Tupinambá Ibirapema Clubs - Cosmotecnics of the Tupinambá Clubs, 2024–2025
Thursday, 16 April 2026
11:00 - 12:30
STIAS, Boardroom
Abstract
The film stems from the research project Ibirapema - Cosmotécnica das bordunas tupinambá, in which the artist maps clubs belonging to her people that are housed in European museums but absent from Brazilian institutions. On her trips to Europe, Glicéria Tupinambá combines documentary methods (photographing, describing, comparing) with processes related to listening to the objects themselves, dreams that guide her research, as well as community experiences that attest to the centrality of women in Tupinambá social life. The video shows Glicéria sharing with her people what she saw in European museums, helping her relatives reconnect with knowledge that belongs to them—but that was often dormant. In the projections, through images of clubs —official records, field photographs, technical analyses, and iconographies—the audience is invited to explore the scope of the research. Instead of confrontation, the artist practices direct diplomacy—museum to museum, object to object—to reorient care, names, and arrangements. Her work questions what is lost when a club becomes a catalog “entry.” In it, dreams, listening, and care are presented as technologies. Which museums are willing to have their conservation and cataloging practices transformed by the knowledge of Indigenous peoples? Glicéria Tupinambá developed this work at the invitation of the project Decay Without Mourning | Future Thinking Heritage Practices, by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond.
Biography
Glicéria Tupinambá is an Indigenous leader, teacher, researcher, and award-winning artist from the village of Serra do Padeiro in the Tupinambá de Olivença Indigenous Territory in southern Bahia, Brazil. Deeply involved in the political and cultural life of her community, she has played a central role in the Tupinambá of Serra do Padeiro Indigenous Association (AITSP) since its founding in 2004, serving in leadership positions and representing her people in international forums such as the United Nations Human Rights Council and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. Her current research focuses on the revival of Tupinambá language and material culture, particularly the historical scarlet ibis feather mantles produced by Tupinambá peoples in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which are now held in European museum collections. By studying the relationship between these mantles, the Old Tupi language, and contemporary artistic production, she has contributed to the cultural revitalization of Tupinambá heritage; in 2020 she received the Another Sky Prize for creating a mantle based on this research and co-curated the exhibition Kwá yapé turusú yuriri assojaba tupinambá | This is the Grand Return of the Tupinambá Mantle in 2021. Alongside her artistic and intellectual work, she remains an outspoken advocate for Indigenous rights and the recognition of Tupinambá land claims in the Atlantic Forest region, a struggle that has exposed her to political persecution and threats but continues to shape her activism and scholarship.