Zum Orinoco (1923) is how the anthropologist Theodor Koch-Grünberg titled-captured the research materials he collected among the Indigenous people of Roraima. Vom Paraná Zum Roraima is an appropriation of that title and invites us to think about the ways of returning to Wapichana land that I have been realizing since 2001. For those who are arriving now: this is the German who took our stories of Makunaimã to the paper skins of Germany [from where I write this text]. The installation Roraimarte II (2024), in this exhibition, further explores such questions.

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Returns, returns, returns, returns, returns, returns, returns.

Descartes, he who lived well in hiding, took refuge in Holland in 1618 as an exercise of freedom. The Frenchman decided to hold off on publishing The World - Or Treatise on Light (1623) for fear of facing the Inquisition and being condemned by the Holy Office. But, while Descartes safely took refuge in Amsterdam, our Wapichana land in Guyana was already suffering colonial wars under Dutch rule in 1648. Wars that left us with scars and memories that persist to this day in our Wapichana history.

II. Stitching the Invisible

Do you notice how, from a short excerpt of Leminski, a Wapichana historical contextualization opens up, as well as a conjuncture about the place, lexicon, and movement of the artist Gustavo Caboco? This is the pedagogy of the invisible that I have been pursuing in my work in recent years, when I evoke the words “colonial coma,” for example. To perceive that which is so present and so blatant, so embedded, so exposed and normalized in colonial form, but which we do not notice. Do you see the invisible? This invisible is not hidden, but present. Uncomfortable.

I get uncomfortable when I think, for example, about how a French philosopher could take refuge in a country with its famous Otomman-tulip fields, while the Dutch themselves were waging wars in our land and enslaving Wapichana bodies. I am uncomfortable with the fact that figures like Maurício de Nassau are presented in Brazilian school textbooks as characters in the “Dutch invasions” of Brazil but that they do not properly portray the violence of these invasions against Indigenous peoples. That, in art history, figures elevated by Nassau’s platoon, like the artists Albert Eckhout and Frans Post, are canonical and untouchable, even by the flames. These images are “susceptible” to error and glorified for their historical and technical quality, while the racism in them is scarcely debated. I feel uncomfortable when I think that, to this day, Wapichana land is in dispute, for example, in the Essequibo² region in Guyana, that Venezuela is after because of its oil. Guyana, which was once Dutch and later English, gained independence in 1966. Our Indigenous relatives had to choose which side they would be on, Guyana or Brazil, and brothers and sisters, families, Indigenous territories, and languages were separated.

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Essequibo is one of the rivers that our grandfather Makunaimã transformed himself into after Tamoromu fell, the great Wapichana tree presented in the opening of the exhibition Que acontece quando cai uma grande árvore? [What Happens When A Great Tree Falls?] (2023). So our elders tell us. In the geopolitical debates between Venezuela and Guyana, our Indigenous territories are not once mentioned in the media. Made invisible, these lands and rivers continue to be targeted for the exploitation of “natural resources” without a river, for example, being considered a subject of law, or a grandfather — which is how we see him.

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III. Manhaba’u means invisible in the Wapichana language

In 2023, I was invited to participate as an author in the Festa Literária Internacional de Paraty [International Literary Festival of Paraty] (FLIP) and, for the occasion, I organized the launch of the publication Literatura do invisível [Literature of the Invisible] (2023). Published by PICADA, the book is an essay-manifesto that proposes a dialog with Earth’s many literary beings and unites my visual arts work with text-based production. Literatura do invisível addresses Indigenous rights issues through art and also brings to light debates on the environmental issues we are facing, with emphasis on consumer relations and impacts on the planet’s health, which are not invisible things but, on the contrary, are in plain sight. How much does this presence of the invisible influence our socio-environmental relationships? How much of the visible remains invisible to us? In the context of this exhibition, the publication becomes a curatorial object and underpins the thinking behind the exhibition and the selection of works presented.

In the exhibition Manhaba’u: onde toca o invisível, I present AMAZAD, a series of embroidered works that address our relationships with the time and memory of the Earth. In one of the works in the series, Gravidez-gravidade e as doenças do mundo [Pregnancy-gravity and the World's Diseases] (2024), there is a female figure, pregnant with planet Earth. If the Earth is mother, there is also a Mãe da Terra [Mother of Earth] (2024), and these diseases of consumption, medicines, and emptiness are represented in this work.

The ecological debate is central in Manhaba’u. I touch on these issues from a more personal perspective, such as in the painting Retorno à maloca [Return to the Maloca] (2024), where I depict the strong-Wapichana-thread³ and the cotton trees spun by our grandmothers with spindles. This strong symbolism portrays the thread of our tradition and culture that live in the sewing studio of my mother, Lucilene Wapichana. This line, which crosses generations and landscapes, is the thread we use to stitch the world.

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³ Making the thread strong is important if we want to weave resistant networks. We have been working on a project, aligned with our land and the Wapichana threads at the British Museum, in England. In this way, we connect the history of Wapichana cotton to the impacts of colonial relations during the English expansion in Brazil.

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IV. Sewing is Indigenous resistance

There is a thread that connects communities and the history of art. When they silence us, we are silent, but it was from my mother’s sewing studio that I began to learn about Indigenous education and Wapichana ethics. If the sewing machine was a colonial object imposed on our territory through nuns and priests, it becomes an object of resistance and autonomy when an Indigenous woman makes use of the tool as a way of relating to the world.

Thus, through art, we continue marking history with stitches and weaving narratives made invisible and often undervalued but that, to us, represent pathways towards learning and empowerment. For this exhibition, I asked my mother to select six objects from her sewing studio to express the manifesto of Indigenous resistance demonstrated in our studio. We added catalog labels to each object and “froze” them in time using resin. Presenting this work on a wooden base would not be enough, so Ana Rocha, my producer, and I went looking for illegally seized Amazonian wood. We found pieces of Amazonian Brazil nut tree, which form the base of the work. And so Costura é resistência indígena [Sewing and Indigenous Resistence] (2024) was born.

Manhaba’u: onde toca o invisível is about considering the invisible based on where I come from, but also about connecting to the invisible thread that touch us, seeking, in this way, to develop actions that inform and strengthen our presence and relationship with the Earth.