The Decade of Contemporary Indigenous Art: system, displacement, and Tupinambá authorship

Abstract

This article examines Contemporary Indigenous Art (CIA) as a field of symbolic, aesthetic, and epistemological reivindication, based on the situated experience of a Tupinambá artist within the art system. It takes coloniality as a persistent regime of naming, classification, and silencing of Indigenous peoples, seeking to understand how contemporary artistic practices operate as forms of memory, reinscription, and narrative dispute. The objective is to examine how Museu da Silva, the Tupinambá Mantle of Maery, and nominal reinscription are constituted as devices of self-archiving and symbolic reterritorialization. The article engages with studies and contemporary Indigenous perspectives, particularly regarding the critique of colonial regimes of representation and the production of memory. Methodologically, it articulates critical analysis of artworks, historiographical reading, and situated reflection on artistic, curatorial, and autobiographical practices. It argues that Contemporary Indigenous Art is not limited to the search for institutional recognition, but operates as a living system of aesthetic, political, and territorial elaboration. It concludes that the so-called Decade of Contemporary Indigenous Art does not constitute a closed period, but rather an ongoing process of displacing colonial structures within the art system.