CORPO – CASA – TERRITÓRIO
Cristine Takuá
23 de maio de 2024
Art by Cris Takuá
Our body is a territory
É casa, é morada ancestral
It is home, ancestral dwelling
Our home is the forest
And through it a portal we cross
Our territory is the riverbank,
It is mountain and mangrove
We're the tangle of a web
of natural colouring.
The forest pulses
and the sacred beings living in it,
in the midst of the gale, are watching
Respecting the spirits of the forest
Should be the principle in the beginning
of the transmission of lores
and knowledge
of the world today we live in.
Art by Kaue Karai Tataendy
By weaving worlds we learn to relate to the spaces that surround us. Since the first home that welcomes us in our mothers' wombs, we begin to realise and feel the dimension of the many territories we inhabit. We are conceived in this great web of relationships, with ways of thinking and existing that are connected to an ancestral memory, a collection of knowledge and practices that inhabits our bodies and is present in many layers. The body, home, territory, this world of deep connections is undergoing significant changes due to the process of mechanisation of relationships. Artificial intelligence, which is increasingly present in human life and interaction, is causing ancestral communication tools such as telepathy, intuition and dreams to be silenced in the daily lives of many beings.
A nossa grande morada, a nossa casa sagrada, é a floresta. E ela não está presente somente dentro da nossa casa, mas nas cachoeiras, nas montanhas, em todos os espaços onde se constitui o tekoa, que é o território onde se vive, onde se planta, onde se cria, onde se brinca, onde se é possível conviver de uma forma coletiva, de uma forma verdadeira. Sinto que todo o nosso corpo, toda a forma como a gente se coloca no mundo, estão sendo chamados para uma transformação, um redirecionamento. Independente das nossas origens, das nossas posições políticas, filosóficas ou epistemológicas, precisamos ter um compromisso ético com a vida e, assim, conseguir equilibrar o sopro de amor que sai das nossas palavras com o compasso dos nossos passos ao caminhar. Esse é o grande desafio que temos que superar para conseguirmos avançar, com coerência e serenidade, sem sermos constantemente contraditórios nas nossas ações.
Art by Jera Mirim
Throughout history, humankind has relied on a reason that does not include other beings in the dialogues. Humans have created, invented, modified and destroyed the balance of nature. And they have forgotten to realise that the ants, the bees, the wind, the mountains, the rivers and all the beings that live here on this planet, visible and invisible beings, animal beings, plant beings, mineral beings, they too share a collectivity, a dynamic of life that pulses within this territory which is the great planet Earth. But we humans insist on wanting to be bigger, on wanting to be more forward-thinking and masters of this whole world. And, in the name of this, we cause all the imbalances in this humanity that we believe we are.
We can't dissociate ourselves from nature, because we are nature and everything is intertwined. No human being can live and survive if there is no water to drink or clean air to breathe. The whole capitalist and colonising process, in many places around the world, has imposed a way of seeing and thinking of time, and this has affected the processes of knowledge transmission. There is a monoculture that governs food, that governs epistemologies and the processes of healing and illness. This needs to be understood in such a way that individuals realise we are nothing more than a tiny grain in this great web that connects life. When I think about home, body and territory, I realise how much we humans are gifted with a great potential that is our own mind. Our thoughts are capable of enormous development and creativity, which we can provide only to ourselves or redirect to learning.
Ants, bees and plants are very intelligent beings, just like all mineral beings. Every day they pulsate, transform and recompose themselves. And we humans are constantly dividing ourselves into categories, ethnicities, skin colour and social classes. But we are all human and we have all been put in this same boat, which is this sacred dwelling, this home-territory where we live every day and where we share struggles and dreams, expectations and desires. Getting used to this and seeing clearly and fully is the mission that each of us carries in this territorial dwelling. With our sensibilities, with our cultural and spiritual specificities, we are able to reach out to this great community that inhabits the planet Earth home, and thus reactivate care and awareness to our own body, mind and spirit.
Art by Alexandre Wera Popygua