Decoloniality and art

Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance

Abstract

This article aims to build a relationship between the works of contemporary indigenous art and the decoloniality of being, from Nelson Maldonado-Torres. Its purpose is to address the links between contemporary indigenous artistic practices that use art as a form of resistance to make noticeable decolonial and environmental issues through a poetic communication, encouraging micropolitical actions and questioning the Eurocentric mindset. In order to develop that articulation, the corpus of the research starts from the analysis of three contemporary indigenous artists: Daiara Tukano, Jaider Esber and Denilson Baniwa. Their works elaborate discussions with the intention of creating cracks in the capitalist model that the “commodity people” (KOPENAWA) chose to live in, which leads to an environmental crisis and the genocide of the native people. The methodology chosen for the analysis of the corpus is the Extremity Approach (2007), developed by Christine Mello, which uses the notions of deconstruction (the idea of indigenous and colonization), contamination (of the Amerindian culture by the Eurocentric concept of culture) and sharing (ideas and art) to explore tensions and limit situations between artistic spaces and coloniality. The article has an interdisciplinary theoretical structure between the fields of philosophy and communication, inspired by (in the following order): Nelson Maldonado-Torres, who presents a couple of analytical dimensions of coloniality; Ailton Krenak and his concept of affective alliances to overcome the walls of coloniality; and finally, Norval Baitello, and his concept of communication through the expansion of affections.