Lina Venegas (CO/PE/AT), Renata Tupinambá (BR), Gabriel Carneiro (BR/DE)

Online Encounter / November 24, 19:00 CET  (Central European Time)
Moderation: Bianca Mendonça and Korina Kordova

The online encounter

Our fourth online encounter brings together dancer and choreographer Lina Venegas (CO/PE/AT), artist, curator and activist Renata Tupinambá (BR), and theatre maker Gabriel Carneiro (BR/DE). Their interests meet around Amerindian Philosophies, embodied knowledge, sustainability, and cultural identity.

In this encounter, Lina, Renata and Gabriel will talk with and through their own practices, which range from urban gardening and connection with the soil, to rituals of regeneration, and reflections on territorial relations articulated through theatre and performance making.

The event will be held in Portuguese and Spanish, with simultaneous translation into English (in the chat).

More information about the series of online encounters.

The participants

Lina Venegas is a dancer, performer and choreographer with an engineering background and Colombian and Peruvian roots who lives in Vienna. Her work deals with cultural and social contents, focusing on sustainability, cultural identity, social migration and integration processes, and it has been developed and shown in Austria, Colombia, Japan, Ghana and Peru. She holds a BA and MA in Contemporary Dance, Movement Research and Dance Pedagogy from Bruckner University Linz and a degree in Engineering from Universidad de los Andes Bogota. She has worked on sustainable development and participatory planning projects for the Colombian Ministry of Environment, United Nations and NGOs and as coordinator of the cultural space ArtEstudio Bogota. She has danced and performed with Serapions Ensemble/ Odeon Theatre Vienna since 2006, Amanda Piña/nadaproductions, Fanni Futterknecht, Kandis Williams, Renato Zanella, Tanzfabrik-wien, ObjêtsFax Co. a.o, works as a dance educator in various artistic and social contexts, and develops a practice of urban gardening as a form of good living.

The Indigenous name of Renata Tupinambá is Aratykyra, she is a journalist, producer, poet, consultant, curator, screen-writer and visual artist. She founded the Indigenous production company Originárias Produções. Collaborator of the Visibilidade Indígena network. For 15 years she has been working with the dissemination of Indigenous culture and ethnocommunication. She has been on the Curating Council of TV Cultura – Fundação Padre Anchieta since 2020. She is a member of the Amotara Zabelê in Bahia, a school of ancestral knowledge in Tupinambá territory in the Una municipality. Creator of the Originárias podcast, the first podcast of interviews with Indigenous artists and musicians in Brazil, which is a part of PodSim, a group of female-led podcasts. Co-founded Rádio Yandê, the first Brazilian Indigenous web radio. Curator of the Festival Corpos da Terra – images of Indigenous peoples in Brazilian cinema (2021). Curator of the second screening of Etnomídia indígena (2021). Curator of the Festival de Música indígena, at CCVM’s Indígenas BR 2021 festival. Curator of the first Brazilian festival of contemporary Indigenous music, by Rádio Yandê, at Unibes Cultural in São Paulo (2019).

Gabriel Carneiro has been working as an actor, director and dramaturge since 2006. As an immigrant, he expresses through his work his correlation with the territories where he lived. Between theory and practice in art, he is currently researching South Amerindian Perspectivism as a biographical approach. Since 2019 living in the Ruhr area, he develops works such as “A sacrificial system” (Rottstraßen5Kunsthallen- directed by Claudia Bosse -2020) and “Mapping of affections” (KunsthausEssen 2020). In 2022 he showed his production “Niemandes Boden” as part of the festival West Off – Theaternetzwerk Rheinland in co-production with the FFT in Düsseldorf, Bonn, and as a revival with funding from the Landesbüro Freie Darstellende Künste at Blue Square Bochum.    https://gabrielcarneiroarts.wixsite.com/works

Documentation

Our 4th online encounter is a meeting with Lina Venegas, Renata Tupinambá and Gabriel Carneiro.

In their shared histories of migration, our three guests bring back memories of their home countries and childhoods and weave a close connection to their individual artistic practice in the present. Coming from culturally rich and diverse South American backgrounds, Lina, Renata and Gabriel enable us to experience vivid pictures of grounds they used to walk on, smells, feelings of being with and in nature, conversations with their ancestors. In this post apocalyptic encounter, we create space to critically discuss the consequences of industrialisation and exploitation of land people used to cultivate; where they used to live within communal practices such as dancing and singing. As modern western ways of living are based on detaching the human from the land, which is mostly seen as a resource, our guests reflect on possible ways to reclaim this connection through artistic creation.

What is the responsibility of the arts and how can they be a form of resistance in a post apocalyptic world?

“There were no Indigenous people in the curating team (Note: of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo). Sometimes we were invited to do work only, not curating and producing. Only after the new constitution in Brazil in 1988, Indigenous people were recognized as citizens.

We bring our territory where we are. Our thought reproduces territoriality.” (Renata Tupinambá)

“I think a lot about memory. Memory brings me to territory. It’s a place where I hear singing. The earth is wet from the rain. Through this memory, the smell of this wet rain, there’s also the warmth, Mata Atlântica.” (Renata Tupinambá)

“These methods of not considering nature and the earth in engineering started to bother me and with dance I started to open up this connection. So this space started to grow, and I realized my body started to become the territory.” (Lina Venegas)

“The way these women (note: of the Emberá community located in the border region between Panamá and Colombia) sing transports me to an idea of inhabiting the earth. Calling the earth. The rain, the animals, celebrating life. With time, I inhabited the space of the migration.” (Lina Venegas)

dance is resistance

“Through comparing these two places and creating a connection between them, Minas Gerais and Ruhrgebiet, (note: edited for understanding) I would like to propose for people to see the future of these kind of places. The future of the Ruhrgebiet is the present of Minas Gerais.” (Gabriel Carneiro)

“When I speak, who speaks with me? Who makes themselves available to understand me? What makes me think?”

“If I smell the earth, the earth can smell me.” (Gabriel Carneiro)

“We are also these trees. These walking trees. We have our roots cut by certain ways of thinking.

We see all the time this different way of existing, this plurality. Animals, plants, living beings.

Because of the way of thinking of the Anthropocene, we see it all separated like that. This cement is the colonization on top of our bodies, limiting the way we think, we go, we exist.”

“…do we need all this destruction to arrive to something new?” (Renata Tupinambá)

“The art needs to go out of its well being. Life itself has to go outside of its own consumer comfort.” (Lina Venegas)

“…the world we live in was built in a way of thinking that prioritizes the vision.(…) The separation between spectator and performer.

So I was wondering about the cement, the division, the separation; Choreographic practice and life practice.

In a way, there’s a wish to return to life as an entaglement.” (Korina Kordova)

“One dances the apocalypse. We need to dance it, right?” (Lina Venegas)

“We dance as a proposal of resistance.” (Bianca Mendonca)

Watch our teaser video of the 4th online encounter here!

Click here for the full length video recording of the online encounter with Living Midnight Narrative Outfit

References and further information

Emberá Communitiy:
https://robuenosaires.iom.int/en/stories/ambachacke-embera

Mining in Minas Gerais:
https://earthworks.org/blog/minas-gerais-brazil/

Plantwave – Listening to the sound of plants:
https://plantwave.com/en-de