Tuire Kayapó (First Contact)
Words by Danielle Pender
Last year during lockdown as artist Pinar Yolaçan edited her latest film Tuire Kayapó (First Contact) she experienced a very strange sense of déjà vu. Turning off the edit suite at the end of the day, she began to notice the same themes from her footage being played out across the nightly news and social media; discrimination, deforestation, corruption, expansion of cities towards Indigenous territories and infectious diseases as a result of all this.
Tuire Kayapó (First Contact) is an intimate portrait of Tuire, the prominent female chief of the Kayapó people, known for her environmental activism in the Brazilian Amazon since the late 1980s. In the film, it’s impossible to ignore the parallels between the issues impacting Tuire’s people and the problems that have come to light during the pandemic, problems that have always been there but that many in the west were conveniently blind to.
It’s a startling film based around conversations with Tuire and the project as a whole is an interesting insight into the process of making something collaborative with respectful intent. Aware of the Eurocentric tradition of building skewed narratives about indigenous people, Pinar spent time documenting the work that went into developing trust and a closer relationship with Tuire and the Kayapó people. This became an essential part of the project and allowed a much greater autonomy to the people she was filming and photographing.
Known predominantly as a photographer, Pinar’s work explores the female body. Her past projects, including Like A Stone and Maria and Perishables, take the female form and examine archetypes. She adorns the body, presents it as something abstract and beautiful but not in the stereotypical sense of the word. She challenges ideals around what a female body should look like, what it is capable of and what it can communicate.
It was this interest in what the body can communicate that led Pinar to South America.
During a residency in Bolivia, she became interested in researching the body painting practises of tribes in the area and other South American countries. Her research took her to the Amazon, where she met chief Tuire and the Kayapó people. The body painting of the Kayapó isn’t just adornment; it’s a communication tool, a way to spread messages and inform others of births, deaths, marriages. It is also a form of silent resistance.
Tuire Kayapó (First Contact) is a fascinating and beautifully collaborative body of work. Not only does this project explore the practises and traditions of the Kayapó people but, Tuire’s words on screen encourage us to reset our thinking around globalisation, around our arrogant approach to nature, and inspire a deeper respect of our interconnectivity with all life on earth. As Tuire says, “we all need oxygen to breathe, we all need clean water.” We are all inhabitants of the same planet and what happens in the Amazon affects us all.
What first took you to South America?
Originally I was doing a residency in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra situated in Bolivia’s lowlands. My research started with the Ayoreo community who are greatly affected by discrimination, racism, displacement and AIDS in Santa Cruz. Ayoreo is a matriarchal society where all chiefs are female which I was interested in, I started by doing some interviews and research with members of the community.
How did this lead you to Tuire and the Kayapo?
Back in New York, where I’m currently based, I was researching other Indigenous groups in lowland Bolivia and those in Pantanal and Brazil. I came across a book called Grafismo Indegina by Lux Vidal that focused on Indigenous communities such as Xikrin, Kayapó and Assuruni and their traditions of body painting. These communities were the only ethnicities using full body paint as a form of clothing not only for rituals and ceremonies but also in day-to-day life as a form of communication. Because of my work with body painting, I was very interested in their traditions and culture and eventually visited them in their territories in the Brazilian Amazon where I met the Kayapó (the Xikrin, a sub-tribe) and the Assuruni.
The Assurini and Kayapó people and the Xikrin, a sub ethnicity, are the only ethnicities among the 200+ in the Brazilian Amazon to use full-body painting as an almost daily practice.
Indigenous people and their contribution to art history are very underrecognized. I studied at Cooper Union in New York and we were told art history began with the Greeks. In this “newfound land” called America, be it Southern or Northern hemisphere, where once millions of Indigenous people lived, there is a definite erasure of this culture which aesthetics were a very big part of.
How can the body painting be read?
The original settlements of the Kayapó and Assuruni people near the Xingu and Tucurui rivers are the only communities with this tradition and only the female members of the community paint.
The paintings represent many different things, and as Tuire explains in the film, there are many kinds of markings. One can think of them as clothing and as a form of communication between villagers. For example, there’s a type of men’s paint that informs everyone in the village that their wife is pregnant, there is another type of men’s paint that informs others that the man is expecting his second child. There are paintings for babies, teenagers and adults, men and women. There is paint for war, for mourning, for celebrations; there are hundreds of different design combinations. It is a separate language in and of itself.
Tuire, leader of the Kayapó people.
How did you approach the process of making the film and getting to know Tuire and the community?
With all of my projects, I research and build a relationship of trust with the community I am interested in working with. It took me more than a year to prepare and several visits back and forth to Brazil for this project.
As with all Indigenous communities, the Kayapo are at once very protected but they have been historically exploited so they’re a vulnerable community and it’s very complicated to arrange a visit so this preparation became as much an important part of my process as the photography and filming.
To meet the people I want to work with, to speak to them, spend time with them and build trust takes alot of time and effort. So what you see in the film is a documentation of this process, of conversation and familiarisation
I went with the intention of researching their body painting traditions and hoping to photograph it, which I did with Tuire’s help (she did a painting session for me so I could photograph it in a staged way) but I was aware that it was sacred and I knew that I had to develop a deeper understanding of it which would only be possible with the help of the community over several trips.
You spent a lot of time with Tuire, what were some of the main discussion points?
I first saw her image in a book about the Kayapó and Indigenous resistance. It was the photograph of her holding a machete to an engineer’s face at the Altamira meeting in opposition of the Belo Monte dam but there was no other information about her. I thought that it was vital to speak to her and record her words since there was no other research material about her at that time, and she was one of the few female chiefs and the most prominent one.
There were some specific things she wanted us to publish around what was happening politically in Brazil at that time. Their territory was under threat from changing policies and laws under Michel Temer such as PEC 215, our conversation took place in 2017 and things have only got worse since Bolsonaro took over.
She wanted to talk about industrial farming and the foreign aid channelled into Brazil under the guise that Indigenous lands will be preserved. However, she explained that the government takes foreign aid and uses it to destroy their territories, not protect them.
She also discussed some more personal points about her position as a female chief in her community, the body paint tradition in the Kayapó and her personal history of how she became a leader as Kayapo are not matriarchal. Tuire is one of the first female chiefs in the Kayapó
You mentioned that the Kayapó way of life is Marxist. Can you expand on this?
Marx talked about “primitive communism” in tribal societies as a gift economy. The Kayapó source their food from the forest and the land, and as Tuire mentions, they don’t live on rice from industrial farming practises or “chicken that the white man says is delicious.”
The Kayapó have a very self-sufficient way of living without disturbing or destroying nature. They are not an individualistic society, food is distributed to everyone and most importantly, they understand that they are part of nature, not separate from it, that nature has to be preserved for the survival of not just them as Indigenous people but for all of humanity.
How do modern life and modern politics encroaching on their way of life?
To Tuire modern politics is corruption, she feels that politicians spread lies about their community as an opportunity to assault their culture and land. She is a leader in her community and her “politics” are around education and healthcare. She goes to Brasilia, to the congress to fight for better healthcare and more schools for her people. So in a way she is part of modern politics, we need more people like her at all governmental levels.
Apart from this, I believe, Indigenous communities should be a metaphor for us all, we shouldn’t think of their issues as separate from ours. Deforestation in the Amazon affects the entire planet. They understand they are part of a greater whole and that humans cannot exist without the Amazon. As Tuire says, “we all need the Oxygen to breathe, we all need clean water.” The so-called modern world and our corrupt leaders fail to understand this very basic principle.
It is not possible to divide and rule the planet and its resources in this colonial, imperial mentality anymore. Covid has been a perfect example, it wasn’t the problem of just one country, it was a global issue where were failed was when we didn’t work together. We must learn from this.
What were Tuire’s hopes for the future?
Unfortunately, the future doesn’t present itself with a lot of hope for the Kayapó. Tuire was emotional discussing the future and the impact of deforestation on her people, on their animals, on the wider world which is why it’s important to raise awareness and take action.
Tuire and her people started organising and fighting a long time ago, which is inspiring and in that sense, our conversation was very much about the present.