About

The Tupinambá of Olivença live in the south of Bahia between the cities of Ilheus, Una e Buerarema. It is a rain forest region of the so called Mata Atlântica that goes from the see up the hills to the mountains region. The Olivença village was founded in 1680 by Jesuit missionaries as an indigenous village. In the late nineteenth century, the Tupinambá people was presumed extinct, due to the restrictive views of official bodies. With the Constitution of 1988 was created the legislative opening required for the recognition of Tupinambá and other peoples.

In the 1990s, there was an escalation in the struggle for the territory demarcation based on a process of “re-taking” the land and the culture stolen from them. In 2001, the Tupinambá of Olivença were finally officially recognized by the National Indian Foundation and the demarcation of the Indigenous Territory was published in 2009. However, this initial demarcation was never approved and now the process is stalled in the Ministry of Justice. The state held three changes in the boundaries, in line with the interests of the big cocoa producers of the region. Several political and institutional forces act to stop the ratification of the territory and the terms established by federal courts are constantly postponed. Today there are over 6,000 Indians living in Tupinambá territory, and they follow in the fight for their territory.

This succinct definition, obviously, is not able to deal with the complexity and the beauty of the wide range of relations that constitute the Tupinambá fight and life. This shallow description has the intention only to locate the Tupinambá people in very succinct way for you who don’t know there story and territory. But this is only one content of this cartography and, in fact it does not make any sense without all the others. The intent here is to talk about the relations that pass trough the Tupinambá life and territory. However, we do not believe and did not have the will that the work presented here, could translate the complexity of what makes a Tupinambá here and now. It’s just a sincere attempt, among many others , to chant life on earth.

This project was conducted with funding from the Brazilian National Foundation for Arts (FUNARTE) in the context of a policy which had the goal to promote aesthetical interactions between contemporary artists and traditional peoples.

Art

Bárbara Szaniecki

Bruno Tarin

Gemerson Tupinambá

Laila Sandroni

Pedro Victor Brandão

Our gratitude to all Tupinambá people, specially to the Itapuã, Tamandaré and Tupã villages where we worked specifically

This project was presented to the National Art Foundation (FUNARTE) in partnership with the Indigenous Point of Culture: Massages from the earth – Thydêwá