Currents

The artists Lilly Baniwa, Ziel Karapotó and Olinda Tupinambá open their workspace and present their previous artistic works as an expression of Indigenous poetics. The presentation will be accompanied by their films Kaapora - The Call of the Forest (Olinda Tupinambá), The Word Became Flesh (Ziel Karapotó) and Lithipokoroda (Lilly Baniwa).

Kaapora – The Call of the Forest

Olinda Tupinambá, Brazil 2020, 20min.

A narrative of the connection of Indigenous Peoples with the Earth and their spirituality, from the point of view of the Indigenous woman Olinda, who develops an environmental recovery project on her people’s lands. With the Indigenous cosmovision as a lens, spiritual characters as the Kaapora are the central line of the film’s narrative.

The Word Became Flesh

Ziel Karapotó, Brazil 2019, 6min.

The European invasion in the Americas has left many scars. Ziel Karapotó uses his body to denounce five centuries of colonization and its consequences on the native people.

Lithipokoroda

Lilly Baniwa, Brazil 2021, 28 min.

Lithipokoroda is an Indigenous performance manifesto from São Gabriel da Cachoeira in the Amazon. It portrays an ancestral woman walking from the forest to the maloca (a traditional communal house of knowledge for Indigenous peoples) while white men destroy the forest. Despite this destruction, ancestral knowledge lives on. Young Indigenous people use technology to denounce violence and defend their culture, demanding an end to genocide, violence, and discrimination.

Lilly Baniwa is an Indigenous actress, performer, artist and researcher from the Amazon region. Her most recent performances include SER-UMA-NÓS (BEING-US-HUMAN) and Antes do tempo existir, which she both developed and performs. Among her newest projects are the video performance manifesto Lithipokoroda and the workshop IPerformatividades Identitárias.

Ziel Karapotó is a multidisciplinary artist, curator and filmmaker. His artistic practice and research is characterized by the exploration of Indigenous poetics, identity configurations and racism against Indigenous communities. In 2024, he was one of three Indigenous artists representing Brazil at the 60th Venice Biennale with the work Cardume II (School of Fish II). His most important audiovisual works include the short film The Word Became Flesh (2019), the documentary Speeches of the Earth (2021) and the short film Paola (2022).

Olinda Tupinambá is a multidisciplinary artist with a degree in Social Communication. She is a cultural worker, performer and filmmaker. Her work is characterized by using her body as a political body - a body that transforms to speak of other possible worlds, to make environmental-political issues visible and to discuss the relationship between humans and nature, which is a recurring theme in some of her works. She has been working in the field of audiovisual media since late 2015, producing and directing ten independent films in the fields of documentary, fiction and performance.