ARU BENA

SEPTEMBER 9—13, 2015

Aru Kuxipa expresses the vision of the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto and the Amazonian artists, plant masters, and pajés (shamans) of the thirty-four Jordão Huni Kuin com-munities to co-create a place of transformation, a zone of encounter and expression and to participate collaboratively in a joint exhibition project at Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary in Vienna. As a locus of exploration and articulation, Aru Kuxipa likewise marks an important step in an ongoing and steadily unfolding process of what the Huni Kuin call Aru Bena. Aru Bena, literally means the “new” or “sacred time” and pro-poses a newly engaged exchange with the world, intrinsically coupled with processes of transformation and a profound understanding of the necessity to share a common path in interconnected futures. As the Huni Kuin culture is adapting to the multi-scaled dynamics of the 21st century, this is a moment of remembering and disremembering and of political renewal. Like many indigenous peoples around the globe, the Huni Kuin have mobilized new forms of articulation and activism in the face of prevailing and new economic, legal, and ecological challenges. While they are trying to preserve their abundant ancestral knowledge and culture and to participate in dialogues with the contemporary world, we may learn from this way of life and cosmovision a more cautious and conscious interaction with the forest, the planet, and re-discover what we have come to describe “nature” as a part of us.

The program surrounding the residency of the second group of seven young leaders of the Huni Kuin in Vienna is a dynamic part of the exhibition Aru Kuxipa. It is tracing the rich ancestral knowledge and cosmovision of the Huni Kuin in their multiple ex-pressions, engaging in novel encounters and opening the stage to new inquiries and challenges pressing specifically its younger generation at present. Each day is dedi-cated to a different topic of concern and engagement.

TBA21–Augarten

Ernesto Neto and the Huni Kuin: Aru KuxipaSacred Secret

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Köstlergasse 1, 1060 Vienna+43 1 513 98 56 0office@tba21.org

ExhibitionsScherzergasse 1A, 1020 Vienna+43 1 513 98 56 24augarten@tba21.org

www.tba21.org

© Irina Gavrich, 2015

Environmental Justice and Sustainability

WEDNESDAY, SEP 9

In our environmental crisis indigenous peoples—wit-nessing increasing dangers caused by global warm-ing, the deforestation of the Amazon, and diminishing biodiversity—are simultaneously the most affected and most vulnerable. For the great conservators and protec-tors of the forest it becomes increasingly impossible to sustain themselves from natural resources and live inde-pendently in the face of new environmental conditions. How can we on the other hand re-think strategies re-garding climate policies with the inclusion of indigenous knowledge?

12 pm // Private Session (not public)

On Sustainability Strategies and Environmental Justice with Johann Kandler (Amazon Expert, Climate Alliance Austria)

6 pm // Sustainability, Conservation and Environmental Justice with Johann Kandler

Johann Kandler from Climate Alliance Austria has worked intensely in Acre, the home of the Huni Kuin, where he fought for the conservation of the rainforest and environmental justice with the local communities. Environmental justice comprises a fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless their national and ethnic origin with respect to the develop-ment, implementation, and enforcement of environmen-tal laws, regulations, and policies.

7 pm // Huni Kuin: Traditional Hunting, Fishing, Agriculture and environmental challenges

The Huni Kuin give insight into their knowledge of the forest and their traditional hunting, fishing and agricultur-al techniques that are still fostered today, but are subject to vast changes and challenges due to deforestation, diminishing biodiversity, and economic dependencies.

Further, Guardian Chris Melchior introduces the Wa-ter Txai project—a water caption project improving the system for clean water supply for 33 Huni Kuin villages along the Jordão and Tarauacá Rivers.

Aru Bena and Aru Kuxipa

THURSDAY, SEP 10

To the Huni Kuin Aru Bena, the “new” or “sacred time” means a newly engaged exchange with the world, intrin-sically coupled with processes of transformation and the desire for broader contact, alliances, networks, and the need for a new common consciousness about the plan-et and its inhabitants. It calls for a renewed engagement with and contribution to the world at large, a time of ex-change, and a striving for indigenous self-governance and sovereignty. How can we integrate this cosmovision and knowledge in a novel understanding of interweaving relationships—ecological, cultural, political, and interper-sonal relations? What is the role of the exhibition Aru Kuxipa in these mediations?

4 pm // Tour of the exhibition Aru Kuxipa with Ernesto Neto and the Huni Kuin

Ernesto Neto and the Huni Kuin invite for a tour through the exhibition Aru Kuxipa—a collaboratively produced polyphonic and multi-chromatic space, sheltering Huni Kuin objects, drawings, weavings, rituals, herbaria, and celebrations in dialogue with Neto’s artistic language.

6 pm // Huni Kuin: Ancestral Chants and Dances

A performative evening dedicated to the abundance of chants and dances, performed by the Huni Kuin and their rich meanings within ancestral tradition, their his-tories, generational transmissions, and contemporary transformations.

7 pm // Contemporary Articulations of “Tradition” with Bernd Brabec de Mori

Bernd Brabec de Mori from the Institute of Ethnomusi-cology at the University of the Arts in Graz discusses in-digenous articulations through poetics and music while questioning ideas of authenticity and identity as they are negotiated in a changing world.

8 pm // Huni Kuin, Ernesto Neto and Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen: Aru Kuxipa and Aru Bena

The presentation is followed by a conversation between Ernesto Neto, the Huni Kuin, and Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen, anthropologist and expert on Amazonian cosmovision in contemporary times, on Aru Kuxipa before the backdrop of the notion of Aru Bena: a new force and new knowl-edge of the ancestry at present.

PROGRAM

The Arts of the Huni Kuin

FRIDAY, SEP 11

Kené Kuin, the “true design,” is an important emblem of the Huni Kuin identity, woven by women with seeds, glass pearls, and cotton or painted onto the skin with black genipapo or red annatto paint. The sacred geo-metric patterns are seen by Huni Kuin women in lucid states of vision. Like traditional songs, they serve as a central means of communication for and with nature, ac-companying and providing the Huni Kuin with the pow-ers of animals and plants to heal, give guidance, and protect, such as the forces of the jiboia (boa).

4 pm // Kené Workshop with Maria Ayani

Maria Ayani, a great weaving master of the Huni Kuin community, holds a workshop offering an exception-al opportunity to learn about this art first hand, to hear about their meanings, histories, and mythic genesis and listen to traditional chants sung while weaving.

During the workshop, “Kené Yuxin—the turns of Kené” by Filmmaker Zenzinho Yube will be screened.

5 pm // Workshop on Body painting

A workshop on the art of body painting. Plant ink of the annatto and genipapo are used to paint the sacred geo-metric designs onto the skin. These designs are a cru-cial element in the beauty of persons and things. Maria Ayani teaches this ancestral technique and its multitude of motifs, their histories, and powers.

7 pm // Ephemeropteræ: EMILY ROYSDON, THOMAS RAAB

Sovereignty and Rightsof the Forest

SATURDAY, SEP 12

Vast areas of the Amazon are taken over by state or corporate interests, often ignoring local and indigenous peoples’ rights and claims, and delegitimizing the use of ancestral land. These “land grabbings” are repeatedly executed in the name of climate change politics such as carbon credit schemes. In Brazil a proposed con-stitutional amendment, the PEC 215 would allow for a legalization of the theft and invasion of their lands by agribusiness and multinational corporations in the name of “public interest.” What idea of law legitimizes the ex-propriation of territory of both human and non-human beings? When is a crime a crime?

11 am // Private session (not public)

A session about indigenous sovereignty, the mecha-nisms of “land grabbing” and global legal frameworks with Kristina Kroyer (University of Vienna)

6 pm // Sovereignty and Indigenous Rights with Kristina Kroyer

Kristina Kroyer from the Department of Development Studies at the University of Vienna worked closely with the Guarani-Kaiowä regarding the loss of their land in the Mato Grosso do Sul in Brazil. The mechanisms of “land grabbing“ and so called “green grabbing“—the appropri-ation of land in the name of climate change policies—make indigenous people, also beyond the territory of the Guarani, lose their habitat and the protection under communal and legal systems. These practices open up fundamental questions about the legitimacy of national and international laws that back economic processes.

7 pm // Huni Kuin: Sovereignty of the Forest

In indigenous perspectivist ontologies, animals, plants, and many objects obtain subject positions and willing capacities, which apprehend reality from distinct points of view. The forest and plants in particular are great teachers to the Huni Kuin. They embody their very own sovereignties that categorically oppose understandings of law by state forces.

8 pm // Film Screening: “Ma Ê Dami Xina - Já me transformei em imagem“ by Zenzinho Yube

This film that translated into “I’ve already become an Im-age“ by Zenzinho Yube was shown at Berlin Biennale in 2015. The film narrates through the history of the Huni Kuin people and their cultural resurgence in five stages. As rubber plantation owners enslaved the Huni Kuin for decades, the community and their culture were almost extinguished. Modern methods of recording have been limited but vital to their (cultural) survival. The screen-ing is followed by a discussion about filmmaking as a means of empowerment, articulation, and documenta-tion of emerging contemporary issues.

Huni Kuin Culture and Healing in Transformation

SUNDAY, SEPT 13

The Huni Kuin of Jordão, like many indigenous peoples around the world, have embarked on a path of (re)af-firmation of their indigenous identity. They have adapt-ed and reinvented their disrupted and almost erased cultures and knowledge in an act of (cultural) survival. The idea of fluent tradition breaks with binary ideas of authenticity/past on one hand and modernity/future on other hand and opens up questions of preservation and transmission of oral cultures and healing knowledge, ev-ident in the Una Isi Kayawa (the “book of healing”)—em-bedded in the exhibition and conceived in a dream by the pajé Agostinho Manduca Mateus Ĩka Muru.

1:30 pm // The Huni Kuin invite for Lunch

The Huni Kuin serve their traditional food, such as tradi-tional peanut caiçúma soup, to sit together and share the intimacy of the kupixawa in the spirit of katxanawa, the spiritual fest of the vegetables plantation.

3 pm // Workshop on Spagyric with Max Güller

Max Güller has been devoted to herbal medicine pro-duced by spagyric processes for 20 years. He special-izes in producing particularly clear and energetic quin-tessences and gives an introduction to this technique to the Huni Kuin.

6 pm // Huni Kuin: Una Isi Kayawa and Forest Medicine

Members of the Huni Kuin give rare insight into their ex-tensive healing traditions, on nixi pae (ayahuasca), sha-manism, forest medicine, the understanding of curing, and the significance of visions and dreams therein. Most prominently, Una Isi Kayawa —conceived in a dream by the pajé Agostinho Ĩka Muru, who has documented the sacred Huni Kuin knowledge of medicinal plants for thirty years, attempting to preserve it for future genera-tions—exemplifies a shift from oral to written knowledge transmission and transformations healing knowledge is subject to today. The publication that resulted from Ĩka Muru’s endeavor was a collaboration between Huni Kuin pajés, the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden Research In-stitute (JBRJ), and Editora Dantes, which published the bilingual edition (in Portuguese and Hatxa Kuin) in 2014.

Osvaldo Manduca Mateus Kaxinawa© Camilla Coutinho, 2015

7 pm // The Art of Life in the Forest with Wolfgang Kapfhammer

Wolfgang Kapfhammer from the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Ludwig-Maximilian Univer-sity Munich is an expert in mythology and shamanism in contemporary indigenous societies, specifically in the Amazon. His most recent research has led him to the notion of “Indigenous Modernity“ that lies at the core of this presentation and challenges notions of authenticity and identity with the cultural diversity of the region.

8 pm // Film screening “Livro Vivo“ by Tadeo Sia and Ikamuru Huni Kuin

Livro Vivo is a film on pajé Agostinho Ĩka Muru. Agost-inho takes the youngsters into the forest and teaches them how to take care of the plants, seen as relatives of the Huni Kuin and healers of the community.

Francisco das Chagas Sabino Maia© Camilla Coutinho

Jose Lima Kaxinawa (Zezinho Yube)© Fatima Coutinho, 2015

Bernd Babrec de Mori

Bernd Brabec de Mori is an ethnomusicologist spe-cialized in indigenous music from the Ucayali valley in Eastern Peru. Excelling in translation and interpretation of indigenous poetics, he spent some years in the field and became integrated in the indigenous group Ship-ibo-Konibo. Thereafter, he has been working at the audiovisual archive Phonogrammarchiv of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and as an assistant at the Centre for Systematic Musicology, University of Graz. His publi-cations contribute to the research areas of Western Am-azonian indigenous music, arts and history as well as the complex of music, ritual and altered states.

Francisco Arnaldo Macario Kaxinawa

The young shaman (Pajé) Francisco Arnaldo Macario Kaxinawa is teacher and chief in the village Nova Aliança.

Francisco das Chagas Sabino Maia

Francisco das Chagas Sabino Maia is a young shaman (Pajé) of the Huni Kuin in the village Nova Cachoeira.

Johann Kandler

Johann Kandler is a developmental speaker at the Cli-mate Alliance Austria. Trained as an engineer, he lived and worked in Brazil for twenty years. During this time he co-founded and managed the Comissão Pastoral da Terra in the states of Acre and Minas Gerais. Since 1993 Kandler is committed to be the most important ambas-sador of the Climate Alliance and supports the partner-ship with indigenous people in the Brazilian Rio Negro.

Wolfgang Kapfhammer

Wolfgang Kapfhammer is an ethnologist at the Institute of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Ludwig-Maximil-ians-Universität München. In his research and teaching he focuses on the Amazon region. Since 1998 he has been working closely with the Sateré-Mawé around re-ligious and environmental issues in the field of anthro-pology. He also collaborated with representatives of the Sateré-Mawé in the framework of “Beyond Brazil“ at Weltmuseum Vienna 2012 to 2013.

Kristina Kroyer

Kristina Kroyer graduated from the Individual Diploma Programme of International Development and is studying Transcultural Communication at the University of Vienna.

In the course of her final thesis, she conducted a quali-tative fieldwork in Brazil, focusing on intercultural realities and future prospects of indigenous youth in the con-text of land loss and resource conflicts. Based on her research, she has given lectures at the Departments of International Development, Social and Cultural Anthro-pology and Global Studies at the University of Vienna and Salzburg. At the moment she is working at an Aus-trian organization for development cooperation and par-ticipating in an international study program on the United Nations

Jose Lima Kaxinawa (Zezinho Yube)

Jose Lima Kaxinawa (Zezinho Yube) comes from the village Mibayã in the indigenous territory Praia do Car-apanã. He acts as an advisor for indigenous matters for the government of the state of Acre, Brazil.

Maria Carlos da Silva (Maria Ayani)

Maria Carlos da Silva (Maria Ayani) is the master of the Huni Kuin-handcrafts in Mibayã, a village in the indige-nous territory Praia do Carapanã.

Osvaldo Manduca Mateus Kaxinawa

Osvaldo Manduca Mateus Kaxinawa is the son of Ika Muru, the shaman (Pajé) of the village São Joaquim. He is a teacher and acts as Deputy Chairman of the group Beya Xinã Bena.

Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen

Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen is adjunct professor in the Depart-ment of World Cultures and Latin American Studies at the University of Helsinki. Currently she is a researcher in the Academy of Finland’s project United in Diversity: Monumental Landscapes, Regionality, and Cultural Dy-namism in Pre-Columbian Western Amazonia as well as the director of the project Transforming the Future in Bra-zil—Ritual and Indigenous Agencies.

Tiago Paulino Sales Kaxinawa

Tiago Paulino Sales Kaxinawa is a young Pajé from the village Bari.

Txana Bane (Fabiano Maia Sales)

As an artist, musician and historian who lives in Europe, Txana Bane (Fabiano Maia Sales) represents the culture and the traditions of the Huni Kuin from the Jordão river.

BIOGRAPHIES

Ernesto Neto and the Huni Kuin: Aru KuxipaSacred Secret

TBA21—AugartenIn cooperation with

Kunsthalle KremsErnesto Neto19/07–01/11/2015

Oberes Belvedere, MarmorsaalO tempo lento do corpo que é pele25/06–07/08/2015

Contact Info

Thyssen-Bornemisza Art ContemporaryKöstlergasse 1, 1060 Wien+43 1 513 98 56 0office@tba21.org

Daniela Zyman Chief Curator Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary T +43 1 513 98 56 16Mobile +436648495403 daniela@tba21.org Franziska WildförsterAssistant Curator Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Mobile +436606715637 fsw@tba21.org

Clemens RettenbacherAssistantThyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Mobile +436645120120clemens.rettenbacher@univie.ac.at

Directions

Getting there: Tramway Nr. 2 and 5 (station “Am Tabor”)Metro U2 (station “Taborstraße”) Opening Hours: Wednesday - Thursday: 12 noon-5 pmFriday - Sunday: 12 noon-19 pmMonday - Tuesday: closed

Am TaborStraßenbahn 2 und 5

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