Reappearances and reclaimings: historiographic–poetic agencements (assemblages) of images and materialities in Brazilian contemporary Indigenous art

Abstract

This article examines the artistic practices of Glicéria Tupinambá, Denilson Baniwa, and Gustavo Caboco, investigating how their work enacts cultural and epistemic reclaimings through the reactivation of historical images and materialities. It argues that images produced since the sixteenth century—central to the colonial construction of the “Indian” as a conceptual image—are counter-instrumentalized by these artists and rearticulated within historiographic–poetic assemblages. Grounded in Félix Guattari’s notion of agencement (assemblage), the study understands these practices as collective, processual, and politically situated configurations that connect images, bodies, territories, and forms of knowledge. The analysis shows that these works do not merely reference the past but reactivate it as an insistent presence, resonating with the concept of haunting as formulated by Avery F. Gordon. The reappearance of images and objects—such as the Tupinambá mantle—operates as a counter-image that destabilizes colonial narratives grounded in extinction, assimilation, and Indigenous passivity. The article argues that these practices constitute a politics of images and materialities that reopens history and repositions Indigenous peoples as contemporary agents in the production of knowledge and memory. By mobilizing ancestral technologies alongside contemporary media, these artists articulate alternative temporalities and contest hegemonic imaginaries of Brazil, framing art as a site of historiographic, political, and cosmotechnical action.