The History of Art as the History of Florests. Reflections on women protagonism from the Ka'a Body exhibition : cosmovisions of the forest

Abstract

This text sets out to think about a “history of forest art” as an alternative to an official history of Brazilian art, highlighting the fundamental role of women, especially indigenous women, in this process. The question that leads us to the reflections here would be: How can we think about a history of Brazilian art, especially of the tropical forest territory, based on the art produced by indigenous women? The narrative of the curatorial proposal for the exhibition Ka'a Body: cosmovisions of the forest and its developments will be used in this article to discuss how collectives of women artists situate themselves in the context of contemporary indigenous art and what the reverberations of this insertion are in their contexts of life. In this way, we intend to think about how the history of art produced in the rainforest is understood. Based on a pioneering initiative, which aims to introduce mainly indigenous women's collectives into the field of contemporary art, the exhibition was a manifesto about the importance of reflecting on the History of the Forests in Brazil, bringing to light different worldviews and stories of resistance about the body-territory of the Brazilian forests and emphasizing the protagonism of women.