Indigenous Art As Expression of Political Resistence

In the analysis of Frantz Fanon, “imperialism and colonialism brought complete disorder to colonised peoples, disconnecting them from their histories, their landscapes, their languages, their social relations and their own ways of thinking, feeling and interacting the world” (reported by Smith 1999, p.35). The effects of colonialism were several: colonization has transformed the land, the way in which knowledge is produced, imposing often knowledge that has nothing to do with the land or the people (Chalmers 2017). In this context, colonialism has had and continues to have a strong impact on the epistemic dimension since modern rationality, proclaiming itself as the only valid knowledge, offers an understanding of the world that hides the diversity of the peoples of the colonies. Visual art and more in general art, “has a doubly counterhegemonic existence, as an aesthetic manifestation and as an archival exercise and interrupts both the aesthetic and the archival conventions at one and the same time” (Santos 2018, p.202). The paper aims to consider the reality of indigenous community in Amazonia and the experience of their political and social resistance through the artistic production of some indigenous artists.