Retaking the image: Poetics and politics of an indigenous visual archeology (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant)

This resource is an application for a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. "What has been said about us? What did we say about ourselves? What images of us?" These are questions from a canvas exhibited in "Retaking the Image", a research, documentation and artistic creation project carried out by the Paranaense Museum (Paraná, Brazil) between June 2021 and January 2022. Coordinated by indigenous artists Denilson Baniwa and Gustavo Caboco, the exhibition arose from the museum’s desire to decolonize its own ethnographic collection. Thus, by employing the idea of "retaking" as an important working methodology, this research seeks to understand the production of meaning through images, since the visual arts are currently fundamental tools for indigenous people to express their demands for land, territory and good living; and, above all, to demarcate subjectivities and political conceptions against the state and against all forms of monoculture. If traditional peoples have been proposing the constitution of alliances to help us get out of the tragic state in which we find ourselves, I intend, by following the trajectory of Brazilian indigenous artists, as well as researching art and science museums, to reflect on the notions of "image" and "imaginary" as forms of knowledge capable of contributing to the development of a new anthropological imagination.