Amanda Piña (CL/MX/AUS) and Renan Porto (BR/UK)

Online Encounter / October 13 – 19:00 CET (Central European Time)
Moderation: Bianca Mendonça and Korina Kordova

The online encounter

Our first online encounter brings together artist Amanda Piña (CL/MX/AUS) and PhD candidate in law at the University of Westminster, poet and essayist Renan Porto (BR/UK). Their interests and practices meet around Indigenous cosmologies, non-anthropocentric perspectives, and embodied knowledge.

In this encounter, Amanda and Renan will talk with and through their own practices and research interests, which range from choreography, dance and activism, to spatial justice, political philosophy, anthropology, law and literature.

More information about the series of online encounters

The Participants

Amanda Piña is a Chilean-Mexican-Austrian Artist living in Vienna and Mexico City. She studied painting before going into performance. Studied Physical Theater in Santiago de Chile, Theater Anthropology in Barcelona, and Contemporary Dance and Choreography in Mexico, Barcelona, Salzburg (SEAD) and Montpellier (Ex.e.r.ce Choreographic Centre Montpellier). Her artistic work is concerned with the decolonization of art, focusing on the political and social power of movement, temporarily dismantling ideological separations between contemporary and traditional, human and animal, nature and culture. Currently works on the realisation of the long-term project Endangered Human Movements, concerned with the reappearance of ancestral forms of movements and cultural practices. She is a research fellow at DAS THIRD, from the department of Theatre, Dance and Performance at Amsterdam University of the Arts.

Renan Porto is a PhD candidate in law at the University of Westminster, researching the emergence of spatial justice around the context of cacao production in northeast Brazil. He is exploring the ecology of cocoa plantations in the northeast of Brazil through a multispecies approach inspired by indigenous cosmologies, looking through this investigation how societies are shaped from a non-anthropocentric perspective. His interdisciplinary research spans the fields of political philosophy, anthropology, law and literature, addressing issues such as contemporary capitalism, technology, political practices and theoretical contributions from literature to the law. He is author of the books O Cólera A Febre (Urutau, 2018) and Políticas de Riobaldo (Cepe, 2021).

Documentation

In this first online encounter, artist Amanda Piña and Renan Porto (PhD candidate in Law at University of Westminster, UK), share their interest in the cacao plant as a metaphor for native Latin American resilience in the current postcolonial context. Through their conversation, we meet perspectives on genocide, economic exploitation and slavery, main pillars of colonialism. Furthermore, the conversation sheds light on poverty as it is perceived within modern western culture, in opposition to the abundance Indigenous people used to live and still live in, through their connection and sense of community with  the land, non-human animals and spirits.

“Cacao has to do with the ends of some worlds… Cacao is a very ecological tree. And because cacao is planted in the shadow of other trees, cacao was liable for the conservation of parts of the atlantic rain forest, the first rain forest that was cut off by colonizers.” (Renan Porto)

“There was one seed left, by some reason. That one seed was so strong to bring Cacao alive again, so postapocalyptic. (…) in some Indigenous histories, cacao has survived already the end of the world.” (Amanda Piña)

“The practices we do are about the dissemination of forms of thought and knowledge that have been erased, because the knowledge of art is knowledge that has already been transmitted, that is embodied, especially of performing arts. In very similar ways (…) in cosmopolitics, through concepts of society and the social, that go far beyond the human only. And here I wanted to stress that for us, the human is not something, we want to be. We don’t want to be human. The human (…) is a category that emerges through the enslavement of animals and of the colonized people (…).” (Amanda Piña)

“At the same time that cacao creates these connections between different communities, creates these connections between different trees, different birds, different insects that inhabit the cacao ecology, it also creates division, it also creates this distance, that is very difficult to cross.” (Renan Porto)

Watch our teaser video of the 1st online encounter here!

Click here for the full length video recording of the online encounter with Amanda Piña and Renan Porto

References and further information

About Amanda Piña/ nadaproductions:
https://nadaproductions.at/about-us/amanda-pina

‘O Colera A Febre’ – Renan Porto:
https://editoraurutau.com/titulo/o-colera-a-febre

‘A Court in the Backlands: A Nomadic Justice in Brazilian Literature’ – Renan Porto:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/366233575_A_Court_in_the_Backlands_A_Nomadic_Justice_in_Brazilian_Literature

‘Ecologia Sob a Queda do Céu’ – Renan Porto:
https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/download/5d1044fc3bf35d1ef35f5f3f668f40281c9f47f3377427d71dd0b9ede9b95b63/196881/2022%20-%20Ecologia%20Sob%20a%20Queda%20do%20C%C3%A9u.pdf

‘A queda do Céu’ – Davi Kopenawa e Bruce Albert:
https://leiaarqueologia.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/davi_kopenawa___bruce_albert_-_a_queda_do_c_u.pdf

‘The falling sky’ – Davi Kopenawa e Bruce Albert
translation: Nicholas Elliott, Alison Dundy:
https://www.perlego.com/book/3805971/the-falling-sky-words-of-a-yanomami-shaman-pdf?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&campaignid=17490270403&adgroupid=140283289120&gclid=CjwKCAiA3pugBhAwEiwAWFzwdacZurj5KO9D8o9YOcEZEwM011L0dPL9VJexRUX8YDJSmkgeKfhamBoCnVoQAvD_BwE

‘Ideias para Adiar o Fim do Mundo’ – Ailton Krenak:
https://www.companhiadasletras.com.br/livro/9788535933581/ideias-para-adiar-o-fim-do-mundo-nova-edicao

‘Ideas to Postpone the End of the World’ – Ailton Krenak:
https://books.google.se/books/about/Ideas_to_Postpone_the_End_of_the_World.html?id=HXXqDwAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description&redir_esc=y