Arts, museums, and indigenous peoples: occupying territories and the cultivation of new meanings and affects in brutal times

Abstract

This writing represents an attempt to occupy territories and cultivate new meanings around the arts and museums through the encounter with the artist's book "Kaá Wásu" (which brought together the Baré, Karapãna, and Guarani-Kaiowá indigenous peoples in the exhibition Tierra [2024]) and the installation "Mulher-raiz, tronco e jenipapos" (which brought the Kaingang people to the exhibition Cosmopolíticas vegetals [2024]). We wish to bring into existence an intertwined "we" through a symmetrical dialogue between indigenous and non-indigenous people, artists and university researchers, involved in the creation of these materials and gestures. From this pursuit, questions about the colonial logics that permeate the arts and museums arise, as does the perception that dialogues with indigenous experiences and epistemologies are essential for dealing with the brutal times we live in. The arts and museums of the future cannot be pre-established categories and repositories of relics; they need to become territories of healing, of disseminating life, and of proliferating alliances with more-than-human beings. Here, especially, we highlight the prominence of plants and the way in which the arts are invented for indigenous peoples as a "small moving farm", as a continuum of the forest in museums. We also emphasize how paper and writing become living materials of counter-colonial thought and creation.