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RODRIGO PETRELLA

The Light of the Forest & the Arch of Destruction

This thinker observed that all the books, no matter how diverse they might be, are made up of the same elements... He also alleged a fact which travelers have confirmed: In the vast Library there are no two identical books. The Library of Babel, by J. L. Borges

This is the digital version of the book A Luz da Floresta & o Arco da Destruição [The Light of the Forest & the Arc of Destruction], printed and published in 2014. Every territory – just like paper or canvas, with their peculiarities and topologies – requires different modes of navigation and comprehension, generating possibilities, demanding adaptations. In the process of translation from the analog to the digital, from the vertical to the horizontal, some chapters needed to be changed; the one entitled “Alto Envira” was removed and a new one, called “Xavante,” was added in its place. Some sequences of images remained intact, while others, such as those of the Mebêngokrê Kayapó, and more intensely in the case of the Enawenê-Nawê, were remodeled. Reelaborated, they are now seen in another support, layers of a new skin. All of this was done with diligence to preserve the book as an attempt at reconstructing a simultaneously intimate and transpersonal experience, through a visual, textual and narrative voyage idealized atop the memory of various other physical voyages that arose during actual experience, though by this point, I also believe they are partly the stuff of dreams. It is the possible reconstruction of a crossing that never ended, which can be reconfigured at every moment, resignified by the collected fragments. There is a cultural discontinuity between those who intermeddled and those who suffered the intermeddling – intermeddlings that vary in terms of different degrees of violence and possibilities of exchange and alliance. Beyond the aesthetic field to which the images belong, we should bear in mind the asymmetries between that which we believe and feel and that which others experience. Last but not least, I would like to thank the help, support and confidence of all those who throughout these many years have contributed to this work, allowing it to be carried out. Contributions by the many friends whom I cannot possibly mention by name at the moment, but without whom, none of this could have been accomplished. This is also a work of many voices and hands that are here amalgamated and take form in images, crystallized in the pictures in this book.

Index:

The Other Lights

-pag 7

Mebêngokrê Kayapó -pag22 Xavante -pag46 Nambikwara Mamaindê -pag63

Pictures of Humanity -pag70

The Gleam of Feathers -pag80 Alto Xingú -pag90 Enawenê-Nawê -pag108 Yanomamí -pag130

The Arc of Destruction -pag145

The Other Lights THE DEVIATION OF MASKS

Rodrigo Petrella spent years in the Amazonian Basin taking photographs of several indigenous communities. He produced portraits, scenes from everyday life, rituals and images of celebration and leisure. He did studies of painted bodies and captured spontaneous moments, fleeting gazes and poses. He photographed aspects of ethnic architecture and pieces of featherwork. In other words, he tackled indigenous images through other images, which required mediations and a readjustment of gazes. If all images are elusive and can only be approached through complex perspectives, when dealing with diﬀerent cultures they are even more so, especially when art and beauty are involved. It is impossible to faithfully capture a face whose expression has been altered, enhanced and displaced by dark, intense paint that has redrawn the factions according to totally unknown codes. Not only are the facial lines corrected by designs that contradict the proportion of the eyes and mouth or the relief of the nose, but these invasive lines and colors also correspond to hermetic – or even more dangerous – multi-faceted codes. The presence of feathers makes a portrait even more complex, because they send powerful visual signals that clash with the imagery of the paintings and the physical features. The semblance is a disturbing symbolic/imaginary construction that acts as a mask in the most radical sense of the term: it splits the face in two, confronting it with the other, which could be its own or its other side (its reflection or its ghost). The mask takes the game of same and diﬀerent to the extreme by replacing or erasing the face. The Kayapó masks photographed by Petrella make the entire body disappear: removing their appearance, displacing their image, the masked men and women dissolve in the impossible memory of the origin

to adopt new arguments that periodically renew its meaning. On the one hand, the mask allows the wearer to become the mythical ancestor who comes back to ensure the fulfillment of the cosmic cycle, the succession of the seasons and the movement from one social position to another. On the other hand, it summons the primordial alter ego to the scene: the adversary who disrupts the social balance and calls for the renewal of the collective pact (faced with an enemy threat, society unites). The mask thus introduces an oscillating mediation between identities: the swapping of roles every society needs in order to accept its conflicts and name the unknown, displacing the sites of enunciation and the gaze. The wearer of the mask or the paint becomes a god, his own ancestor, a totemic animal or a cultural proto-hero: he becomes someone else in order to recover himself through the disruption of time and the circumvention of alterity. When he goes back to being himself, he is inevitably marked by this diﬀerence and split by the dual role that he has had to play in the ritual. He removes the paint or the costume provisionally because he knows that his appearance will once again be subjected to the essential simulacrum of every culture: the dual maneuver that conceals in order to better reveal; which splits the body so that its other side can be glimpsed. PHOTOGRAPHIC DISTANCE

This act of splitting –the intimate fold of every society– entails a touch of exasperation: a dark area that must be approached with a certain degree of caution. The photographic process is useful when it comes to making calculated approaches: photography is a means of focusing, of regulating distance. Thus, Petrella’s approach requires adjusting the desire of the gaze through a system of circumventing and diverting, tilting and distancing. Capturing the image of an elusive object (an image in itself ) requires diﬀerent devices: the use of colour or black and white, close-ups or panoramic shots; capturing a pose or a candid portrait. Sometimes the detail is needed, other times the whole; either one particular element is stressed or the gradation of light. The urgency of shot requires rapid movement, a

a quick swipe of the eyes; the delicacy of another scene requires waiting patiently, like the indigenous hunter who, holding his breath, stalks his prey. As Wittgenstein says: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”1 The silence of language invokes showing; but how to show what is concealed by the mask if behind it there is another mask or pure absence, nothingness itself? Just presenting the facts and objects does not increase what is shown. The event can only be glimpsed through poetic representation, which conceals in order to reveal; it can only be tackled using strategies that manipulate the distance between absence and presence; using the necessary deviations to face that which can never be shown in full. In the appearance, in the image, the costume has its own truth. A truth that cannot fully reveal itself, as it also consists of its other side; it depends, in part, on its concealment. That is why the photographer names certain real events –the ones which we can talk about, as Wittgenstein would say– and keeps quiet about others: he merely suggests them, points out an intense area of silence hoping for some sign to appear. We might compare these moments to the terms coined by Barthes: the studium, which describes the objective situation and supplies material to the ethnographer, the anthropologist or the art theoretician; and the punctum, which shows that sign; the meaning that shoots out at us from the picture and pierces us.2 This opposition takes us to the subject of art, the quintessential space of the punctum. Which brings us to the following question: what is the correlation between the photographer’s image that records and points out and the image created by the indigenous person with costumes, feathers and body paint? This question challenges the very notion of art, penned in between its two limits: the indigenous aesthetic and the aesthetic of photography. INDIGENOUS ART: QUESTIONS

The debate about whether or not it is appropriate to use the term “Art” in the context of indigenous culture is disrupted by the ambiguities of this term. There is not a problem with it when it is used

generically: it refers to the operation that emphasizes the form of situations and things to alter their ordinary meanings and thus intensify the experience of the world. Like with any type of art, indigenous people rely on beautiful forms to make certain moments of their lives extraordinary and open them up to a new horizon of meaning. But the modern origin – Kantian, Hegelian – of aesthetics continues to stand in the way of the “artisticness” of indigenous creation, even though contemporary thought challenges the autonomy of art. Indigenous cultures do not separate beautiful forms from the network of political, legal, social and religious groups that make up a body whose parts are connected, though never in a stable manner. This lack of diﬀerentiation clashes with the model of modern art which, based on the predominance of form over content (functions, meanings and concepts), has certain requirements, such as constant formal renovation, individual creative genius and works that are original and unrepeatable. These demands correspond to a historic model of art, Western modern art, (from the early 17th century to the mid-20th century approximately). Determined by hegemonic reason, however, they become a universal canon applicable to all artistic production and a basis for discrediting forms of expression that do not adhere to its clauses. Indigenous art is not the product of unique, innovative, brilliant individual creation, even if the artists constantly renew collective patterns. Its forms are not autonomous, though the aesthetic quality can be detected in the brilliant evasion of beauty that drives its main figures. These characteristics of indigenous art have caused a historic rupture between the fine arts and the “applied arts”. If the former are ennobled, the latter –tied to prosaic functions or barbarian cultures – are reduced to the status of mere arts and crafts, folk expressions, archeological remains or pagan superstitions. Contemporary art theory, which challenges the notion of the autonomy of art, undermines the foundations of the dichotomy between illustrated art and popular or indigenous arts and crafts and refutes the discriminatory treatment of the “artisanal”. Yet this dichotomy is so deeply embedded in the hegemonic cultural discourse that it is important to insist on critiquing it and thus on defending the

term “indigenous art.” Before going about this, it is useful to remember that the concept of “art” does not exist in indigenous languages, which means that they do not have a word that describes a phenomenon foreign to their cultural context. More than the need to label a diﬀerent cultural field, the use of this term answers to the political convenience of indigenous peoples – whose ethnic rights are therefore better protected – and a conceptual gain for Western art – which benefits from the inclusion of difference. We shall address both of these points in the following subsections. A POLITICAL CASE FOR THE TERM “INDIGENOUS ART”

Respect for cultural differences stirs up the ethnocentric, discriminatory prejudices that allow Western art to monopolize every chance to manipulate tangible forms vis-à-vis meaning. This helps promote a different image of indigenous peoples, thanks to which the rest of Brazilian society comes to know them not only for their marginalization and infringement of their rights, but also for their creations, so often dazzling. The affirmation of indigenous art means accepting alternative imaginaries and acknowledging artistic differences, which can contribute new devices to universal heritage and provide essential signs to help disoriented contemporary art get back on track. This acknowledgement becomes, in turn, a factor of ethnic affirmation and social cohesion. When fundamental aspects of their identity are respected, indigenous peoples are in a better position to assert their demands for cultural self-determination and political empowerment, to defend their right to their own territory and a dignified life. CLANDESTINE BEAUTY

Alternative art forms emerged long before the modern autonomy of art; they were produced in parallel to modern art and continue to be produced, now that that autonomy has been destroyed. The paint that auratizes bodies and the feathers that illuminate the shaman’s brow and make the warrior’s head look more powerful invoke beauty only to reinforce social meanings that are hard to define with the word “art”. Aesthetics have no value on their own: they serve to reinforce contents that

transcend the realms of tangible appearance: great truths, superior values and even prosaic functions that have nothing to do with the fetishization of the aura. Even so, the fact that the form is not autonomous does not mean there is no form. Though it’s immersed in the dense network of the social body and does not dissociate itself from its intricate components, the aesthetic form is present, driving – as yet another force – the collective path. Beauty works furtively to endorse certainties and reinforce functions through the irrefutable gleam of images. It aims beyond proper proportions and harmonies; beyond the realm of tangibility: it activates the latent powers of trivial things, elevates bodies, illuminates and consecrates the ritual scene. Better-adjusted forms and more intense colours emphasize the mystery of the origin, expose the complexity of social diagrams and show the renewed astonishment at the diversity of the natural world, mixed up with the community’s imagination and symbolic repertoire. Paradoxically, this concept of indigenous art is close to the idea of contemporary art, with which it has many things in common that will help us tackle the intersection between ethnic image and photography. By refuting the autonomy of art, contemporary art finds itself with a serious problem. That refutation shall permit the fulfillment of the old avant-garde dream of reconnecting form and function, of bringing art and life closer together and facilitating the access to artwork for the overwhelming majority of the population. But as we already know, the modern utopia of massive aesthetization has been fulfilled not as part of the democratizing programme of art and politics, but as an item on the global agenda; that is, the exclusive walls of Art were torn down at first not because of some kind of enlightened emancipation, but to benefit the international market. In the pursuit of such benefits, the so-called “diﬀuse aesthetization” promoted by the information society and the entertainment industries activates complacent models of beauty; a beauty neutralized of any kind of disturbing edge that has become transparent, consummated in its purely imaginary moment. Now that the autonomy of art has disappeared and with it, the privilege of meaning, contemporary

art struggles between the surplus of content (conceptual absolutism) and the abuses of form (globalized aesthetization). Finding the (unresolvable) balance between autonomy and heteronomy of the aesthetic poses a challenge for modern-day art. In its attempt to avoid being caught in the circle of meaning or diluted in the flow of pure content, art must restore the moment of the aura (the distance of form, the space of desire) without this distancing being a gesture of idealistic regression or an act of segregation and exclusivism. Behind the effort to avoid both of these risks, the safeguarding of the place of distance–the space of difference– might be a political gesture, an act of resistance to the flattening of meaning proposed by profitable reason. And this is when indigenous art offers not solutions, but suggestive clues: its works are able to stress the aesthetic form – to introduce a principle of autonomy –without getting trapped in the circle of meaning, without giving up the different functions demanded by society and required by beliefs and rituals. For a moment, indigenous art distances itself from its objects –it auratizes them–, but does not exempt them from their commitments to the community. It makes them gleam, immersed in the body of the entire culture. As contemporary art wishes it could, it keeps a certain distance without objectifying it and makes beauty a dazzling sign of truth. THE BODY OF ART

In this subsection we shall talk about two powerful forms of indigenous art that mark Petrella’s photographs: body painting and featherwork. They share a common support: the human body, the surface of privileged inscription of the art that concerns us here. And for both of them, their main – if not only – backdrop is the ritual. In a cyclical manner, ordinary social time is detained and dislocated; it is ripped in such a way that the community can take an imaginary trip back to its origins and summon its dead and its gods to corroborate the great truths, guarantee the succession of seasons and the flow of the collective experience. This essential precaution, which alienates, intensifies and sublimates the collective conscience,

allows it to strengthen its bonds. When it enters the scene, when it represents itself, society shows different aspects than the ones revealed in ordinary time. The props (paint, feathers and masks) allow internal diﬀerences to be accepted, identity to be represented and memory and shared beliefs to be played out. Through rhetorical mediations, the whole society is recognized. During the ritual, the transformation of the social body begins with each individual body, which becomes a fundamental support and the very principle of the complex ritual aesthetic. Men and women emphasize their faces and torsos, their arms and legs in order to redraw the map of their identity that indicates the position of their clan, their social status or which ethnic group they belong to. But also, in a primordial way, they do this to reinvent their own silhouettes during the ceremony: to compare the design of the paintings and the illusion of the costumes with the lines of the natural world and the divine realm. Through body paintings and costumes, they take their body out of their environment and return it, altered, in order to make it – for an instant – a link between the individual and the social, the biological and the symbolic, the ordinary and the extraordinary. Thus, body paintings do not only have a refined aesthetic vocation and a sophisticated coding system for social positions; they also correspond to ritual scripts and mythic principles. By playing with body designs, indigenous people tackle primary questions. And they do so not by resorting to the undecipherable significance of language, but through the extremely ambiguous signs that mark the incomplete path of meaning. Just like body painting, featherwork relies on the power of the image to display the gleam of power, to call attention to the mystery of the origin and assert the foundation of certainties. Today, these serious responsibilities are at risk: featherwork is one of forms of visual art hardest hit by the spread of the capitalist model throughout indigenous territories. This loss takes the form of both ethnocide, which threatens any sign of diﬀerence, and ecocide, which devastates the habitat of the chosen birds and requires hasty substitutions of their feathers, when it does not directly determine the loss of these essential ornaments.

A DUAL PERSPECTIVE

Now that the question of indigenous art has been addressed – though not settled – we shall pose another: what is the relationship between this art and photographs of it? Rodrigo Petrella takes pictures of body paintings, ritual scenes, masks and featherwork and presents them mediated by his gaze: a gaze that must keep a certain distance from the object, but not too much. Photo editing has its own aesthetic, which can clash or agree with the aesthetic of the bodies portrayed. Many times, Petrella photographs of men, women and children who observe the gaze that will capture their likeness. The subjects of these portraits – quiet, smiling, aloof and somewhat distrustful – look at the photographer from the other side of the line that separates the two positions, holding our gaze for a moment, and forever. This exchanging of gazes establishes the space of the image. On the one hand, there is the gaze of the photographer, who must take a position and calculate, down to the very last millimeter, the size of the field in order to ensure the necessary distance, which keeps on changing with every movement. On the other hand there is the defiant or complicit gaze of the indigenous people who he have stopped to pose or have already been frozen by the camera. Now their bodies are subject to the aesthetic order: now they are forms of a carefully calculated composition, components of a space overlapping their own space; now they are figures subject to the regime of representation: attentive, at some specific or punctual moment, to what is happening beyond the scene. Thanks to this counterpoint, the stranger who has stopped in front of the camera does not have to become purely the subject of a scientific record or an object of exotic curiosity, but the Other who constructs his own gaze before the observer’s eyes. That’s why, although remote and excessively foreign, the individuals portrayed by Petrella escape the ethnographic record and reveal themselves as the masters of gazes held before those who look at them so intently. EVIDENCE AND PLEA

If the term “art”, complex enough on its own, becomes even more so when tied to the word “indigenous” it gets even more complicated when mixed up with concepts from photography. Perhaps so

called “artistic photography” has helped obscure a question seen from diﬀerent angles. For the modern system of artistic fields (painting, drawing, sculpture) the entry of photography was awkward, since its uncertain condition did not quite obey the codes of representation subject to the regime of artistic autonomy. The extraordinary referential powers of photography (its potential to document the reality of the object) ruined a model based on the opposition between abstraction and figuration and jeopardized the hegemony of meaning, one of the pillars of that regime. The contemporary discourse, which refutes the autonomy of art, has made room for both artistic and documentary photography, the most characteristic manifestation of the referential or deictic potential of the photographic image. The power that this image has to establish the signs of reality gives it not only a great denotative capacity (of hyperrealistic representation), but also informative and testimonial value. For the first time, the image is able to fulfill the old dream of representation: to provide irrefutable evidence that the represented object was really there, to capture the mark of its presence, as physical absence. In the context of the loss of the autonomy of art, evidence of another reality serves as a tool to reassert the power of that which occurs beyond the circle of representation. The collapse of that autonomy makes it easier for thematic and referential contents to invade that circle, and for “non-artistic” disciplines to enter the scene. But it also generates a dark obsession with the real, in the Lacanisan meaning of the word; that is, that which lies beyond the symbol, beyond the scope of language. This invasion of the spheres of art forces us to rethink the role of photography. Not “artistic” photography based on pure aesthetic/formal values, but conceptual and documentary photography (photojournalism, ethnographic photography, photographic essays etc.) aimed at what takes place beyond the scene of representation. According to this perspective, much of documentary photography is tied to contemporary art in their shared interest in the extra-aesthetic. (The contemporary image explores the unresolvable tension between what can and cannot be regarded as art, according to particular situations and pragmatic values).

Yet not everything that is referential falls within the sphere of art. By definition, objective references correspond to the sphere of the studium: the description of the reality that puts the work into context and allows its zeitgeist to be interpreted. The photograph becomes artistic when it manages to pierce the surface of inscription and disrupt the order of the record: to establish the absence, the reverse side of that which is shown. The punctum, the operation that produces this disruptive cut, is contingent. Each opition of meaning depends on a specific space and time. Therefore no work – photographic or otherwise – is guaranteed this status of “artisticness”. The artistic is no longer defined by the fulfillment of aesthetic/normative canons (harmony, proportion, synthesis) yet by its pragmatic eﬃciency, its conceptual density and poetic charge, components that can only be determined in each specific situation. That is why, although aesthetic form is still fundamental, in contemporary art it is only yet another force among many that drive social progress; by not being trapped in the orbit of meaning, it points to an inevitable elsewhere. The deictic, indicative quality of photography gives us nothing less than evidence of the represented object’s existence: the fact that it has been caught in its tracks by lighting eﬀects (whether it be by analogic or digital means) lends a special power to the medium of photography, a power that partly explains its prestige in the current field of the visual arts. In the field of ethnography, the substantiation that photography provides is particularly important: it reinforces the figure of “having been there” – vis-à-vis field studies – and contributes to the richness of the information, the studium. But the mere ability to provide a sign or vestige of what is shown is not enough to confirm the artistic quality of photography. The work of art requires not so much the presence of the object as much as its absence; that is, the possibility that it can show itself by staying out of the picture, by providing clues about what it is not, signs of its other. In its attempt to open up this possibility, the medium of photography coincides with other forms of contemporary art. Along the same lines, and within the actual field of photography, the conceptual – discursive – image converges with the documentary – descriptive - image. There are no definitive boundaries between art, which tries to attain the impossi-

ble real, and the record, which seeks to establish the facts of events. They both must resort to the power of the image to glimpse that which is beyond the scope of the gaze; they must both use form in order to detain, for an instant, that which is shown and, for an instant, suggest that which is not. They both require poetic arguments to make the discourse or narrative more complex and seek the remains or surplus of the recorded facts. DISTANT OBJECTS

The referent is nothing but a starting point of the visual languages, which seek in the denoted object a principle or a reason to deploy diﬀerent questions. But in some cases, the power of objective information is so patent that it in itself demands complex images that go beyond the scope of the merely referential. If a sensitive, competent photographer like Petrella portrays with awe the painted bodies of the Kayapó people, he is not only gathering extremely valuable ethnographical information: he is also showing codes of a half-open, stolen world. By supporting and contradicting the structure of the body, the lines reinvent the surface of the skin (which reverberates, then, in its depths), conjuring up divine and animal forms, indicating paths or establishing consecrated areas. Those lines make an impression on the photographer’s sensitivity and then, well-represented (presented/stolen) by him, they appeal to the gaze of those who see the photographs. If the work of art entails manipulating objects which, in themselves, have no auratic power, clearly some of them have more intrinsic possibilities than others to incubate a distance to be deployed by the work. That is why Rodrigo Petrella merely presents the beauty of the bodies without altering them with the devices of a new work of art which, overlapping the original, could risk the fullness of its forms. He does not resort to eﬀects of portrait photography, but skillfully uses the tricks of his trade to direct the viewer’s gaze at bodies and faces now invested with auratic power. THE SURVIVAL OF LIGHTNING

The work of Rodrigo Petrella that concerns us here is entitled Luz da Floresta e o Arco da Destruição.

Just as the referent of this work shows us only a vestige, its title offers us only a clue. But that clue opens up many directions. One of them leads to the opposition that Didi-Huberman establishes between the overexposure of powerful global spotlights (of merchandise: display cases, the spectacle of politics, stadiums and television studios) and the small light of surviving peoples, flickering yet still alive; an intermittent gleam of desire and poetry that he compares to the glow of fireflies3. The ferocious glare of the omnipotent projectors of the society of spectacle threatens the survival of alternative forms of appearance and visibility: it leaves out groups of people who reveal themselves under their own lights. Thus, fostering the imagination (or putting into images, into flashes of light) of cultures excluded by the hegemony of the market is a political gesture of affirmation of difference. Lightning bugs disappear only to the extent that we refuse to follow them, says Didi-Huberman4. That is why he urges us to pursue the authentic glow of surviving cultures, at risk of going extinct under “ferocious mechanical projectors” of the total market, and proposes following the glow of “bright communities: old-fashioned, atopian communities”5. In this regard, Denis Roche talks about the need to produce photographs based on flashes of light and compares photographic images to fireflies, in that they act as “moving insects with their big photo-sensitive eyes”6. That is why today, photography is important not as an autonomous procedure or proof that the represented object is real, but as the possibility of creating images that are always intermittent: they show fleetingly, like flashes of lightning, as Benjamin put it. Thus, the eﬀectiveness of photography lies in its ability to construct an image, in its potential to reveal/conceal objects that elude the spotlights. Petrella’s photography seeks the right angle and position to detect little erratic events and to capture intermittent flashes of light. They are precarious signs compared to the powerful gleams of the market, yet radiant in the flow of a sensibility determined in a poetic manner. This is the political power of nomadic art, in the Deleuzian sense of the term: the market can manipulate just about everything, but it cannot control poetry, which is based on a light that goes out a little more each day; a strange light capable of illuminating silence, of making the nocturnal silhouettes of that which is

absent gleam. The second half of the name of this series, Arco da Destruição, is tied to the tragic situation of communities threated by the total loss of all forms of diversity. The brief yet bright lights of the rainforest are weakened or put out, fraught by the crushing spread of capitalism over the lush lands of the Amazon Basin. The luminous metaphors of the body and the gleam of feathers are incompatible with the fierce lights of the market. Yet body paintings and pieces of featherwork survive. And they do so by making their scattered flames glow even brighter: by relying on the power of beauty, which is capable of stopping the moment of destruction in the bright instant that precedes it.

Ticio Escobar, Asunción, July 2014

Mebêngokrê Kayapó

In October 2010 I carried out a photographic project inspired by paintings by Albert Eckout (1610– 1665), portraying Mebêngokrê warriors with body paintings which, according to them, were in accordance with their tradition. Seeing the situation, a group of women approached and demanded, in the vein of equal rights for their gender, that I also record the character and tasks of everyday life. I agreed. But on the day arranged for the session, the weather was especially hot and we decided to go to a stream near the village, where we could cool oﬀ at a refreshing waterfall, and take the photographs there. Kriny Village (whose name, in the Kayapó language means “new village”), near the city of Redenção, in the state of Pará.

In October 2012, I took a trip to Motukore Village, located in Kayapó territory, in southern Pará. The purpose of this trip mainly involved protocol, without an aim to record anything in particular; I was supposed to present myself to the village together with a local indigenous artist, by the name of Banhi-re Kayapó. That settlement had been recently founded by a dissident group from the neighboring Gorotire Village, and the remains of trees they had cut down were still scattered throughout the central patio. At the end, in order to say farewell – and, who knows, to aﬃrm the group’s identity – they decided to present themselves painted, in their traditional garb. I photographed the faces of the people present at the meeting; these images can be seen on the following pages.

Ngrenhyry

Pรกtdjati

Pongri

Akatiny

Nhakmoro

Mrotiô

Kêje-i

Ropare

Tapture

Akroêtyk

Mrakarã

Ngrenhpryre

Ngradjupire

Nhakpryti

Xavante The Xavante are an ethnicity of the Jê linguistic group and have a history of contact with the surrounding society dating back to the mid-18th century. I visited the village of São Marcos, near Barra do Garças, Mato Grosso State in September 2007. At that time of year, the climate is characterized by hot days and very dry air, a blue sky, searing sun so bright that it hurts one’s eyes, and cold nights. Located in the cerrado [Brazilian savanna] biome, the area has sandy soil and a striking vegetation of scrubby trees with twisted branches. I recorded a relay race between two rival teams of males carrying trunks of buriti trees (approx. 80 kg), called uiwede in the Xavante language. In this competition, each team corresponds respectively to one of the two large matrimonial classes (poriza'õno and öwawe) which divide this ethnic group. The participants put every ounce of their eﬀort into the race. They each carry their team’s tree trunk alone on their shoulders for a stretch and transfer it to another member of their team, one after another, until reaching the finish line at the center of the village. The very heavy tree trunks are carried along irregular routes that vary between 6 and 8 kilometers in length. The races always involve adults of the same sex; there are also races of women with slightly less heavy tree trunks. These are highly significant events that mobilize the entire community.

Nambikwara Mamaindê The Nambikwara, especially those of the North, who are also known as the Mamaindê, were the first ethnicity I had a chance to visit. I returned to the communities countless times, especially the village of Capitão Pedro. The nose-piercing rite, which indelibly marks the passage of the adolescent into adulthood, was being forgotten; it had not been practiced by that group since 1984, and there were few people in the village who knew how to execute it. In repeated conversations, I emphasized to them the importance of maintaining their traditions and, motivated by my insistence, on a very cold winter morning, they decided to resume the holding of the ceremony. The cold temperature increased the pain of the piercing made with a sort of very sharp wooden dagger, further accentuating the scene. On the following days, to celebrate, we went to hunt bats (a local delicacy) in a cave that lay at a half-day’s hike from where we were. At the cave we composed a panoramic sequence of ten pictures in which all of the indigenous people who were present can be seen. Embedded in a hill between the plains and the mountain range of Guaporé Valley and covered with native vegetation, this cave represents the passage, the portal of the souls between worlds, where the spirits go when they become disembodied, after which they can return by becoming re-embodied in humans or animals.

Pictures of Humanity ABOUT THE BOOK

A Luz da Floresta e o Arco da Destruição [The Light of the Forest and the Arch of Destruction], a publication featuring photographs by Rodrigo Petrella, records the everyday settings, characters and artifacts of diﬀerent indigenous Amazonian ethnicities. The beauty of the images it presents are a further installment in the continuous process of updating the mindset through which nonindigenous Brazilians (who together constitute the vast majority of the nation) see the first inhabitants of the current national territory, the Indians. Concentrated mainly in Amazonia, the traditional indigenous peoples today compose only 0.25% of the Brazilian population, without counting the other 0.13% who no longer live in their villages since they are scattered within the vast urban grid that sprawls throughout the country (interspersed by large agricultural or coastline areas), inhabited by Brazilians of European, African and Asiatic ancestry, who began arriving in Brazil in the 16th century, at the outset of the Portuguese colonization. Nevertheless, the Brazilian indigenous population consists of about 225 ethnicities that speak more than 180 dialects and languages. THE ICONIC-IMAGINARY INSCRIPTION OF THE INDIAN IN EVERYDAY BRAZILIAN LIFE

Paintings, photographs, films and videos of Indians are commonly familiar to Brazilians from other backgrounds, not because they evoke the constant exchanges and conflicts they have shared with the native communities, but because pictures are the most recurrent everyday visual evidence of the presence of the Indians in Brazilian life (besides food names, place names, and other indigenous words incorporated to Brazilian Portuguese, even though most speakers are unaware of the indigenous origins of these words), the exception being the nonurban areas of the nation’s North and Central West.

This iconic familiarity, however, did not arise by chance. It has resulted from a still ongoing process of construction that began in colonial era, a time when the repertoires forged by the European colonizer were needed in order to legitimize the continuous domination and exploitation of the previous owners of the land, until today, when the discourses about the cultural other are bringing an entirely new aﬃrmation of the identity of the indigenous people and other minorities. The mindset with which the average Brazilian over the last 100 years has experienced the indigenous presence in Brazilian life was configured and continues to operate mainly in the discursive and imagetic realms. Formed by discursive and iconic repertoires of diﬀerent levels and eras, which can even be mutually inconsistent, this mindset continues to be constructed by the dynamics of commonplace views based on the writings that have circulated since the time of the colonizers, adventurers and traveling naturalists; 19th-century Brazilian romantic artists and writers; landmark texts (of a historical, artistic and journalistic nature), such as the “Manifesto Antropófago,” released by the modernist writer and critic Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954) in 1928; and, more recently, the discourses of the Indians themselves. It is necessary to also consider relevant contributions to the indigenous cause such as those by Marechal Cândido Rondon (1865–1958), who created the centenary Serviço Nacional de Proteção ao Índio (S.P.I.) and conceived the Xingu National Park; by the Brazilian hinterland experts Orlando (1916–2002), Cláudio (1918–1998), Leonardo (1918–1961) and Álvaro (1926–1995) Villas-Bôas, by Apoena Meirelles (1949–2004); and by anthropologists such as Berta Ribeiro (1924–1997), Darcy Ribeiro (1922–1997) and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1951). Nevertheless, this mindset would not have the same social penetration if it had not also been consumed in the iconic sphere. Published on an ongoing basis for generations, books, magazines, newspapers, agendas, school notebooks, postcards, reports, films, documentaries and digital media have served to disseminate images of the country’s autochthonous populations (absent from the daily life

of the nation’s large cities and the vast agricultural regions). Their icons evince the peculiar feeling of the Brazilian in relation to these populations situated at the fringe of the National State. This is a simultaneously familiar and distant feeling, since the average Brazilian has no real knowledge or awareness about the indigenous social-communitarian context. THE AMAZONIAN PHOTOGRAPHS BY RODRIGO PETRELLA

The Amazonian photographs by Rodrigo Petrella have as their backdrop the asymmetric relation between the conquistadors and the natives coupled with the radical demographic substitution that has resulted from this relation, in a process spanning the last 500 years. With the publication of this book, Petrella’s images also begin to participate in the extensive iconic network that has become an abstract but dynamic locus, of our relation with the indigenous communities. Concerning the present book, A Luz da Floresta e o Arco da Destruição, the artist has stated: “The book’s idea/structure tries to follow, in a certain way, the experience in which I constructed this large archive of images. A series of trips, encounters and disencounters that took place over the course of nearly a decade in this immense geographic space called Amazonia. It is a chameleonic, indeterminate work, with various thrusts and techniques that I would describe, at the very least, as heterodox. “With this in sight, I preferred to separate the photos of the publication into chapters structured according to the specific visual manifestations (body paintings, ritual objects, feather artifacts) of the diﬀerent ethnicities.” According to the artist himself, the photographs of his Amazonian experience were not taken on the basis of some previous project or purposes – consequently, they are diﬀerent from the iconography produced on commission from the conquerors and missionaries, by travelers in search of exoticism, and by artists on scientific missions (such as Rugendas, Debret and Florence), guided by taxonomic

aims, or even by photographic records made by anthropologists and experts on the Brazilian hinterland (whether Brazilians, or foreigners like Lévy-Strauss). Even so, without any aim of restricting Petrella’s empirical-professional experiences that gave rise to these series, reducing them to methodical discourses, we can provisionally read the images of his book on the basis of some thematic and visual axes, configured by questions that are recurrent in the images of the artist’s photographs. Before presenting these, however, it is important to summarize some of the discursive bases that inform the colonizer’s relation with the natives, since the aﬀective inventory produced by Petrella stands in opposition to such discourses. HIERARCHIES

The questions that informed the European perception of the tropics and Brazil were (and still are) a blend of powerful economic interests with heterogeneous arguments, coupled together to establish not only the conquerors’ racial, religious, technical, political, scientific and cultural superiority over the conquered peoples, but also the exploitation of the native labor by the colonizer (although, in the Brazilian case, labor supplied by African slaves predominated over the indigenous alternative). Nevertheless, repertoires that informed the relation between Europeans and inhabitants of their former colonies throughout the last 500 years underwent constant change due to the permanent tension between the metropolis and the colonies, between oppression and resistance, and their respective and opposing discursive arguments, such as the emergence of anti-clerical humanism and enlightenment libertarian thinking, which wound up encouraging the independence of the Latin American colonies; as well their imperialist imitation: the recent globalization and the criticism of it spurred by postcolonial thinking.

EUROPEAN DISCOURSES ABOUT BRAZIL AND ITS INHABITANTS

Europe became aware of the arrival of the Portuguese to Brazil, on April 22, 1500, by means of the letter by Pero Vaz de Caminha, a ship’s secretary with the Portuguese fleet. His main intention was to communicate to King Manuel the existence of lands newly incorporated to the Portuguese Empire, recently discovered by Pedro Álvares Cabral, commander of the fleet of 12 ships that arrived that year in what is currently Brazil. Portugal would finally share American lands with Spain, up to then the absolute sovereign of the New World unveiled by Christopher Columbus in 1492. Caminha’s mission was to describe to the monarch the wealth of the American territory that Cabral had just claimed in the name of the Portuguese crown. But his narrative was not limited to that aim: he also evaluated the tone of the contacts the Portuguese had established with the natives. It was necessary to inform whether the indigenous people had resisted the overlords who had arrived from across the sea, or if they had accepted, without resistance, to be docile subjects of His Majesty. “Brown, naked, without anything to cover their shame. They carried bows in their hands, and arrows. They walked stiﬄy toward the ship. And Nicolau Coelho signaled to them to lay down their bows. And they did.” Pero Vaz de Caminha’s first mention of the Indians, in the letter to King Manuel, did not conceal his evaluation of this crucially important factor for the expansion of the Portuguese Empire: the native obedience to Nicolau Coelho’s signal of command. That is, the Portuguese authority was aﬃrmed in these first contacts. HANS STADEN AND CANNIBALS

Hans Staden was probably the first adventurer to report his personal experiences in Brazil. In 1554 his ship sank along the coast of what is now the state of Rio de Janeiro, and Staden was taken prisoner by the Tupinambás. He escaped being eaten, and returned to Germany. Three years later, in Marburg, he published his report in a book that became a bestseller. The publication’s frontispiece

opened with the following text: “The true story and description of a land of naked and cruel man-eating savages, located in the world of America, unknown before and after Jesus Christ in the lands of Hessen until the last two years, seeing that Hans Staden, from Homburg, in Hessen, got to know it through first-hand experience, and now presents this account to the public. (...).”1 The premises of Staden’s narrative were not restricted to only his personal experience. They were also heavily informed by discourses founded in the conviction of the European superiority over people who were “naked and cruel man-eating savages, located in the world of America.” They were, therefore, premises that resulted from the revolt he felt against the “illegitimate” native resistance and, consequently, unlike the submission observed by Caminha. EUROPEAN EXPEDITIONS AND MISSIONS

At the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, new sorts of discourse about the native population began to be imposed on the former ones. Informed by Enlightenment principles, these discourses produced by traveling artists and scientists were aimed at classifying the flora, fauna and mineral wealth in accordance with taxonomic methods, in order to record them iconographically, collect and order their samples in ways analogous to those of botany, mineralogy and the other new “scientific” disciplines. Soon after his arrival in Brazil, Jean Baptiste Debret, a painter with the 1816 French Artistic Mission, described his enchantment for the country he was to live in for the next ten years: “In regard to the particular history of the savages, a fortunate circumstance provided me with the first materials: just two days after our arrival, we got to see some Botocudo indigenous people brought to Rio de Janeiro by a traveler, who allowed me to carefully draw them, with the further kindness of giving me authentic and interesting information about the customs of these Indians,

among whom he had lived. This chance happening led me to begin producing, in the center of a civilized capital, this particular collection of savages, which I should finish in the virgin forests of Brazil.” Naked and cruel, Staden’s savage was finally substituted by the exotic savage, who could be classified like any other natural phenomenon in a vast area of the planet in which civilization resided only in the areas under human control, mainly by the white population. The taxonomies of indigenous populations proposed by Debret and the other travelers of scientific missions and expeditions that came to Brazil certainly constitute the best counterexample of the poetic sense of the photos by Rodrigo Petrella published here. POETIC GENESIS / A PHOTOGRAPHIC POETICS...

Without any classificatory or discursive aim, the images by Rodrigo Petrella resulted from spontaneous exchanges and contacts between the artist and people belonging to the tribal communities over the course of a decade. They were visual records whose meaning was imposed gradually on the artist as these exchanges were deepened. The publication was therefore organized after the production of hundreds of photos, and subsequent to the need to visually order them by means of heterogeneous criteria, analogous to the open experience lived by the photographer. These images and scenes mainly reveal how the artist’s visual interests were being processually defined without a previous plan. The final sequence of these photos ultimately gave rise to a pattern of ordering, though a diﬀuse one. The artist wound up assuming criteria on diﬀerent levels, articulated in a themantic-imagetic web founded on his experience with tribes of many ethnicities including the Mebêngokrê Kayapó, Krahô, Xavante, Paresí, Nambikwara, Nambikwara Mamaindê, Enawernê-Nawê, Suruí, Zoró, Cinta-Larga, Rikbaktsa, Kuikuro (Xingu), Karitiana, Tenharim, Parintintin, Mura Pira-hã, Yanomami, Kaxinawá, Ashaninka, Shanenáwa, and Kulina Madijá. He finally decided that the images should be grouped by ethnicities. This thematic ordering, however, was a classification, even though

it resulted from personal choices rather than from the pseudo-scientific parameters used for the production of drawings made by artists accompanying expeditions. Considered in isolation, this factor could lead some readers to suppose that the sequence of images in the book reflects an Enlightenment logic, which, however, these photographs throw into question. It would nevertheless be possible to imagine other ways of grouping these pictures, removing them (by means of the gaze) from the primordial ordering of the photos in the book. This operation allows the observer to produce other thematic sets, whose elements, though invisible in the original sequence, pervade them in a scattered way, thus disassembling all the classificatory vestiges still present in the eﬀective ordering/series of the published material. Therefore, with freedom and license, without any aim of proposing new forms of ordering (but of reading) this iconographic material, we point out the following groupings: the forest and community environment (the constructed landscape of the village and the oca); feather artifacts (which recall the flowers and birds of the forest, since they were framed with a more intimate than analytic proximity that characterizes the artist’s work); rituals, clothes/ceremonies and festivals; and, lastly, portraits of that environment’s inhabitants (collective scenes, with girls in the river and women at the waterside, portraits of lone men immersed in their habitat and close-ups of face and body paintings). All of these groupings – and many others not proposed here – involve the “heterodoxy” mentioned by Rodrigo in his statement, cited above, concerning the organization of the photographic material in his book. The artist’s images visually convey to us a number of more egalitarian subject matters and actions, which have been guiding the discourse and the relationship of the most advanced sectors of Brazilians society in regard to the indigenous communities that inhabit the national territory. The writings by Jean Baptiste Debret about the Indians (and also on other Brazilian themes), published in the first volume of Picturesque and Historical Voyage to Brazil were conceived as reports inseparable from the various plates that illustrate the book. Some of their titles are representative of the

traveling naturalists’s perspective (as much objectified – a way of composing scenes and configuring types – as symbolic, that is, the bearer of a worldview and an agent of the powers that its ideology legitimizes). Within these titles we can underscore, for example: “Botocudos, Puris, Pataxós and Maxacalis” (plate 10), “Forms of Indian Dwellings” (plate 26), “Types of Indigenous Masks” (plate 27); “Heads of Indians” (plate 28) and “Indigenous Hairstyles” (plate 29). Plate 10 features Botocudo, Puri, Pataxó and Maxacali Indians in a grotesque scene conceived to inscribe the natives in the environment in which they lived as savages, next to the animals. Plates 26, 27, 28 and 29 are aimed at the cataloging of types. Here the concern is to present images of dwellings, ritual masks, heads of Indians from certain tribes and their hairdos, separated from each other by the white background. Small illustrations, gathered on a single sheet, based on the various themes they deal with, form sets whose logic is ruled by the same spirit that conceived and organized the countless naturalist collections formed since the beginning of the imperialist expansion. Debret does not portray faces, but rather describes heads. He does not show us people, but rather types and races. In short, he does not have any interest in sharing experiences with the Indians, since he was not able (nor could he have been able) to get past the unequal levels his discourse was couched in.

Fernando Cocchiarale, Rio de Janeiro, September 2014

From the point of view running opposite to that of the images of the traveling naturalist artists (who catalogued types and species), Rodrigo’s photographs record the protagonists of the daily life that seems familiar with us, even though it is, in fact, completely unknown. The principal merit of these images, however, lies beyond the specific sociocultural characteristics of these communities (which Petrella, also, collaterally records). Even if he is not the only Brazilian artist to surpass the iconographic-classificatory patterns in which the Indian has been understood since the colonial era, Petrella’s treatment of these faces composes portraits (essentially diﬀerent from Debret’s “heads”) of human dignity – and its expressive derivations common to all humanity – that the iconography generated around the theme has seldom achieved.

The Gleam of Feathers of Feathers

Karajรก

TapirapĂŠ

Kayapรณ

Rickbatsa

Karajรก

Kayapรณ

Alto Xingú The first officially demarcated indigenous land in Brazil was the Xingú Indigenous Park, conceived by the Villas Bôas brothers and created in 1961 by then president Jânio Quadros. It is currently home to 14 different ethnicities, belonging to four different linguistic branches: Kuikuro, Kalapálo, Nahukwá, Matipú, Ikpeng (languages of the Karib branch); Mehináku, Wauja, Yawalapti (Aruak branch); Aweti, Kamayurá, Jurúna (Tupi branch); Trumaí (an isolated branch); Kisêdjê (Macro Jê branch), which surprisingly bear social and cultural relations in common, visible in the well-known Kuarup Festival. This is a complex funeral celebration that takes a whole year, demands protocols and involves different clans, groups and peoples, where the spirit of the illustrious dead person leaves the village represented by a tree trunk – which names the festival – and travels to the infra-world, putting a close to the family’s mourning. In August 2005, in Ipatse Village, of the Kuikuro ethnicity, I witnessed the Kuarup of two important leaders, whose names should not be uttered, who had died months earlier. The sequence presented is complemented by circumstantial photographs made in September 2007, in the same village.

Tagó – Xamã

Enawenê-Nawê The Enawenê Nawê are a small indigenous group who live in a single community called Halataikwa, near the Iquê River, an aﬄuent of the Juruena, in the state of Mato Grosso, Brazil. The rite of Yaokwa is the longest event known among the Amazonian indigenous communities, lasting for the seven months of the dry season and consisting of a ritual exchange of foods, mainly fish and manioc, between the Enawenê Nawê and the spirits. Due to its complexity and duration, this event requires the construction of dams in the nearby rivers, made with tree trunks tied by vines (waiti), thus allowing for a great deal of fishing. These photographs were taken between March and September, 2008, and record one of the last such structures constructed. Due to the increasing deforestation at the riverheads, predatory fishing, the installation of a large number of hydroelectric centers and dams in the respective hydrographic basin, the number of fish has drastically decreased. There are ten clans, consisting not only of people, but also of subterranean and celestial spirits, associated to sets of flutes and to the descendants of mythical populations that came out of the stone and spread throughout the region. Each clan (yãkwa) is a group of spatially scattered descendants and cannot marry one another; all marriages must be made between members of diﬀerent clans. The village consists of large rectangular communal houses arranged in a circle, along with a “flute house,” with a conical structure located approximately at the center, called the Yaokwa Hakolo. The Enawenê Nawê, who live in northwest Mato Grosso State and speak a language of the Aruák family, had remained in isolation until 1974.

An awkward amateur underwater camera was used with the aim of portraying the EnawenĂŞ NawĂŞ working on the construction of the foundations of their dams, but the considerable currents in the rivers, which generally have an intensely dark and cloudy color, coupled with the precariousness of the equipment, made this task impossible. This piqued the curiosity of the indigenous people, who began to make fun of my inability; and, wishing in a certain way to help in the making of the images, they swam under the water, smiling, to the encounter with the camera.

Yanomamí The Yanomami and their various subgroups inhabit a vast territory that includes continuous spaces in the mountainous and preserved northwestern region of the state of Roraima, the northern part of the state of Amazonas, and parts of Venezuela. The Yanomami Indigenous Territory in Brazil has an area of 9,419,108 hectares. Although they belong to the same ethnicity, the subgroups speak very different languages, such as Ninám, Sarumá, Yanomám and Yanomámi. In October 2009, on the occasion of a meeting of leaders of various Yanomami groups, I was invited by the Hutukara (Yanomamí Association) to document the event, providing evidence of its holding to later present to its sponsor. The event took place in a maloca neighboring the Catrimani Mission, run by missionaries alongside the defunct BR-210 Highway and the Rio Catrimani. During the brief intervals between the talks and discussions, I was able to portray the leaders present. For this group, there are serious restrictions in regard to photography and I was only able to take these photos due to the personal request and intervention of David Kopenawa Yanomami, an internationally recognized indigenous leader, who had invited me. For the Yanomami, having a double in a picture is very dangerous, since it is believed that the bearer of this image wields a virtual power over the person portrayed, and might eventually harm him or her in some way.

The Arch of Destruction 1

Amilcar Packer: We met for the first time in January 2014 at the COMO_clube2. That night, you started showing me some photographs you had on your cell phone from the series you made among the Mebêngôkre Kayapó people, inspired by Albert Eckout’s3 paintings. I was impressed by those images, however, I confess that what gradually started to attract my curiosity and grab my attention were the stories, the constellations of happenings, characters, motivations and choices that determined your trips and organically constituted the vectors of the photographs that you made, some of which are presented in this book. In later conversations we needed to conduct an exercise of dialogue and recollection, aiming to sketch out a context in which the works can be seen beyond their merely imagetic qualities. We agreed that it is essential to understand that it was a series of trips and a work of photography that gave rise to a field of relations and experiences that range beyond the images themselves – a complex, rich and paradoxical field that beckons to be shown and explored. In our meetings we took an approach that is not restricted to recollecting the past, but rather one that aims to show the work in light of the meanings it can acquire with the ongoing passage of time. Backing up our conversations there was a gathering of research material ranging beyond our immediate knowledge, thus mingling countless voices with ours. A book is always an invitation, a possibility of exchange and opening, this being what we should aim to leverage. Therefore, I would like to begin by asking you about the context of your first trips. Rodrigo Petrella: In mid-1999, I visited Amazonia for the first time. I went on a reconnaissance trip for a project by Swiss fashion photographer Michel Comte, for whom I was to work the following year in New York. At that time, I had a romantic idea about the local world of that region, like something you might see in National Geographic, of pristine nature and teeming green forest; I was not especially attracted by anything beyond that. Nevertheless, the adventure of the trip was a lot of fun. A real adventure! A certain

sensation of excitement, of euphoria, of being alive without an apparent destination – free, at least for a time, from the civilization of São Paulo. On that trip, at a gasoline station near the city of Comodoro, in the state of Mato Grosso, along the border with Rondônia, by the hand of chance (if there is one), I ran into who was to be my guide, my friend and frequent travel companion. A local educator, named Linete Ruiz. It was through her intermediation that I visited a Nambikwara group for the first time, that same day, followed by other visits, over the years, to many other villages and peoples located in the region, which extends from northwest Mato Grosso State to the city of Humaitá, in southern Amazonas State. Much of this work was possible due to her unconditional support. Linete is married to a chief of the Parintintim people (see map), leading to my later venturing into areas closer to the Transamazônica Highway and the Rio Madeira, more precisely, on the watercourse called Igarapé Ipixuna. The fact is, on that first visit to a real village I had a strange sensation. On the one hand, there was that sort of extemporaneous lifestyle and, on the other, something else that until today I don’t know how to describe without sounding presumptuously intellectual and distant. Something harmonic, perhaps, a certain feeling of peace… AP: What were your impressions on that first encounter with the Nambikwara? RP: Look… The contact was a crushing experience. Because the projections I had, that entire fiction of the scenes tucked away in my memory of Indians gleaned from movies and books, my fantasies of what Amazonia would be like… they were not there; it was nothing like that. It was a real, human Indian. In this case, it was the Nambikwara of the cerrado [Brazilian savanna] region, Indians who like to sleep right on the ground, who do not paint their skin as they do in movies, or wear colorful necklaces, some of them covered in dust. I became shockingly aware of the unavoidable fact that the Indians lived in tune with another time, their own time. Looking back at it now, I see a veiled idea, a certain generalized, systematic and cultural imposition whereby we think that these others, whether minorities are not, need to live in accordance with our expectations, that they need to be integrated and work according to our culture and

desire, in this case, to begin to produce in order to then, ultimately, be submitted to our culture and society, to pay taxes. Essentially, that they need to adapt, “evolve” and stop being Indians. It is surprising how we project ourselves onto the other as the measure of correctness. When you understand that everything is enclosed in a layer of concepts and memory, you start perceiving your own culture in perspective, in light of the differences, and you need to consider the possibility of accepting that there are other different cultures which are nevertheless just as legitimate as ours. Accepting dissimilarity is difficult, and perhaps our pride as a dominant local culture is what hinders our acceptance of them, who are mistakenly called the “others”; we have a fear of accepting them as part of “our” world, “our” social context. AP: You think it’s a decision!? RP: It is a decision! It is sometimes a conscious one, sometimes conscious and non-verbalized, sometimes unconscious. In this regard, more than the Nambikwara, we can consider the Pirahã. They have a very beautiful guttural and musical language. According to Daniel Everett, a linguist from the United States who lived many years among this group, it is one of the world’s most simply structured and efficient languages. Well, they don’t want to know very much about us. They haven’t learned to speak Portuguese, not even “por favor” [please] or “obrigado” [thank you]. I also ask myself: Why should they?! It has been 100 years since we made contact with them, and until today, for better or worse, they exist on their own terms. As much as they can, they resist the impositions of our culture, except for using “simple” everyday utensils such as a knife, a boat, or a pair of pants. But outside these material objects, it doesn’t seem to me that they want to know very much else. AP: Which other peoples, groups, villages and communities have you visited? RP: Besides the Nambikwara groups of the cerrado of the Central and Chefão4 villages, both near Comodoro, a city on the border of Mato Grosso, and the Mamaindê people (Nambikwara of the North), who are near Vilhena, in Rondônia, I have visited Rikbaktsa groups, also called Canoeiros, and the EnawenêNawê, both in Mato Grosso. I have traveled to the area of the Suruí, Zoró and Cinta Larga at different

times, the latter in Rondônia. Although these different groups are, in Amazonian terms, neighbors in the same macro region of the extensive borders between these two states, in general they have different myths and worldviews. Linguistically, the Suruí of Rondônia, the Zoró and the Cinta Larga belong to the TupiMondé language group, being very close to one another. Even so, I confess that to me they seem like astronauts who fell from different asteroids, planets or galaxies, with their complex, age-old cultures and customs, which seem so odd and singular to us. Indeed, I would say that when seen from close-up, these systems do not share much in common among themselves, besides the fact that we refer to them, reductively, by the same word: Indians. I also visited the Parintintim, Pirahã and Tenharim communities, in southern Amazonas State, as well as different peoples of the Rio Envira: the Ashaninka who speak the Aruaque language, the Kulina, the Shanenawa and the Kaxinawá of the Pano language, all in the state of Acre. At the invitation of David Kopenawa Yanomami, I portrayed leaders and representatives of different Yanomamí peoples – Yanomámi, Ninán, Sanumá, Yanomán – who participated in a meeting, I think financed by the Norwegian government, I can’t remember for sure, at Missão Catrimani in Roraima. I paid several visits to the Mebêngrokrê, better known as the Kayapó, who live in a transition area between the cerrado and the forest, in Pará. I made isolated trips to Xavante and Paresí groups, and had the opportunity to experience a Kuarup in the Xingu Indigenous Park (Kuikuro, the village of Ipatse) in Mato Grosso. I photographed the Krahõ tree-trunk race, in Tocatins, and probably other groups in passing, which unfortunately I do not recall. Each with its own unique character! I would ask myself, about these various human types and all of these histories and narratives: How does all of this still exist? How does all of this resist? My curiosity drove me to travel, to read and learn more about this vulnerable wealth. It is like when an artist comes across someone else’s artwork, another reference; you grow based on the possibility of dialogue. AP: And what gave rise to these encounters? RP: For most of my trips, I was invited, accompanying or guided by the indigenous people themselves. In

some cases I was brought by indigenist friends, on other occasions by the Coordination of the Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB). That is, in some way I was always under their care and – why not say it – their supervision. We didn’t go with a large financial or institutional structure. I can say that this characteristic, of being vulnerable, was part of the process and was important for developing the work. Finding myself relatively alone, in the position of a stranger, constantly obliged me to relate with the village’s day to day life; and this disarms you, or at least it disarmed me. Ultimately, I was just a guy with a camera, in a village. My presence as an external threat was low. Sometimes I was with Linete, sometimes I was alone, and I sometimes relied on my hosts for the most basic things, like eating. I depended on the village, on the group, and this made a big difference, arriving in this, let’s say, humble situation. AP: It could be, but there are still considerable differences and historical asymmetries. RP: Yes, but, for not being an anthropologist or sociologist, and not being formally associated to a research institution, I had a different form and freedom of action. A good part of the process also took place through techniques and strategies proper to my role as a photographer. I could do things that others might consider a problem, something like a mistaken ethnography… Due to my artistic background, a priori, I came with a preexisting, systematized thinking on the theme. The important thing was the process, the relation, the form of the constructive narrative, guided by a corporal experience and, finally, the visual result. Clearly there were expressly prohibited things, and others that I perceived intuitively, but in general I never had a clear limit of what I could or could not photograph and, above all, the manner of how to do it. I have photos where I am an external eye, very lucid from a distance and where more formal aspects predominate, akin to the classic portrait. But there are also moments where this line is blurred, crossed, where I participate as a documentarian who allows himself to enter the flow of events. Sometimes I interfere directly in the process, partially directing the action, and there are also determined occasions in which the equation is completely inverted and I allow myself to be directed by who is being portrayed. This is good, it is what gives the various tones and, moreover, it was how it happened, how the things could happen: an exchange based on the experience of the moment and on that which was possible to be

done. Otherwise, it would have been like following an unknown road while not paying attention to the geography. You need to adapt and mold yourself according to the occasion. Every situation is unique, and it is necessary to be new, in each new place. Different peoples, different places, different histories. AP: You mention some situations present in the book in which the people you are photographing participate actively in the construction of the picture. Situations in which you photographed on the request of those you were visiting, or, as you said, moments at which you allowed yourself to be directed. I’m thinking specifically about the case of the Paresi youth, who asked you to photograph them dressed “traditionally,” “as Indians,” understanding by this that they were being photographed as a caricatural projection, costumed according to the way they perceive that the whites see them. After this conversation of ours, I started thinking about how the relation with the supposed other, how the condition of otherness frequently seems to go through a sort of reduction of differences, in which it is hard for us to concede to the other the possibility of self-... RP: ... of self-definition. AP: Exactly. I started to think about how when the indigenous people asked you to photograph them “dressed like Indians,” they incorporate the projection of the image of them that is made by the “white” people… RP: ... who are also not “white”… AP: ... but without submitting themselves to this image. The playful and even ironic way in which they do it seems like an emancipatory operation, a culturally anthropophagic one, if you will. I think about the notion of exo-denomination and about how the many peoples were attributed names that are strange and foreign to them, and how this situation has lasted until today. Names that are often not only generic, but also pejorative and degrading, which were generally attributed to them by rival and enemy groups. I understand that in this gesture of their asking you to photograph them as Indians, something occurs like a

re-appropriation of the image, of exo-denomination in the image, since, after all, it involves wearing the skin that is placed on you, imposed by the other, but in a way that makes this a playful act, a game, changing the direction that the mirror reflects. An action where there exists a certain reversal of the order and the structures of power, something which, for as simple as it is, I see as being charged with great power. We often see cases where original peoples – also called native and/or indigenous peoples – are determined as non-Western, that is, negatively, in terms of what they are not. All too often, we also see discourses and initiatives arrogate to themselves a position of authority and ownership in regard to all and any sort of experience together with these people, disbelieving and discrediting other possibilities, judging them as mistaken. In short, it is not about stirring up controversy and much less about polarizing questions that are already sufficiently controversial and polarized, but I think it is essential that we think seriously about how we can elaborate approaches able to establish relations that are less codified and hierarchized and to pose questions of another order and with a greater power of understanding. A space where one culture is not naturalized and ennobled in detriment to the other. Where otherness is not seen with disdain and as something to be annihilated, but neither as a relic to be preserved, to become a museum piece, as something static and infantilized, to be protected in a guardian/ward relationship. I think it is especially interesting when, despite the possible paradoxes and even contradictions, one manages to diverge from standard classifications, which normally automatically establish fixed and asymmetric relations of power, where there is no alternation or possibility for change in the terms of the relations. An example that comes to mind, though from a distant realm, is that of the musician Sun Ra, who used to say that he was from the “Angel Race” and came to Earth from Saturn, thus creating a sort of personal mythology, establishing another ontological framework that allowed him to not be pigeonholed by the historical standards of culture in the United States, such as racial discourses and prejudice. When you are from another planet, you reconfigure the questions, and the problems are not necessarily of the same order. At various moments, when the facts are set in stone, I think it is very necessary to “fictionalize” to thereby empower the imagination. AP: But getting back to the trips, what were the returns like?

RP: My first return took place in 2003, to the Parintintin, on an affluent called Urapiara, in the upper Rio Madeira. That was when I began to travel intensely and spontaneously, up until 2007, when I then began to visit Amazonia in a more surgical and precise way. In that second phase, perhaps due to the absence of a certain ingenuousness that was visibly present in the first encounters, I created interplays in relation to other references, dialoguing with artists from the past, giving rise to the series inspired by Albert Eckhout. And why him? Maybe because his paintings captured something of the spirit of the Tupinambá that the Kayapós themselves felt present when I showed the images to them. At the same time, it is curious to perceive how everything is evanescent. There are places where there is no longer a political configuration for me to return there, realities that quickly unraveled, leaders who died, groups that moved to a new location, internal fights and divisions or even the costs of taking one of these trips on my own, without any financial or institutional support. Therefore, in various cases, after some visits, there is no possible return, since there’s no place to return to. AP: And what repertoire of references did you work with? RP: Compared to other regions, the imagetic representation of Amazonia is scarce, full of gaps, with a series of peculiarities imposed by its very size and complexity. For a long time, the Portuguese crown prohibited foreigners from navigating its waters, as a strategy for defending the territory out of fear of invasion, and this was coupled with the natural difficulty of traveling there. Besides the faraway reports of the first conquistadors and explorers, at the beginning of the 19th century, there was the Langsdorff expedition, which produced many images in a very systematized way. One of its aims was to reconnect the commercial relations between Russia and Brazil; this exhibition included the participation of French painter and draftsman Aimé-Adrian Taunay, the inventor, draftsman and pioneer of photography Hércules Florence, and German painter Johan Moritz Rugendas, the latter of whom left the expedition and headed off on his own. There is an extraordinary, singular series of photos made between Tabatinga and Manaus, in 1867, by Albert Frisch, the works of George Huebner and Ermano Stradelli, but I generally always ran up against a great difficulty in finding visual references in my research. But what I did is certainly not totally

new. Major Luiz Thomaz Reis, the filmmaker of the expeditions of Marechal Cândido Mariano Rondon, for example, made images that range from ethnography and photojournalism to art. What he accomplished is impressive and magnificent, especially considering the technical limitations of cameras and equipment of that time, developing film in streams… AP: More recently, we can also think of Claudia Andujar and the important work she carried out with the Yanomamí, not only as an artist, but especially as an activist with the Comissão Pró-Yanomami (CCPY), having played an important role in the demarcation of the Yanomamí Indigenous Lands. Or the images by Maureen Bisilliat, who collaborated with Darcy Ribeiro and photographed the Xingu on the invitation of Orlando Villas-Bôas. RP: Certainly, but the fact is that, in the first years, the indigenous people I visited were precisely the Nambikwara, who were visited in the 1910s and 1940s, respectively, by Cândido Rondon (Coronel, at that time) and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, as well as the Parintintim, “pacified” after a great deal of effort by Curt Nimuendajú in 1922. The villages I visited were the same, or nearly so. But if you think about a short timeframe, a lot underwent radical change. This was significant for me; the weight of history, of the stories and, in a certain way, of the responsibility in relation to the work of all those people. Among my many trips, I once made it a point to bring along the book Saudades do Brasil and give it as a present to the Nambikwara of the cerrado, to share with them that record that touches so closely on them. In fact, some of the older ones saw themselves or recognized relatives in the photographs by Lévi-Strauss and went crazy! Then, a venerable old man called Lourenço, who in the 1970s participated in the contact – once called pacification – with isolated Nambikwara communities, a chief, shaman and herb doctor, who had a certain moral authority over various groups, saw in me a chance (perhaps thinking of the book by Levi-Strauss) to leave a legacy for the future. Because of a liking he took to me – which later turned into friendship – I was able to take photographs among the Nambikwara. He certainly saw my camera as an opportunity, not as an instrument to steal images and annoy them!

But as it turned out, at that moment, I was not prepared for the Nambikwaras’ proposal. He offered me the possibility, in a subtle and veiled way, to document aspects of shamanism, for me to experience the procedure, firsthand, and to even eventually become a shaman myself. I didn’t have the skill or enough maturity as a photographer to capture that. It took some time… I had to ripen for some years more in the task of traveling through Amazonia, through the forest, to understand certain things, to understand how to participate in something like that, without trampling on others or getting trampled myself by these processes. You need to enter into a “flow of consciousness” that is not yours, to avoid deceiving yourself, to remain there close by, but not too close, without dissolving yourself. It is not easy. I am a photographer, in some way I translate my experience into images; however, you first need to be mentally and morally open to experience something, before wanting to photograph it. Or at least that’s how it was with me; perhaps, if I had been more skilled, things would have been different. But there, at that moment, I wasn’t able to do it. The elders saw something in me, a possibility, when I was still not even aware of it. AP: In the span of time stretching from the trips of Rondon and Lévi-Strauss to yours there is an entire 20th century of radical and fast-paced transformations in Brazil and the world. In what ways did you feel that places you visited were affected by this? RP: In terms of national borders, the Northwest region has always been a problematic area for Brazil, even though most Brazilians are not very aware of it. Marechal Rondon’s many missions included that of inspecting the borders and mapping the topography for a future populational occupation, as well as installing a telegraph wire; to do this, he relied on help from the Paresí, the Bororo and many other indigenous people to guide him and to maintain it. In short, it was a question of national security, since it involved the study of the lands which a half-century later became the nation’s Northwest Pole. It should be remembered that, in the 19th century, the military leader of Paraguay, Solano Lopez, undertook a Napoleonic quest and attacked the former state of Mato Grosso, arriving as far as Corumbá, and later, in a strategic movement, invaded Argentina and Uruguay, taking over the state of Rio Grande do Sul. As we know, these events led to the creation of the Triple Alliance, an agreement between Argentina, Brazil and

Uruguay, resulting in great bloodshed. At the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, further north, there was also what was called the Acrean Revolution, whose result, after many fits and starts, was the annexation of the current state of Acre, previously part of Bolivia, to the Brazilian territory. In this case, it involved a much less bloody negotiation, resolved through the signing of the Petrópolis Treaty, in 1903, made possible through the diplomatic skills of the Baron of Rio Branco. It was a struggle that involved Brazilian rubber tappers, migrants from the Brazilian Northeast, especially from the state of Ceará, who had founded the rubber tapping company called Seringal Empresa, the Bolivian government, and an arrogant United States company with colonialist attitudes, called the Bolivian Trading Company, also known as the Bolivian Syndicate, which had leased Acre from Bolivia and aimed to monopolize the production of rubber, whose price had skyrocketed on the international market. The 20th century in Brazil can also be narrated from the perspective of the occupation of the nation’s West and the destruction of those biomes. In the late 1930s, Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas launched what became known historically as the March to the West. By means of governmental incentives, the plan was to colonize this vast area of land, boosting agricultural production. This movement aimed to take advantage of the demographic surplus from the nation’s South, while providing food to the Southeast, which had become the country’s industrial pole. The plan also included the beginning of a systematic process of occupying Amazonia. In the Juscelino Kubitschek period, the construction of Brasília and the geographic displacement of the nation’s capital to the center of the country also participated in this ongoing aim of occupying regions considered empty. In 1966, General Camilo Castelo Branco launched the slogan “Integrate, don’t abdicate,” a lemma that accurately expressed Brazil’s historical fear of losing the lands along its western borders, while simultaneously revealing the desire and the plan to definitively colonize the entire Brazilian territory. In the 1970s, General E. G. Médici founded the Superintendency for the Development of Amazonia (SUDAM) and launched the National Integration Plan, known by its Portuguese acronym PIN, with its monumental highway works: Cuiabá–Santarém, Manaus–Porto Velho, Perimetral Norte and the famous Transamazônica. The latter, 1972, gave rise to the beginning of the construction

that would serve as an axis for the future colonization, and had as its goal to settle 100,000 families. The aim was to establish an internal and productive articulation among macroregions, while also distending agrarian conflicts, mainly in the Northeast, reallocating and spreading this population through a vast area, Amazonia, also under and other lemma, “Land without men for men without land.” We know about the failure of this project and its disastrous effects to the many indigenous peoples and the ecosystem. In the 12 years during which I visited the Center-West and North regions, this process of change intensified and visibly accelerated. A new large wave of infrastructure works, mining operations, megahydroelectric plants along with small hydroelectric centers, gigantic farms for the production of mono crops, especially soybeans, as well as extensive livestock raising, brought another contingent of people and extraordinary pressure on the forest and the ways of life of the traditional populations. All of this came about due to the insertion of these spaces into the great structures of international commerce, completely transforming the systems of local production that had been largely disconnected from the export of primary goods, a process that was brought about by large national and transnational companies. In 2010, a new highway called the Pacific Highway, also known as the Interoceanic Highway, made a new cut through the region, allowing for the transport of merchandise to Ilo, Peru, a port city on the Pacific coast. The first time I went to Comodoro, in 1999, I saw the grim aftermath of a lumber company called Chefão. Everywhere that Chefão had gone, nothing was left! The land was a Dantesque scene. Eight years later, there were paved highways and the totally degraded forest areas had been converted into soybean farms. This largescale monoculture requires a massive capital investment and entails a brutal civilizing occupation, all in a very short time. Can you imagine, what these peoples and places have been through, and how much they have suffered, since the moment that the Nambikwara made contact with the so-called civilized world, since the time of the visits of Rondon and Lévi-Strauss? So, I arrived right there, where there have been countless attempts aimed at occupying the land of the supposed Brazilian Wild West; occupations that left various scars at different moments and whose strong migration and urbanization intensified during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. Cities like Cacoal or Ji Paraná, in

Rondônia State, which today have more than 100,000 inhabitants, in 1973, had a meager sprinkling of residents. It all took place at an impressive pace. AP: It is extraordinary to think that an entire part of Brazil remained unknown to Brazil, nearly untouched until the middle of the last century. RP: In fact, it remained untouched until the 1970s. The next decade, however, saw the implantation of the Northwest Pole and the aborted construction of another highway, the Perimetral Norte, going through Brazil’s utmost northern tip, the state of Roraima. As though one were not enough… it’s fortunate that it was never completed. Offsetting the migration from the Northeast to the Southeast, there was a large migration from the South to the Center West, which increased until the late 1990s, bringing in approximately one million families. There are traditional, old cities, such as Cuiabá, but even so, you see a new presence. And there, following the road through Porto Velho, going up highway BR-364 through Rondônia, until the mid-2000s, one could see the signs of this wave of migration which had just recently arrived at the state capital. Humaitá – one of the oldest cities in Amazonas State, located on the Madeira River, a little beyond Porto Velho, on the continuation of the fluvial route winding toward Manaus – remained without significant changes as compared to the Comodoro-Ariquemes axis. Certainly, the 1970s and ’80s saw an intensification of the problems of landownership in those regions, with an intensive and extensive landownership boom. This was encouraged by countless government stimulus programs and subsidies to occupy the forest, cut down the trees and clear the land. But many of those lands were not empty, they had an owner – the Indians were there and, the way it all took place, there was no way to avoid conflict. All throughout Amazonia there was a series of murders, true massacres, like that of the Yanomamí in the village of Haximu, and which in some form unfortunately continue to take place today, some of them more selectively, through commissioned killings of indigenous leaders who take up the defense of their rights, others in a more methodical and incisive way, as is taking place with

the Guarani-Kayowá, in the state of Mato-Grosso do Sul. There is a need for more profound reflection at the national level, to consider how these attitudes are still permitted, and how it is that this question has continued to be systematically ignored by the authorities for so many years. AP: How was it that you arrived at Cuiabá? RP: It was crazy. I got a car and hit the road bound for Cuiabá. I had conducted a brief and informal study, asking some people, “I want to photograph Amazonia, water; where do you think I should go?” Everyone said Manaus. So I decided not to go to Manaus. If the commonplace destination is Manaus, don’t go to Manaus! But where was I to go? I thought: I’ll go to Cuiabá, and once there I will see what to do next… It was a real adventure with a lot of roads that only existed on the map. So, I kept driving where I could. On the first trip, I got as far as Itaituba, in Pará, where I took a ferry to Belém. Two or three years later, I spent some time at Lake Urapiara, and there – once again curiously – the second time I visited a village, it was where Curt Nimuendajú had one of his milestone experiences, “pacifying” the Parintintins. Later, it was strange to perceive that the two first visits I made to villages were in places that were so highly significant from a historical standpoint. It’s not important if Lévi-Strauss was only there for a short time, or if he was only stung by a bee; the fact is that it was significant for the development of his outlook. The cover of Saudades do Brasil features a Nambikwara, with that feather in his nose, and, as always, smiling. Wow! And what reflection to make here? How such encounters, totally by chance, gave rise to works that are so powerful and interesting for the future of humanity! It is not possible to think about indigenism without Curt Nimuendajú, or Marechal Rondon. Without these landmark references, perhaps you couldn’t even think about the many who came later, like the Villas-Boas brothers, Darcy Ribeiro, etc. And this is why they talk about an arc of destruction, because it is the destruction of the biomass, of the social groups, their lands, their families, their languages and customs, as well as the disappearance of many of these histories, stories and narratives…

editorial conception

Amilcar Packer Rodrigo Petrella photography

Rodrigo Petrella texts

Ticio Escobar Fernando Cocchiarale interview

Amilcar Packer map

Francisco Iglesias graphic design

Fernando Moser

The Other Lights - Notes

Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,  Aforismo 7 (“Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Aphorism 7”), Tecnos, Madrid, 2007. 1

Roland Barthes. La cámara lúcida. Notas sobre la fotografía (“Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography”) Paidós, Buenos Aires, 1998, p. 64. Georges Didi-Huberman. Supervivencia de las luciérnagas (“The Survival of the Fireflies”) Abada Editores, Madrid, 2012. 3

Op. cit., p. 35.

Idem, p. 37.

V. idem, p. 35.

The Arc of Destruction - Notes

Here we present a second edition of the interview “The Arc of Destruction,” revised and enlarged as needed due to the scanty production time, the immense complexity of the theme and budgetary restrictions faced by the printed version. Coupled with this is the nature of the process of oral interviews that were transposed and rewritten. This edition sought to correct slight in precisions of data and to remodel the elliptical and sometimes repetitive structure proper to speech, which sometimes emphasizes less important points while others are left without the consideration and emphasis they deserve. The changes were made to provide greater clarity and precision. – All of the indigenous names are in accordance with the standard used by IBGE, in the 2010 Demographic Census – Much is said about the so-called arc of deforestation, a geographic area where the agricultural frontier is being pushed into the forest, and where we find the highest rates of deforestation in Amazonia. This region consists of 500 thousand km² of lands that start in the east and south of the state of Pará and stretch toward the west, passing through the states of Mato Grosso, Rondônia and Acre. This book was named The Arc of Destruction in reference to another arc,

which extends through more or less the same area but concerns the destruction of the life and culture of many indigenous peoples. 2

The COMO_clube is a platform of shared artistic experience and invention. Link 3

Albert Eckhout (1610–1666) was a Dutch painter, draftsman and botanist, who served as a member of the entourage of John Maurice of Nassau’s 1637 mission to Pernambuco. Together with Frans Post, Eckhout was responsible for the significant pictorial work that portrayed the landscapes, inhabitants, natives and colonizers of Dutch Brazil. 4

The name it received for being near the Chefão lumber company that was located in the region. – For more information on indigenous peoples in Brazil, ethnicities, linguistic branches, territories and cultures, see: O Brasil Indígena and Povos Indígenas na Brasil