Lecture
Visualizing Multispecies Resistance: Pan-Amazonian Indigenous Perspectives
- Date
- Tuesday 22 April 2025
- Time
- Address
-
Pieter de la Court
Wassenaarseweg 52
2333 AK Leiden - Room
- SA29
In an era marked by intensified civilizational crises and planetary destruction driven by colonial modernity and its continuities through extractive and racial capitalism, Amazonian Indigenous artists have played an important role in revitalizing life and transforming physically and epistemically damaged territories. This presentation will provide a comparative analysis of two recent short films by Amazonian Indigenous artists from Brazil and Peru: Children of the Corn (2021-2022) by Denilson Baniwa and Bakish Rao: Plant Resistance (2024), produced by Denilson in collaboration with the Comando Matico collective of the Shipibo-Conibo people. Both films, in which I was involved in the joint creation, address concerns around monoculture. They offer warnings about this issue through the lens of Amerindian cosmological perspectives on the Plantationcene. The works emphasize the inseparability of physical, vegetal, and spiritual health, proposing multispecies resistance against the homogenization of life. This comparative exercise highlights the importance of creative coalitions among Indigenous artists from different peoples as a pedagogical and cosmopolitical tool in times of ecological and social crisis.
Jamille Pinheiro Dias
I am interested in twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural histories, literatures and visual cultures of Latin America, with a focus on Brazil. My studies involve environmental issues, Amazonian cultural production, Indigenous arts, and translation studies.
I am currently the director of the Centre of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies (ILSC) at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study, where I also work as a Lecturer. I was a Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor at Brown University's Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, as well as a researcher affiliated with the Amazon Lab at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, where I was previously a von der Heyden Fellow, and with the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.