“Amazonizing” world cities through paintings: Indigenous cosmovisions encountering urban centers for the lost balance

Abstract

Currently, Peruvian Amazonian Indigenous artists are receiving unprecedented attention as they exhibit their paintings in galleries worldwide. In this context, I focus on three paintings of world cities as Havana, Miami, and Paris by Bora artist Brus Rubio (born 1984). Unfortunately, these paintings have not been analyzed from Indigenous studies and Amazonian Indigenous cosmologies. I argue that the paintings manifest Rubio’s Amazonian resilience by offering a new imaginary of the urban space associated with Indigenous cosmologies, which facilitates the preservation of Indigenous lands, rights, and traditions for the globalized world. In this vision, the Western and the Indigenous worldview find harmony when the human and the non-human encounter and celebrate a balanced cohabitation as in Bora’s narratives. This is his way of amazonizing the world or claiming his right to world citizenship and proposing a new understanding of globalization.

Towards Amazon-centred memory studies: Borders, dispossessions and massacres

“…We talk about the complex human/non-human intersections with the aim of retracing two fundamental critical paths: on one hand, we subscribe to Stef Craps’ claims about a new wave of memory studies that goes ‘beyond anthropocentric modes of cognition and representation’ (Craps et al, 2018: 500), and we affirmatively reclaim the productivity of these claims in Amazonia, insofar as they resonate with Indigenous cosmovisions whereby non-human beings exist in a horizontal dialogue with humans. In her discussion of the dislocation of Amazonian urban paintings to non-Amazonian metropolises, Mitsuishi argues that, in Amazonian cosmovisions, ‘there is no duality between culture and nature, as all beings – including animals, plants, and spirits – are beings of culture’ (Mitsuishi, 2022: 5). Considering the Achuar people 1 in Peru, Descola (1988) illustrates this same concept in terms of intersubjectivity, which ‘turns every plant and animal into a subject that produces meaning’ (p. 50) 2 Indigenous scholarship, such as Alana Manchineri et al’s Portuguese-language volume Atualizar o mito (Manchineri and Manchineri, 2018), asks us exactly to bear in mind the absence of this duality when it comes to collective memory, stored and passed on, in Manchineri epistemology, through Tsrunnini ginkakle , that is, ‘histories of people from the past’ (Manchineri and Manchineri, 2018: 72), where non-human agents assume important, subjective roles in the accounts of the past.…”

Brus Rubio: Nuevos horizontes del arte amazónico

“…El efecto final permite comprender que en su arte hay también un esfuerzo por traducir el conocimiento de su gente, con la finalidad de hacerlo inteligible a otros, al mismo tiempo que su gente puede verse representada a sí misma de una manera respetuosa. En palabras de Katia Yoza Mitsuishi (2022, 8), su trabajo se vuelve una manifestación política: “Rubio’s art is a political manifesto of the vindication of the Amazonian Indigenous art as aesthetic objects instead of craft-works and beyond the narrative mode” 1 . Su arte vuelve patente su re-existencia: él quiere informar al público general sobre una historia comunal olvidada, la cual ha sido obviada o abiertamente desautorizada por gente que ha definido cómo se entiende y se representa la Amazonía.…”