Tupinambá cloaks: its goings and comings*

by Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira

The photographic act can be understood as a way of making visible a series of circuits that have been made and are hidden during a long arc of time. One example is founded in the artistic practices of Lívia Melzi, who for three years has dedicated herself to photographing the archives of Tupinambá cloaks in several European museums located in cities like Brussels, Paris, Florence, Basel. Her gesture highlights three moments of colonial practices are worth observing: first, that there is a history of the cloaks that arrived in Europe, mostly in 17th Century; second, that Melzi’s work allows a dialectical seeing through the artistic and documental aspects in photography seizing the imperial’s look crystalized at the XIX Century with all positive sciences; third, her work produces an opening for the transmission of technical-sacred knowledge of the cloak, contributing to its recomposition in Brazil by Glicéria Tupinambá. In short, two women cross several layers of history in a photographic correspondence.

The arrival of the cloaks in Europe is a story of comings and goings. Little by little, each one has taken up residence firstly in some collections and then, in ethnographic museums. Mariana Françozo in “Beyond the Kunstkammer – Brazilian featherwork in early modern Europe” retraces the path of the cloaks that little by little had their meaning transformed by colonial encounters. If before, the cloak had a ritual function in the Tupinamba cosmovisions, it later became an object of exchange. In short, a merchandise. Although completely feathered, it entered the collections of European ethnographic museums by ship. What is interesting to emphasize is that the cloaks have histories that coincide both with the development of the museum in terms of techniques of conservation and with the fixity of the colonial gaze. Both these aspects remain in the feathered structure of the mantle, even if later, across the anthropology and ethnography on the 20th century, it found a new consciousness in the West, becoming in some sense a way to make the West look away. Lívia Melzi’s visual work emphasizes this silent and historical background.    

Melzi’s photographs underline inherited practices that usually rest in the silence of the archives. In the light of the photographic surface, the pieces evade documentation because small displacements simply occur. Opened on a large white surface, the Tupinambá cloak stands on the border of distinct temporalities: the collector’s gaze tends to fix what could be a stuffed animal or its remains. The tonality of one of her images semantically reinforces its presence in the museum’s archive. However, the structure in the surroundings, the edges of the image, evoke arrangements that combine collage, montage, and other technical procedures. Besides, the image matches the part of the cloak that has on feathers, showing precisely the structure of its inner parts. Thus, in this photograph the cloak and the image show two structures of time: the first comes from the very material wear of the cloak, its lack of feathers in one part; the second, from the photograph itself, which shows the conditions under which the image was produced. In other image, with a white background, the artist has a set of stickers on which one can see numbers and information referring to the pieces filed in the Museum. By bringing up the flow of the archive, the images perform a meta-archive, for they situate museums in the West as “contact zones”, as defined by James Clifford. The photographs in question can also be read as contact zones. Contact between the artist and the archive, between the images and the indigenous people, between our memory of museum visitors and our little practice of visiting their archives.

The circulation of artefacts, objects and their constant resignification also produce a sense of diaspora of indigenous peoples. Exiled in their own lands and increasingly threatened, the possibility of the material and symbolic return of their own knowledge from colonial archives can help to elaborate a network of visibility. Melzi’s photographic practice produces a transmission of gestures both through her photographs and in her exchanges with Célia Tupinambá. This would be a third structure that emerges from his ongoing work. The dialog is just beginning and the images act strongly already here.

*foam magazine #59 JULY 2021