<\/p>\n
Bene vixit qui bene latuit*<\/i><\/p>\n
Resting beneath the stone
\n<\/i>he who lived hidden.
\n<\/i>Spare him the outrage
\n<\/i>of the tumult.
\n<\/i>* \u201cHe who lives well lives hidden\u201d,<\/i> Lema de Descartes (N. A.)<\/p>\n
\u2013 Paulo Leminski, miniora\u00e7\u00e3o f\u00fanebre para ren\u00e9 descartes <\/em>[Short Funeral Prayer for Ren\u00e9 Descartes], Toda Poesia (1976)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I.Where does the invisible touch?<\/strong><\/p>\n I call on the Paran\u00e1 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 \u201cmake visible\u201d or have the pretense of \u201crevealing\u201d the mysteries of the hidden or unconscious.<\/p>\n In Leminski\u2019s \u201cshort funeral prayer,\u201d it seems to me that an invitation to \u201cclose a cycle\u201d or \u201cclose a time\u201d is being made. The time Descartes lived lays under the stone, a time when the strategy of being invisible related to staying alive \u2014 and so those who lived invisibly lived well.\u00a0 Yet, this still sounds to me like a reality to Indigenous populations in Brazil. In the philosopher\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n In this initial conversation, there is a conscious, temporal choice to consider Leminski and Descartes. Leminski was from Paran\u00e1, one of the places from which I propose the work that follows Vom Paran\u00e1 Zum Roarima<\/em>\u00b9. The poet died the year I was born, 1989, so I see him as a reference of what was said, coming from Paran\u00e1, 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.<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Vom Roraima Zum Orinoco (1923) is how the anthropologist Theodor Koch-Gr\u00fcnberg titled-captured the research materials he collected among the Indigenous people of Roraima. Vom Paran\u00e1 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 Makunaim\u00e3 to the paper skins of Germany [from where I write this text]. The installation Roraimarte II (2024), in this exhibition, further explores such questions.<\/em><\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Returns, returns, returns, returns, returns, returns, returns.<\/p>\n 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 <\/em>(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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n II. Stitching the Invisible<\/strong><\/p>\n 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 \u201ccolonial coma,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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 Maur\u00edcio de Nassau are presented in Brazilian school textbooks as characters in the \u201cDutch invasions\u201d 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\u2019s platoon, like the artists Albert Eckhout and Frans Post, are canonical and untouchable, even by the flames. These images are \u201csusceptible\u201d 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 Essequibo\u00b2 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.<\/p>\n ***<\/em><\/p>\n Essequibo is one of the rivers that our grandfather Makunaim\u00e3 transformed himself into after Tamoromu fell, the great Wapichana tree presented in the opening of the exhibition Que acontece quando cai uma grande \u00e1rvore? [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 \u201cnatural resources\u201d without a river, for example, being considered a subject of law, or a grandfather \u2014 which is how we see him.<\/em><\/p>\n ***<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n III. Manhaba\u2019u means invisible in the Wapichana language<\/strong><\/p>\n In 2023, I was invited to participate as an author in the Festa Liter\u00e1ria Internacional de Paraty [International Literary Festival of Paraty] (FLIP) and, for the occasion, I organized the launch of the publication Literatura do invis\u00edvel <\/em>[Literature of the Invisible] (2023). Published by PICADA, the book is an essay-manifesto that proposes a dialog with Earth\u2019s many literary beings and unites my visual arts work with text-based production. Literatura do invis\u00edvel <\/em>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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n In the exhibition Manhaba\u2019u: onde toca o invis\u00edvel, <\/em>I present AMAZAD<\/em>, 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 doen\u00e7as do mundo <\/em>[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 M\u00e3e da Terra <\/em>[Mother of Earth] (2024), and these diseases of consumption, medicines, and emptiness are represented in this work.<\/p>\n The ecological debate is central in Manhaba\u2019u<\/em>. I touch on these issues from a more personal perspective, such as in the painting Retorno \u00e0 maloca <\/em>[Return to the Maloca] (2024), where I depict the strong-Wapichana-thread\u00b3 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.<\/p>\n ***<\/em><\/p>\n \u00b3 Making the thread strong is important if we want to weave resistant network<\/em>s. 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.<\/em><\/p>\n ***<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n IV. Sewing is Indigenous resistance<\/strong><\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/em>. We added catalog labels to each object and \u201cfroze\u201d 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 \u00e9 resist\u00eancia ind\u00edgena <\/em>[Sewing and Indigenous Resistence] (2024) was born.<\/p>\n Manhaba\u2019u: onde toca o invis\u00edvel <\/em>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.<\/p>\n <\/p>","protected":false},"template":"","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n