“Pollinating an entire forest”: shamanism and more-than-human places in the contemporary indigenous art of Denilson Baniwa

Abstract

In Brazil, there is a growing movement of contemporary indigenous art that employ artivist practices toward works that claim their rights and way of seeing. Created between experiences permeated by art-life interactions, they conjure encounters between the indigenous worlds and aesthetics with those of contemporary art. Denilson Baniwa is an artist that is part of this impetus of tensioning situated in-between places, composing works that articulate art-life, shamanism, and cosmopolitics beyond the nature-culture binarism. Thus, this essay aims to unravel how his art works show multiple possibilities of comprehending the more-than-human senses of place. In order to do so, it employs references from Cultural Geography and the analysis of for of his works – Pajé-onça hackeando a 33ª Bienal de Artes de São Paulo (2018), Tudo é gente (2020), Ecologia da polinização invisível (2022) e Tatá (2023) – alongside the investigation into interviews and manifestos written by or on the artist.