THE LAW OF CAPITAL: HISTORIES OF OPPRESSION
Virginia Villaplana: AMAZONIA World paradise lost
2009
Film installation
4 projections
60 min
www.virginiavillaplana.com
World paradise lost was developed in the form of a film installation; it uses narrative film-essay as a device, and takes place in the areas of the current Amazon borders. The narrations contained in this work are based on images shot by Elena Rodríguez-Bauzá between 1932 and 1935 in the Amazon rainforest in Mato Gross, Brazil – in particular the banks of the São Lourenço river. These documents, captured on six rolls of nitrate film, along with the tales of the travels of this amateur entomologist were the foundations of the cinematographic tone which would offer the opportunity to create an index of indigenous culture there. Elena Rodríguez-Bauzá’s records are not, in this sense, a complete documentary work, but can be interpreted as a symbolic cultural unveiling of this vanished human geography. They include partial notes, field studies and document images – falling short of documentary status – which have been hidden away for almost a century. The collection is the result of a disseminated documentation process of an exotic journey which compiles different sequences of shots of the Mato Grosso do Sul, including falsified portraits and records of ancient indigenous populations, such as images of men enacting the war dance and women exposing their naked bodies before the camera.
A part of the experimental ethnography field, World paradise lost is a work which explores the links between culture and indigenism in a globalised world. The journey of the records of the Mato Grosso forest left behind by Elena Rodríguez-Bauzá is intended to be a reflection on the notion of colonial memory, based on the sequences of images brought into the present day by the marks left by this portrayal. A utopian portrait project of cultures classified under Western understanding as “exotic.”
This area in central-western Brazil (close to the town of Cuiabá, which today forms a state in itself) was the destination of some of the most significant expeditions starting out from São Paulo during the 18th century in order to populate the country, create trade enclaves, and find sources of gold and gemstones. During the 19th and 20th century, this territory was visited by writers, adventurers and scientists such as Hercule Florence, the Baron of Langsdorff and later Claude Levi-Strauss, who would create a subjective ethnographer’s perspective in Sad Tropics (1955). Before the Second World War, film ethnographers were travellers; just as Osa Johnson carried out his documentary work in Cannibals of the South Seas (1912) and Wonders of the Congo (1931), adventurers and scientists tried to document the last traces of a culture which was fading away. The film genre and ethnography are culturally related; the narrative genres which separate fiction and documentary, blended in the portrayal and register of other cultures in documentary style, prior to the existence of a documentary narrative (just as Robert Flaherty showed in Nanook of the North, 1912-1922), lead us to consider, following the suggestions of Jay Ruby in his essay Exposing yourself: reflexivity, anthropology and film, that film genres emerge from a western middle class need to explore, document and explain the world, and thus symbolically dominate it.
The first recordings of the indigenous cultures of Mato Grosso, Brazil appear as a result of a cultural approximation exercise by the cartographer Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, from the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro; he contracted Luiz Thomaz Reis, who commenced the systematic task of an ethnographical register on film. In 1913 and 1914 he filmed, with the pareci and the nambikwara people, a film which has since been lost, Os Sertôes de Mato Grosso, and in 1916, with the bororo people, Rituais e festas de Bororo, thus creating the first ethnographical film set among the indigenous cultures of the Amazon.
The filming of World paradise lost, in experimental ethnographic form, is set in the Tri-border Amazon region, between the borders of Colombia, Brazil and Peru. Each of the files generated has the backdrop of different indigenous communities, such as the Tikuna or the Santa Sofía tribes, and enclave of different ethnic groups such as the Muinane Bora, Marubo, Cocama or Yagua. The Marubo cosmovision, which relates that new beings are formed by the union or transformation of parts of dead, mutilated beings, seems to be the result of a reorganisation of decimated and fragmented indigenous societies, which was caused by the increase in rubber extraction going back decades up until today in the entire Amazon region.
World paradise lost is a visual anthropology document by an amateur cinematographer which tells of the origins of the ancient peoples inhabiting these lands, tracing their portraits and reflecting the view which has been pushed into the past. It is a reflection on the transforming dynamics of image production on the shape of indigenous life, the sense of community and vital subsistence.
Virginia Villaplana is writer and artist. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts and Communication. Since 2006 she has been assistant lecturer at the Department of Language Theory and Communication Sciences, University of Valencia, Spain.
Film installation
4 projections
60 min
www.virginiavillaplana.com
World paradise lost was developed in the form of a film installation; it uses narrative film-essay as a device, and takes place in the areas of the current Amazon borders. The narrations contained in this work are based on images shot by Elena Rodríguez-Bauzá between 1932 and 1935 in the Amazon rainforest in Mato Gross, Brazil – in particular the banks of the São Lourenço river. These documents, captured on six rolls of nitrate film, along with the tales of the travels of this amateur entomologist were the foundations of the cinematographic tone which would offer the opportunity to create an index of indigenous culture there. Elena Rodríguez-Bauzá’s records are not, in this sense, a complete documentary work, but can be interpreted as a symbolic cultural unveiling of this vanished human geography. They include partial notes, field studies and document images – falling short of documentary status – which have been hidden away for almost a century. The collection is the result of a disseminated documentation process of an exotic journey which compiles different sequences of shots of the Mato Grosso do Sul, including falsified portraits and records of ancient indigenous populations, such as images of men enacting the war dance and women exposing their naked bodies before the camera.
A part of the experimental ethnography field, World paradise lost is a work which explores the links between culture and indigenism in a globalised world. The journey of the records of the Mato Grosso forest left behind by Elena Rodríguez-Bauzá is intended to be a reflection on the notion of colonial memory, based on the sequences of images brought into the present day by the marks left by this portrayal. A utopian portrait project of cultures classified under Western understanding as “exotic.”
Photographs of a clip taken in the Bora community, in the Colombian jungle.
This area in central-western Brazil (close to the town of Cuiabá, which today forms a state in itself) was the destination of some of the most significant expeditions starting out from São Paulo during the 18th century in order to populate the country, create trade enclaves, and find sources of gold and gemstones. During the 19th and 20th century, this territory was visited by writers, adventurers and scientists such as Hercule Florence, the Baron of Langsdorff and later Claude Levi-Strauss, who would create a subjective ethnographer’s perspective in Sad Tropics (1955). Before the Second World War, film ethnographers were travellers; just as Osa Johnson carried out his documentary work in Cannibals of the South Seas (1912) and Wonders of the Congo (1931), adventurers and scientists tried to document the last traces of a culture which was fading away. The film genre and ethnography are culturally related; the narrative genres which separate fiction and documentary, blended in the portrayal and register of other cultures in documentary style, prior to the existence of a documentary narrative (just as Robert Flaherty showed in Nanook of the North, 1912-1922), lead us to consider, following the suggestions of Jay Ruby in his essay Exposing yourself: reflexivity, anthropology and film, that film genres emerge from a western middle class need to explore, document and explain the world, and thus symbolically dominate it.
The first recordings of the indigenous cultures of Mato Grosso, Brazil appear as a result of a cultural approximation exercise by the cartographer Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, from the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro; he contracted Luiz Thomaz Reis, who commenced the systematic task of an ethnographical register on film. In 1913 and 1914 he filmed, with the pareci and the nambikwara people, a film which has since been lost, Os Sertôes de Mato Grosso, and in 1916, with the bororo people, Rituais e festas de Bororo, thus creating the first ethnographical film set among the indigenous cultures of the Amazon.
The filming of World paradise lost, in experimental ethnographic form, is set in the Tri-border Amazon region, between the borders of Colombia, Brazil and Peru. Each of the files generated has the backdrop of different indigenous communities, such as the Tikuna or the Santa Sofía tribes, and enclave of different ethnic groups such as the Muinane Bora, Marubo, Cocama or Yagua. The Marubo cosmovision, which relates that new beings are formed by the union or transformation of parts of dead, mutilated beings, seems to be the result of a reorganisation of decimated and fragmented indigenous societies, which was caused by the increase in rubber extraction going back decades up until today in the entire Amazon region.
World paradise lost is a visual anthropology document by an amateur cinematographer which tells of the origins of the ancient peoples inhabiting these lands, tracing their portraits and reflecting the view which has been pushed into the past. It is a reflection on the transforming dynamics of image production on the shape of indigenous life, the sense of community and vital subsistence.
Virginia Villaplana is writer and artist. She holds a PhD in Fine Arts and Communication. Since 2006 she has been assistant lecturer at the Department of Language Theory and Communication Sciences, University of Valencia, Spain.
