Art, Music, and Dance in the Karib Alliance

Abstract

The participation of Macuxi Indigenous youth has been particularly significant within the political and social life of their people. Through their own forms of organization and collective action, these young people have sought to occupy spaces and strengthen their role in community life, creating mechanisms that keep them active and connected to their ways of making worlds. In this context, art, music, and dance have emerged as important pathways for following the footsteps of their ancestors and keeping culture alive, functioning as means of transmitting knowledge, strengthening cultural practices, and affirming identity. This paper presents artistic activities developed by Macuxi youth and examines an experience of intercultural exchange carried out with a group of Kurâ-Bakairi youth within the framework of the Karib Alliance project. Although they belong to different peoples, Macuxi and Kurâ-Bakairi share a common Karib linguistic matrix, which establishes important linguistic connections between them. The encounter took place in April 2025 during a seminar held at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP), when the two groups met to conduct a joint workshop on graphic patterns, songs, and dances, in addition to visiting various cultural spaces and museums in the city of São Paulo. Based on this experience, I propose to investigate both the elements that brought these two groups of young people closer and those that distinguished them. In this sense, language, graphic patterns, songs, and embodied practices are examined as forms of cultural expression that, while revealing differences, also become elements of intercultural exchange. The presentation seeks to understand how these practices can function as spaces of mutual learning, cultural strengthening, and resistance, particularly when placed in dialogue with the non-Indigenous world and with the institutional space of the museum.