This artivist (artistic + activist) performance starts as an unofficial silent guided tour to the museum's Room 4 and then affirms itself as a poetic happening, unanticipated by the visitors and the museum staff. It seeks to make visible a time of power over the other and to replace it by another kind of time, a time of search for healing, dignity and empathy towards what was lived by other people, in another place, in another time. This polysemic and multipersonal time is a time that approaches, and brings us closer to the ‘huacas’.
Technical information
Conception of the performance: Rui Mourão
Author of the video projected: Jaider Esbell
Singer of the reproduced Indigenous song: Ibã Huni Kuin
Performers: António Subtil, Bruno Gonçalves, Eunice Artur and Rui Mourão
Cameramen: Bruno Gonçalves and Rui Mourão
Photographic documentation: Susana Alface
Support on site: Filipa Cordeiro
Information about the video
The video that was projected over the room and the bodies during the performance was created especially for this project by Jaider Esbell, one of the artists invited, who speaks from his own Indigenous situatedness, in another time and space – his -, creating several visual metaphors. He evokes the mummified bodies in the room and their sacredness via inanimate objects (small axes, grinding stones, beaded artifacts, etc.), in an animist belief and identitarian positioning filled with emotional, cultural, political and spiritual meaning. He mentions the museum device of the glass display case that imprisons the bodies, by using glass panes that he scratches with stones stained with blood. He also refers to the golden frames (which form a line on top of Room 4) around the oil portraits of the 19th century museum founders (including Januário Correia de Almeida, who brought the human remains to Portugal).
Besides the video, the song chanted by another of the invited artists, Ibã Huni Kuin, was also played. His incantatory chant results from a dedicated body-image research developed as part of the MAHKU (Movement of Huni Kuin Artists) collective. Flowing between laboratorial and ritual practice, his research takes place in another time and space – his – and imprints life into the inanimate/animated paintings he creates with his disciples. This sound is part of a video recorded in 2013 at Centro Cultural UFMG, Belo Horizonte (Brazil) during the exhibition ¡Mira! Artes Visuais Contemporâneas dos Povos Indígenas, produced by the Núcleo Transdisciplinar de Pesquisas Literaterras.