In their creation narratives, the Yepá Mahsã people, known as Tukano, came into the world on a serpent-canoe of transformation: “Pameri Yukese”. They brought with them all of their sacred medicine and instruments and crossed the world’s waters until they came upon the beach of transformation at the Bay of Guanabara. From there they travelled up the coast until they arrived at the mouth of the river of milk, the Amazonas river, and continued up to the headwaters where they settled in the region known today as the Upper Rio Negro.

This history is shared among various indigenous peoples, who have as a common origin the serpent-canoe of transformation. They are the peoples of the Jurupari, peoples of Ayahuasca who continue to exist and resist at the triple border between Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela. The region known as “Cabeça do Cachorro” [Dog’s Head] saw its first contact with Europeans in the 17^th century. In the 19^th century these indigenous populations were enslaved during the rubber empire, and at the beginning of the 20^th century, their cultures were persecuted and demonised by the Salesian Catholic missions, aided by integrationist policies of the Brazilian state.

Following four centuries of ethnocide, the passing on of traditional knowledge, transmitted across generations, is reaffirmed as an act of resistance to colonial violence. Keeping indigenous culture dynamic and alive, cultivating memory, connection to the land, the power of medicines and the truth of cosmovision, constitute a political commitment to survival.

For Daiara Hori, whose traditional name is Duhigô, a member of the Tukano clan - Erëmiri Ahûsiro Parameri - the act of counter-colonisation involves reaffirming indigenous thought, inverting the order established by the geometry of discursive power which dominates Western understanding, through the use of contemporary tools - including art - to establish dialogue between histories and stories.

Mirage and Visions

The works of Daiara Tukano, as she is better known, feature in the 30^th edition of the Exhibition Program of the São Paulo Cultural Centre (CCSP) as an invitation to become more familiar with the universe shared among these peoples, who row together not only through spaces, but also through times, preserving the social memory of their common origin by way of the collective practice of aesthetic experiences, manifested across a multitude of formats and supports. For this exhibition the works take on the visual form of drawings and paintings which the author has grouped together into clusters of intercommunicating meanings.

Her work consists of research into “Hori” a word from the Dahseyé

(Tukano) language which refers to the “vision” of the Kahpi

(ayahuasca), the medicine which gives origin to all understanding, the history, language, song and drawings of the Tukano people. These visions arrived at in the remembrance of dreams and in spiritual practices traditionally undertaken by her family, are modes of communication which, as well as considered artistic, are also understood as ways of transmitting knowledge. In the painting of traditional objects in her culture, in the weave of baskets, in ceramics and in body painting, a great narration of the transformation of these societies is inscribed. Engendered therein, across multiple disciplines, lies the Tukano narrative.

Attentive to the teachings of her grandfather, Ahkïto, Casimiro Lobo Sampaio, who died of Covid-19 in 2020 at the age of 110, Daiara immerses herself in the memory of her family and her people, from the figurative to the abstract and from monochrome to light. Investigating traditional graphic patterns, she experiments with the reception of light in pictorial form – “from the colour present to the inexistent”, as she defines it in her own conception – seeking to understand the density of light’s vibrations, as well as the way they impact perspectives that have been submitted to the visual regimes of eurocentric historicity.

As such, since 2013, she has been producing “Kahpi Hori”: a series of homonymous canvasses which are both autonomous and, at the same time, associated works, whose presence constitutes experiential testimonies of individual and collective visions of her culture that point towards the transformation of humanity and of thought.

As a young woman from a patriarchal and patrilineal culture, whose ceremonial knowledge is traditionally reserved for men, Daiara calls upon the creation narratives in order to focus attention on the feminine figures, from the Great Grandmother, creator of the universe, to the spirits that travel through the layers of the world, and the “Hori”, that crosses time, materiality and spirit.