Terra Batida

A programme of performances that celebrates the unifying force and reinvention of contemporary Indigenous art.

Wayuri is an act of collective creation or, more plainly, of doing something together. The choice of this word from the Nheengatu language — a pan-Amazonian language related to Tupi, which was banned in the 18th century by the Marquês de Pombal for obstructing the imposition of the Portuguese language — celebrates the collective power and reinvention of contemporary Indigenous art. It is the joy of doing things together, of summoning a multitude of Indigenous languages, voices, lives and biomes that convene to resist the structural sedimentation of colonial violence between Portugal and Brazil.

Our Wayuri brings six artists into the gallery space of Denilson Baniwa’s retrospective, thus collectivising it. The programme takes the form of an afternoon gathering resulting from a research process initiated by Terra Batida — a platform aimed at deconstructing ecological ideas in the light of interlocking visions and responsibilities. The research process, lasting around two years, included residencies in which Indigenous artists gathered, investigated, and created new work in history and ethnography museums in Lisbon and Coimbra, generating strategies for co-existence, mutuality and care.

In this gathering-performance, Lilly Baniwa, Ellen Pirá Wassu & Ritó Natálio, Olinda Tupinambá & Ziel Karapotó and Juão Nÿn present different performative actions and gestures that interweave and intermingle with each other. The programme also makes space for an audience talk and a video installation presenting the research processes this group of artists employed in museum archives in Portugal.

In Our Wayuri, the individual performative gestures and actions are woven together, often with no clear beginning or end. They may unfold in fragments, be momentarily interrupted, or blend into one another – shaping a shared, collective performance.


Cartas do Fogo
Ellen Pirá Wassu & Ritó Natálio

Somewhere between poetry and performance are the readings of excerpts from Fire Letters, a curatorial and artistic collaboration between Ellen Pirá Wassu and Ritó Natálio, an experience that transmutates and digests encounters with historical collections via a dialogue about deforestation processes and the institutional policies of disappearance, conservation and memory, as applied to Brazilian and Portuguese territory.


Diakhe
Lilly Baniwa

The perspective of the route and return, as indicated by the Baniwa word diakhe, the title of a performance by actor Lilly Baniwa, from Alto Rio Negro. In the artist’s words, “Between waters and memories, the diakhe calls: a route that returns, where ancestral territories and wisdom meet to conjure cures and connections, breaking the silence imposed on the sacred objects that bear our stories.”


Contra-feitiço a escrita maldita
Olinda Tupinambá & Ziel Karapotó

An action to response to physical encounter of artists Olinda Tupinambá and Ziel Karapotó with the Letter from Pêro de Vaz de Caminha, dated 1 May 1500, in the National Archive of Torre do Tombo. A performance/ritual, using their body-territories, to establish a counter-narrative to the first Portuguese description of Indigenous peoples in Brazil, thus breaking the bonds the colonising gaze placed on those same people. Past, present, and future intermingle and history is, at last, questioned, retold, and rewritten with Indigenous protagonists and authorship, by the people who have always lived it.


Branqueologya
Juão Nÿn

A reenactment of the first contact between the “white man” and the native peoples of Abya Yala. “What exchange still needs to be (un)made?”, asks the Potyguaran artist, Juão Nyn. Branqueologya is the continuation of their previous work, Contraxawara.



We recommend experiencing the full duration of event. The audience is free to move around the space, and leave and re-enter the gallery if necessary.

The exhibition Contra-feitiço, by Denilson Baniwa, runs until 8 Feb.