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The Ka’a Body Digital Arts Festival, created in partnership with the Instituto Maracá, launched on 27 January with an online discussion, and features work from: Denilson Baniwa, Sandra Benites, Anita Ekman, Hugo Germano, Andrey Guaianá Zignnatto, Zahy Guajajara, Sandra Nanayna, Marcelo Noronha, Dani Ornellas, Nzo Oula, Mariana Villas-Bôas, Sallisa Rosa. It initially presented a series of six films and a symposium, focusing on re-contextualising Indigenous culture and the forests that make up much of the territory of Brazil (The Amazon, The Atlantic Rainforest, and the Caatinga).
The programme has now expanded to present a new documentary on Itu nai anya arimikane (A floresta é nosso futuro/o que nos faz crescer; The forest is our future/that which makes us grow), 2021, a large-scale textile work made by AMITIKATXI, an artist collective formed of women from the Tiriyó, Katxuyana and Txikiyana Indigenous peoples, organised by the Fundo de Artes e Artesanatos Wëriton Iyeripo. The work was a significant collective work and the first contemporary artwork produced by the collective. The documentary was produced by the AMITIKATXI collective in collaboration with Brazil Footprint and the Iepé Institute.
Ka'a Body is supported by the Goethe-Institut London. The symposium was created in partnership with Select Magazine.
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itu nai anya arimikane: on the collective artwork of AMITIKATXI, 2022
Documentary produced collaboratively by AMITIKATXI, Brazil Footprint & the Iepé Institute
7'46" -
Sallisa Rosa and Zahy Guajajara
RITO, 2021
Single-channel video
9'59"Edition of 5 + 2 AP"RITO is a rite of passage into the future. It is a video manifesto that speaks of rebirth, and aims at non-death. We do not allow ourselves to die.
With RITO, we manifest a crossing between death and life. Hair connects us to firming the body to walk the path of transformations. And it is in the firmness of mutual roots that we resist. Transforming conflict into care, converting death into life.
This is not a performance. This is a ritual. And what drives us to do this ritual is the need to reframe our views as a species. We are a new species. We're not performing. We are in search of transformation and healing, this is a ritual for the future.
We are two Indigenous women artists, from different paths.
On one side, we have one who was born in the village and whose first language is the ze'eng eté dialect of the Tupi-Guarani trunk, who started to live in the city as an adult, adapting there to new origins, technologies, cultures and languages. Experiencing chaos. The city, too, is their origin.
And on the other side, one that was born in the big city, and whose first language is Portuguese, from Vulgar Latin, and who was raised amidst the chaos of its origins, and that is why it identifies with the confusion. The village is also its origin." – Zahy Guajajara & Sallisa Rosa
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Zahy Guajajara, Sallisa Rosa & Mariana Villas-BôasAIKU'È ZEPÉ, 2021Single-channel video12'42"Edition of 5 + 2 AP
AIKU'È ZEPÉ was born from the need to manifest the massacre of indigenous culture.
The narrative emerges from the earth, representing the birth of a genuine being in symbiosis with nature, who will go through a process of searching for an identity.
Indigenous painting symbolises the first identity, related to ancestry and cultural and family origin. This process is interrupted by the denial of origin, the black face symbolising the end and the beginning of a new identity; that will be represented by Western painting. This painting symbolizes the castration suffered by the Indian in an attempt to insert himself into society. In a cyclical and delicate movement, the return to the land, the rescue and connection with nature takes place, this is the strength of resistance - The struggle for indigenous inclusion in society without giving up ancestry. R-existing is the hope of rebirth for the next indigenous generations.
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Denilson Baniwa
Tyty memórias de um beija-flor (Tyty memories of a hummingbird), 2021
Single-channel video
3'26"
Edition of 5 + 2 AP
I awoke at 5 in the morning, before the sun.
I like to see it rise and burn the sky.
They put a board at the top of the city
where I can read the spell:
“If you live this, you won’t need anything more.”
This phrase left me sad
and my heart quickens
and my eyes close
and I feel that I want to experience the city upside-down
My grandma left her village at my age.
She went down the Aiari river
and wounded a tree with a bullet.
With her eyes of coal, Carbon-14, she told me:
“Don’t look back, my son.
You need to be strong.
I’m here if you need me.
You need to be strong.
Hold my hand.”The city wakes me with a street vendor’s clock,
on my fingers a ring of discomfort.
Everyone is searching for someone to blame.
If it’s you, well, it’s you.
Sometimes, there’s not much to be done.
Beside that bookshop, I would like to take a bath of rain,
close my eyes in this Sāo Paulo cold
and imagine that these shops with their sales
are selling millions of seeds.
That we, you and I,
on a cold and rainy day,
where only we would fit the street,
little by little, metre by metre,we will plant a forest.
Hand of the forest and not of the shrub.
Today I would like to dig between the paving slabs
and germinate a forest.
You and I.
Strawberry guava, cupuaçu and banana,
cashew, cipó sweet orange, cara cara orange, pumpkin, taboca bamboo and bacuri,
pepper, sororoca, tajá, coca, tobacco and mariri.
And we would continue to plant
beans, peanuts, tonka beans, buriti palm, açaí and jauari,
tucumā, tucum, jupati and uxi,
cassava, water hyacinth, hog plum,
arrowleaf elephant’s ear, sumaúma, jenipapo,
paxiuba, muirapiranga, inajá,
corn, jackfruit and annatto,
urupé, rubber tree, clove and ice cream bean.
We would make a forest territory.
We would knock down buildings.
I open my eyes and the billboard is still there
and I, alone in the city, where buildings are huge hives without bees
metal anacondas - snake-canoes - loaded with people without their own identity,
counting the time so as not to be late, but always paying off the credit late.
Invoices to be paid.
The billboard stays there.
I carry seeds in my pocket,
hummingbird memories,
and longing in the heart.I remember you and my grandma.
I sow seeds in the cemented soil, hoping that some,
just like me, grow in arid places.
Resistance through persistence.
If we manage to put down our roots,
if our seed succeeds in this soil
the billboard is the traveller, ephemeral.
“If you live this, you won’t need anything more.”Denilson Baniwa
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Anita Ekman, with Sandra Benites, Marcelo Noronha, Dani Ornellas and Nzo Oula
Tupi Valongo - Cemetery of the New Blacks and Old Indians, 2018
Single-channel video
18'13"
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Anita Ekman, with Sandra Benites, Sandra Nanayna and Marcelo NoronhaTUPI VALONGO - KUNHANGUEREKO (THE BODIES OF WOMEN), 2021Performance and video work, made in 2021 for MoMA7’45”
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Andrey Guaianá Zignnatto
Xe Rapó, 2020
Single-channel video
Edition of 5 + 2 AP
4’15”