WEAVING BRIDGES BETWEEN WORLDS
Cristine Takuá
13 March 2025
"The embaúba, tuthi, is the mother-fiber because it is magical.
It can make women transform into anacondas, produce bees,
realizar caças e tecer caminhos que chegam até as aldeias celestes.”
Há muito tempo, eu sonhava em fazer um entrelaçamento de saberes com a presença dos pajés Maxakali e da anciã Delcida com os jovens Guarani, para juntos caminharmos na mata e intercambiarmos os saberes da Nhe’ëry.
Photos: Anna Dantes
Delcida Maxakali is a master of songs, stories, and the art of embaúba, being one of the main elders of the Village-School-Forest. Born in one of the oldest villages of the Maxakali Indigenous Land, in Pradinho, Delcida keeps in her memory the history of her ancestors' displacements through the territory, preserved in her songs and tales. For years, she lived in the Aldeia Verde reserve, facing enormous difficulties in accessing water. Despite her advanced age, she was one of the main leaders to decide to leave the territory in July 2020. Today, she´s a great supporter of the Living School in the Village-School-Forest, a space for the preservation of cultural heritage and environmental conservation of the Maxakali territory.
Photos: Rodrigo Duarte
It was very powerful and meaningful for the Maxakali Living School group to feel the living forest, in the songs of the birds, in the crystal-clear water, in the many medicines found along the way, and in the collected embaúba fibers. Everyone was filled with joy to collect jaborandi seedlings to take for the women to use after childbirth.
Foto: Rodrigo Duarte
With the permission of the Ija kuery and the yãmĩyxop, from December 12 to 18, 2024, we held an artistic and spiritual residency at the Living School Mbya Arandu Porã. The meeting brought together young people from the Living School Guarani of Tekoa Rio Silveira and a Guarani family from Piaçaguera, Suri Jera, Samira Mindua, Josiane Pará, and Simone Jaxuka, 14 representatives from Living School Maxakali, coordinated by Sueli and Isael Maxakali, an artist from the Witoto people Aimema Uai, from Colombia, Freg Stokes, escritor, performer e cartógrafo de Melbourne, da Austrália, Brisa Flow, singer, composer, hip hop culture MC, and her partner Ian Wapixana, artist who, along with Caio Tupã, captured sounds during the meeting. We also had the presence of Anita Ekman, independent curator and artist, Sandra Benites, educator, curator, and representative of Funarte, Anna Dantes, editor, coordinator, and creator of Selvagem cycle of studies about life, Verônica Pinheiro, educadora e coordenadora do grupo Aprendizagens do Selvagem e de Alice Faria, translator and coordinator of the Translations of the Selvagem group. Débora, Renata, Tajiana and Ronia, who participated through Goethe Institute. Rodrigo Duarte, visual artist, captured images and sounds to collaboratively compose creative material from the residency, Anai Vera, anthropologist, helped organize the meeting, and Ana Estrela, anthropologist, represented the Museum of Indigenous Cultures.
Photos: Alice Faria and Rodrigo Duarte
Through exchanges, we were able to weave bridges between many worlds through art and the ancestral thinking of the peoples who gathered to transmit messages of regeneration and expansion of consciousness. The exchange between the Guarani and Maxakali people enabled a dive into the Nhe’ëry forest, Mata Atlântica [Atlantic Forest], in search of embaúba, a native plant in our forest to extract its fiber and produce arts that heal and enchant. Through songs, the Maxakali women dialogue with the ants and the spirit of the embaúba to ask for permission for its harvest. During the walks in the forest, many medicinal plants and seedlings were also identified and collected.
Photos: Anna Dantes e Carlos Papá
The Living Schools led the entire residency process. Together with the artists present, we produced a large collective canvas featuring forest beings. Some map canvases were also created, tracing the territories where the represented peoples live. The children, guided by Veronica's brilliance, worked with clay to create shapes, painted canvases with natural paints depicting animated narratives, and made drawings with leaves using the light of the Sun.
Photo: Carlos Papá
Photos: Rodrigo Duarte e Anna Dantes
On the full moon of December 14, we held a spiritual ceremony to celebrate the union of the forest peoples and to strengthen the healing processes of the body and the earth through dialogue with the spirit of the plant.
Foto: Rodrigo Duarte
Each teaching, each story told by the shamans, each song sung by the youth, children, and elders formed a bond of strength and transformation. Lightning, thunder, and strong winds accompanied the week we spent together at my home, Tekoa Rio Silveira.
The crystal-clear waters descending from the mountains of Serra do Mar enchanted everyone, especially the elder Delcida Maxakali, mother of Isael and great-grandmother of Bidé, Cassiel.
They were magical days
Days of healing and re-enchantments
The Living Schools continue to pulse
Within our hearts
And deep within our
Most profound memories.
Photos: Rodrigo Duarte
* * *
Juntando forças e desejos, Selvagem e Goethe-Institut colaboram na realização e documentação da residência na Escola Viva Guarani no âmbito do projeto Cosmopercepções da Floresta, o qual atravessa as conexões planetárias das florestas e as práticas de seu manejo para uma construção coletiva cultural pelos povos da floresta. Com cinco residências na América do Sul e na Europa, a iniciativa do Goethe-Institut Rio de Janeiro centraliza territórios tradicionais, mapeia a história ambiental das florestas e evidencia conexões científicas e cosmológicas. Esse projeto tem como ponto de partida iniciativas existentes em territórios indígenas e tradicionais que trabalham para regenerar as relações entre muitas espécies, humanas e não humanas, com base nos modos de vida dos povos da floresta.
The residency at Aldeia Rio Silveira, created by Cris Takuá and Carlos Papá, brings together Indigenous leaders from various territories around the construction of the prayer house, as well as the plant laboratory and the actions of the Guarani Living School. Living School is an initiative of the Selvagem cycle. Living School strengthens and transmits traditional knowledge of various Indigenous peoples, including the Maxakali, Huni Kuï, Tukano-Dessano-Tuyuka, Guarani, and Baniwa.