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Blazing a Trail of Hope An Interview with Emerson Uýra
Using only natural materials collected locally and sustainably, it can take several hours to design Uýra's clothing. Photo by Lisa Hermes. Inset top: Uýra, “Mil Quase Mortos (Boiuna)/One Thousand Almost Dead.” Dressed in a costume made entirely of natural materials, Uýra stands against a backdrop of a river contaminated by plastic waste. Photo by Matheus Belém. Inset bottom: Uýra visits villages along the Amazon River to teach residents about the importance of conservation. Photo by Selma Mai.
Laura Harvey (CS Intern)
E
merson Uýra (Emerson Munduruku) is a young artist, scientist, and educator of Afro-Indigenous ancestry from Mojuí dos Campos, Santarém in the Amazon. Through his drag persona, Uýra Sodoma, Emerson Uýra blurs the lines between human, animal, and plant. Out in the streets of the Amazonian city of Manaus, Brazil, or in the sterile space of the art gallery, Uýra mesmerizes audiences with his disrupting of colonial narratives of wilderness, gender, and environmental destruction. A visual artist and human rights activist, Uýra is also a biologist with a masters degree in ecology. Whether he is inhabiting Emerson or Uýra Sodoma, he is pushing for diversity, rights, and racial justice. Cultural Survival recently spoke with Uýra. Cultural Survival: Please describe your artwork. Emerson Uýra: I talk about life in my work, about the
violations of those lives, about the beauty, the potency, the manifestations of all lives—not just the life of the forest, but of human life as well, the beauty that we are walking through. I move from academia, from scientific research, and I bring a lot of that to my artistic practice telling natural stories about animals, plants, our Indigenous stories, stories about our people from the periphery, about LGBTQ2S (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Two-Spirit) people. Cultural Survival: How did you begin as Uýra? EU: Uýra emerged in 2016 after a coup d’état in Brazil.
I was living with artists who were protesting [and] I began 4 • www. cs. org
to see myself as an artist. Since then, I have been taking on a presence that is a hybrid of animal and plant. I adorn myself with leaves, branches, seeds, everything that is part of us, because we also are nature. I invite these elements of the forest together with my body. And there we have Uýra: this presence in this entity of plant and animal flesh. I like to see Uýra as a tree that walks within the cosmovisions within the way that Indigenous Peoples from many places come; from there come the transformations. We transform many things within these visions into animals, and animals become people. A tree walking breaks the Western, Eurocentric, colonial imaginary that envisions trees as stationary, motionless organisms. By turning into Uýra, these rights of the walk- ing trees are like the Indigenous bodies that have always mobilized us and moved independently of colonialism. CS: Do people react differently to your performances depending on the space? EU: People are enchanted or repulsed. There are many
sensations. The multitude of reactions are ok, even important for me. People on the street react in multiple ways; this is part of being human. It is different from the reaction inside art galleries where people are all very polished and reactions are all very controlled. I prefer the reaction on the street. CS: Please describe one of your most memorable performances. EU: I perform photo performances, so I go with a photographer
to a chosen site. For example, the city of Manaus where I live, I situate myself, I receive Uýra in my body, and there I pose,
