The Brazilian Indigenous artist and activist Glicéria Tupinambá will take over the Brazilian pavilion within the 2024 version of the Venice Biennale. Three Brazilian Indigenous artists will curate the pavilion: Arissana Pataxó, Denilson Baniwa and Gustavo Caboco Wapichana.
Tupinambá (often known as Célia Tupinambá) was born in 1982 within the Serra do Padeiro, considered one of a number of villages that kind the Tupinambá Indigenous Land of Olivença in southern Bahia. She considers the tradition and plight of Brazilian Indigenous communities in her work, and has spearheaded a number of activist interventions and artworks associated to Tupinambá heritage and the demarcation of Tupinambá lands.
The Tupinambá persons are considered one of a number of Tupi cultures that inhabited the jap Brazilian coast earlier than Portuguese colonisation. The Tupinambá, particularly, had been lengthy thought-about extinct. The tribe was not federally recognised till 2002, and continues to battle laws that legalises encroachment on their native territories.
A lot of the artist’s previous work has centred on the revitalisation of historical Tupinambá information. Current works have targeted on recovering the manufacturing of Tupinambá mantles, a shamanic ritualistic object that was historically made via a definite course of involving the weaving of pure fibers, scarlet ibis feathers, and feathers from different birds, some whose colors had been modified via the featherwork method often known as tapirage, during which the melanin of captive birds’ feathers had been suppressed so their feathers might regrow with yellow and reddish hues. As her works chronicle, these vibrant Tupinambá mantles had been avidly collected as a part of the burgeoning curio commerce in Latin America that emerged after European contact, and are emblematic of the fraught entanglement of European and Indigenous cultures in Brazil and the following ethnographic framing of non secular Brazilian Indigenous objects.
The artist explores associated themes within the movie Quando o Manto Fala e o Que o Manto Diz (When the Cloak Speaks and What the Cloak Says) (2023), which premiered final month on the São Paulo Museum of Artwork (Masp). Made in collaboration with the director Alexandre Mortagua, the movie is overlaid with poetic narration and follows Tupinambá girls via the method of making a mantle, from the development of the netting to the appliance of the feathers.
Pertinent to Tupinambá’s work, a uncommon instance of a Tupinambá mantle made within the colonial interval was returned to Brazil over the summer season after being held on the Nationalmuseet in Denmark since 1689. It’s considered one of 11 identified current mantles from the period, the remainder of that are nonetheless held in European collections. The mantle will be a part of the gathering of the Nationwide Museum in Rio de Janeiro, which is working to rebuild and increase its nationwide holdings after {an electrical} hearth gutted the establishment and most of its assortment in 2018.
Tupinambá’s presentation within the subsequent Venice Biennale is titled Ka’a Pûera: nós somos pássaros que andam (Ka’a Pûera: We’re Strolling Birds) and can examine the sacred object via a movie of the identical title. The Brazilian pavilion, which has been symbolically renamed the “Hãhãwpuá Pavilion”, a time period that references ancestral Indigenous lands, may also characteristic different works critiquing topics associated to Indigenous resurgence and resilience.
“Ka’a Puera are historical forests that had been reduce right down to make fields, (…) however can also be identified by the Tupinambá individuals as a small chicken that lives in dense forests, its brown, orange and grey feathers camouflaging the chicken on the forest flooring,” the co-curators write in a joint assertion. The double that means of the exhibition’s title goals to honour communities “whose territorial rights have been violated, however who name us to resistance”.
Previous to her Venice Biennale illustration, Tupinambá acquired the 2023 PIPA Prize, one of the vital prestigious artwork awards in Brazil. Her previous tasks embody the acclaimed 2015 movie Voz Das Mulheres Indígenas (Voice of Indigenous Ladies).
Tupinambá was beforehand a professor on the Tupinambá da Serra do Padeiro Indigenous State Faculty, and is pursuing a Grasp’s diploma in social anthropology on the Federal College of Rio de Janeiro. She has held a number of management roles in Indigenous rights organisations and has been criminalised for her activism; in 2010, she and different activists had been imprisoned after delivering an official message to then-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (who’s now serving a second presidential time period) calling for the reinforcement of demarcation efforts.
Along with aligning with the following Venice Biennale’s overarching theme Foreigners All over the place, Tupinambá’s choice underscores the momentum throughout the Brazilian arts sector to champion Indigenous histories, from the most recent version of the Bienal de São Paulo’s predominant deal with Indigenous artists to Masp’s present annual curatorial programme, Indigenous Histories. The sixtieth version of the Venice Biennale (20 April-24 November 2024) is being curated by Adriano Pedrosa, the creative director of Masp and the primary Latin American curator to ever lead the biennial.
