We Are Rivers

Lilly Baniwa, Ziel Karapotó und Olinda Tupinambá take us on a walk along the banks of the Leine, featuring traditional Indigenous music and dance. Music and dance here embodied expressions of Indigenous cosmologies, territorial memory, and relationality. As they share songs, chants, and gestures rooted in their communities, the artists evoke rivers as ancestral beings, sources of life, and carriers of stories. In the collective movement, there is a space for listening and reflection as they share their Indigenous knowledge and cosmologies that are deeply connected to rivers.

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.