A world is born, but I’m not going to talk tradition.

This is an invitation to share an open-ended, inconclusive, and sensitive matter, and to an encounter with my recent experiences as an Indigenous Wapishana visual artist in which the references presented don’t arise from the academic field or permeate so-called literature, but instead hew closer to the cotton seed-lines of our plowed lands/ of the Atlantic Forest in Roraimà-Paranà. Wapichana cotton seeds I insist on sowing in other lands just like our mothers and grandmothers used to. Threads that we need to sharpen, refine, and strengthen to touch the skillful hands that weave and work these flowers. It so happens that there is an abyss between what takes place here, on this page of the art world, and the cotton planted in the earth. One of the names of this abyss is “Contemporary Art,” a thread manifest in a timeline of the History of Art; and since we must speak about this ancient time, we pick up the thread. We do not begin in the realm of invention, however, but instead in the literal realm of spinning cotton. Making threads: it’s the foundation of our art and vision.

The reflection that I am sharing took place in a gymnasium at an Indigenous school in Roraima, where the community usually meets for social gatherings. I don’t know if it was the heat, or the chirping of the cicadas that I heard in January, or the effect of the tender Patamona that we drank the night before, but all this timeless talk of threads sharpened my vision so that I noticed a relative, an Indigenous friend of the Baré people, drinking her Guaraná Baré as she asked the Tuxaua of the community, who was drinking his Guaraná Tuchaua, about tradition and planting manioc. My friend Baré recalled some techniques with the tipiti that they use in her community in São Gabriel da Cachoeira with her family, and at the meeting Tuxaua remembered the olden days: how each braided fiber is an animal – the tipiti, a boa constrictor, for example. A teacher from outside the community who was drinking her Guaraná Antarctica joined the conversation with a chat about Indigenous literature and the Guaraná Sateré-Mawé tradition depicted in a book, but that world seemed increasingly distant from our present meeting, since the book featured no Indigenous authors.

Con-tradi(c)tion.

The pirarucu tongue, who had already declared that he would no longer talk about guarana, because today this product is sold at kiosks at street markets in Manaus, took the microphone at the meeting, and decided to address the gatherings that take place in Brasília and a possible Indigenous minister – a granddaughter of Makunaimî – who can occupy the chair in a new Indigenous ministry to continue the struggle for land demarcation, for health and differentiated education, for dignity, against mining on Indigenous lands, against deforestation, as well as the struggle for resources to assure the continuity of the so-called family-farming to keep the “house of flour” alive. It turns out that the meeting ended abruptly, as the “pirarucu tongue” (the nickname of Tuxaua’s son) began to feel sick. A devotee of Tuminkery dan, the son has bad eyesight (he’s practically blind), and the Karaiwe doctor said it was due to diabetes. Tuxaua, who noticed his son nearly fainting in the midst of his speech, finished drinking his Guaraná Tuchaua in one gulp, and placed his son on the back of his motorcycle to take him to the hospital in Boa Vista. The devotees of Santa Luzia, the patroness of ophthalmologists, began to pray in the Wapishana language. But how do we strengthen our threads of tradition? How do we strengthen this vision?

The abyss called Contemporary Art is slow to take note of certain priorities and realities. This field of observation, of spinning, this craft that makes the spindle turn, occupies the same field-baaraz as those who hear cicadas sing and listen to the historical time of transformation. The cotton threads continue to recall the day when sewing machines arrived in communities with the embroidery classes offered by priests and nuns, and when industrial threads began to compete for the place of the thread spun by our grandmother. But these cotton threads endured over time and are now part of the Art and Public Sphere debates. They share the fact that one of the Benedictines’ goals was to cojoin their god with one of ours (which we didn’t even call a god). They sought, in other words, to colonize birth and death by instilling faith in Tuminkery dan.

Where are we headed in the end?

The thread spun by grandmother and child preserves the memory of following this education project that conceives of sewing machines as a tool to tame our bodies and memories. It’s a way to observe with one’s senses the day that work and the notion of a “useful life” were conceived in Indigenous communities.