ARCHIVO PAPERS

We Live Like Trees Inside the Footsteps of our Ancestors

Gabriela Saenger Silva — 2023-10-26

This text reviews the exhibition "We Live Like Trees Inside the Footsteps of our Ancestors", open for visits from 12 May to 22 July 2023 at the Blenheim Walk Gallery at Leeds Arts University. Curated by Dr Mariana Cunha (University of Westminster) & Dr Marianna Tsionki (Leeds Arts University) with the participation of the artists Marianne Hoffmeister Castro, Jeannette Muñoz, Renata Padovan, Maya Watanabe, the exhibition explored the fragility of the ecosystems in Latin America on the aftermath of the coloniality and erasure of indigenous knowledge. The artworks in the exhibition portrayed a mapping of the region, showing the delicate balance between life and death and the disappearance of the communities and local wisdom on the brink of environmental emergencies.

Photography's Enduring Life

Beate Pittnauer — 2023-10-26

Museum Kunstwerk hosted a special exhibition that explored Native American photographic portraiture and questioned its ambivalent status as both fine art and a powerful political tool. Displaying the works of two US-american artists, Edward Sheriff Curtis and Will Wilson, the exhibition not only bridged a century of different modes of representation, but also confronted irreconcilable (de)colonial imaginaries: Curtis’ non-Indian point of view on the one hand, the Native American perspective of the Diné photographer Wilson on the other.

Digitising the Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya Archive

Belén Romero — 2023-10-26

This article will present some notes on the possibilities and limits of archiving or cataloguing living cultural processes based on the experience of digitising the photographic archive Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya. Latin American visual culture studies and the functioning of the association based on dialogic and collaborative learning have been our paths to carry out this study.

Urban Earthdivers and the Immodest Messiah as Decolonial Worldmakers

Renate Dohmen — 2023-10-26

The discussion explores the work of Kent Monkman in view of questions of indigeneity in the visual arts by drawing on the concept of the postindian created by the Anishinaabe author and theorist Gerald Vizenor and the figure of the urban earthdiver, where he re-imagines the earthdiving trickster of Native American Indian creation myths as mixed-blood contemporary worldmaker and decolonial agent of change. The propositions inherent in the work will be discussed in relation to notions of the post-abyssal and an ecology of knowledges by Boaventura de Sousa Santos and the conception of de-linking entailed in decoloniality, a particular and influential approach to decolonising put forward by Walter Mignolo.

Elements of Colonisation and Indigenisation

Nevin Dalvin — 2023-10-26

This article discusses the nature of indigenisation seen on the murals of Syrian Christian churches in Kerala, focussing on St. Mary’s Jacobite church in Angamaly, Ernakulam. Kerala has several churches with elaborate murals, which have not received sufficient attention, and quite a few questions remain unexplored. These church murals were formed out of interactions between the Portuguese, the church of the East and the local religion. In the 16th century, the Portuguese exerted control over Kerala churches that had formerly been affiliated with the Church of the East. Some of the questions addressed in the article are: What are instances of indigenization seen on church murals? What are the different kinds of indigenization visible? How does this weave into a global narrative? What is the colonial and decolonial politics behind such image representation? These areas are discussed in the following article.

Life and its Transits as an Art Studio

Laura Burocco — 2023-10-26

The interview is an excerpt from a dialogue that took place in two video calls between the author and co-author and visual artist Arissana Pataxó in 2022. The conversation is part of the project “A South–North Dialogue on Afro-Indigenous Art”, which aims to bring Brazilian and Sámi indigenous artists into dialogue. The interview is organized through an open dialogue that covers the artist's ways of producing, linked to community life and her daily life as a community educator.

Decolonial Visualities

Nasheli Jiménez del Val — 2023-10-26

This issue aims to contribute to ongoing discussions in decolonial thought and visual culture studies regarding the potentialities of othered approaches to image-making beyond Western-centred conceptualizations of the image and its visualities. Specifically, this publication looks at the importance of Indigenizing visual cultural studies in order to effectively decolonize an inter-discipline that has historically obviated its Western-centric biases. Drawing upon the concepts of decolonial aestheSis, the right to look, and Indigenous visual sovereignty, this issue presents texts addressing the Indigenization of visual culture as a means for decolonizing the fields of visual culture studies and contemporary art studies.

Aesthetics of Poverty

Pamela Gomez — 2023-10-26

Indigeneity is usually framed as modernity’s other. It is a narrative that confines Indigenous peoples to a place of deprived marginality or exotic romanticism. This perception is especially prevalent in mainstream visual representation of Indigenous people. In this photographic series, I seek to challenge the dichotomy between tradition and modernity by overlapping seemingly disparate elements such as traditional textiles and modern architecture. I started this exploration by mimicking early 19^th century ethnological photography and current neoliberal multiculturalist imagery. In both cases, I use my own body, as an Indigenous woman of Aymara origin, to explore the mechanisms through which historical heritage operates simultaneously as emancipatory resistance and neo-colonial oppression.

Daemonicycles

Soraya Vasconcelos — 2023-10-26

The starting point for this visual investigation was an image from the photographic album of the border delimitation mission of a section of the Angolan/Congolese (DRC) frontier. The image shows a lunch at the Portuguese camp on the 5th of October 1914. Sitting at the table are six white men – the three commanding officers from each colonial power, Portugal and Belgium. Standing at the back of the construction that serves as a dining room, is a black servant. His head, merged into the background, is invisible. From the original glass negative of this shot, it was possible to retrieve this man’s features. The image was reprinted, cut up and reworked in various manners including collage and photography, a short animation photo essay – O Festim [the Feast] – and a web-based experiment – Daemonicycles – of which this visual essay is an interpretation. The work intends to reflect upon history and colonialism, considering power dynamics, cosmology and culture and the enduring phantoms that haunt us still today.

Ancestral Gratitude Bridge

Tahila Mintz — 2023-10-26

Ancestral Gratitude Bridge was created in response to the high suicide rate of Native youth. The immersive experience is rooted in original teachings of gratitude expressed through the Thanksgiving Address with recognizable environmental and cultural scenes. The experience is a reminder of all of our relations, from the bugs, to the winds, to the birds and people. The teaching and experience is a reminder that they are never alone, but always supported and surrounded by community, not only the 2 and 4 legged kind. It is being engaged with across Haudenosaunee territory and an expanded version with additional landscapes representing the Emirate territory was recently on view at the Sharjah Art Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present.