People’s Palace Projects

Project description

The Xingu Indigenous Territory is one of the most diverse territories on the planet, home to 16 different Indigenous groups that speak seven different linguistic families and continue to live a traditional lifestyle. The area is located in the south basin of the Amazon rainforest and is of great environmental significance, but is continually threatened by logging and farming industries.

The collaboration between PPP and members of the Xingu communities started in 2014, when PPP was approached by theatremaker Simon McBurney. McBurney wanted to organise an exchange with Amazonian Indigenous communities as part of the development of a new play The Encounter, inspired by the book Amazon Beaming about the Mayoruna people. While PPP had not done a project working with an Indigenous community before, they applied learning from previous international exchanges they had organised with artists, researchers, community leaders and cultural organisations. Those projects emphasised the need to create the right conditions for equitable exchange. One example is the four-year programme Favela to the World, in partnership with Grupo Cultural AfroReggae, which enabled artists from Rio de Janeiro’s most violent favelas to perform on major international stages. They also ran a cultural educational exchange between Brazil and the UK on the role of community arts in addressing gun and gang violence.

Professor Paul Heritage at PPP worked with McBurney to research Indigenous peoples’ experiences and environments, and design appropriate methods to make the exchange ethical and fair. They arranged for McBurney to spend time with two Indigenous communities, first with the Mayoruna in the village of Marajaí, in the State of Amazonas, and second the Yawalapiti, based in the Xingu Indigenous Territory. The Yawalapiti people invited Heritage and McBurney to attend the Kuarup, one of the most important cultural and spiritual ceremonies for the Xingu communities, celebrating the lives of significant individuals who have passed away. At the ceremony, they met Takumã Kuikuro, an Indigenous artist and filmmaker from the Kuikuro people of the Upper Xingu. In 2014, through the Culture Connection Brazil scheme, Takumã spent six weeks in London creating a film, London as a Village, which humorously explores Western culture from an Indigenous perspective.

Developing the collaboration

Since the original exchange, the relationship has grown into a long-term partnership between PPP and members of the Kuikuro, and it has created opportunities for mutual learning, understanding and support, with an increasing emphasis on climate justice and the environmental, social and cultural threats to the Xingu. Trusted relationships were gradually built up between the different participants through an extended process of collaboration, carefully co-developed with Takumã to respect the decision-making practices that are central to the Xingu cultures. This was largely conducted through group discussions with the community members at the centre of the village, responding to collective ideas and issues as they arose.

‘When we arrive, we always head to the centre of the village to be welcomed and exchange gifts. The entire community gathers, sitting in a circle with the chief and other leaders. The chief invites us to step into the middle of the circle, where we spend a few hours introducing ourselves and our practices. They ask questions about and start sharing stories and ideas for collaboration.

Everything is decided and agreed in this format, a collective decision-making process that is an integral part of their lives. Meetings like these happen almost every other day. It is a real participatory exchange, continuous communication, constant decision-making, translation, and adaptation. It is all about working together to learn from each other and build mutual understanding and trust over time. In projects like this, there are many different layers of responsibility.’

Thiago Jesus, Lead for Indigenous Exchange & Climate Action at PPP

An important part of this process was a series of artist residencies that were held in the Ipatse Village, the main settlement of the Kuikuro people. These were carefully designed by Takumã Kuikuro with support from the PPP team to balance a focus on the Kuikuro people’s desire to document aspects of their endangered cultural practices with avoiding intruding too much on people’s daily lives. PPP and Takumã co-created a protocol for ethical and equitable collaboration that visitors were asked to comply with. The protocol is still being used, adapted and translated, and acts as guidance on how visitors can be culturally sensitive and avoid intrusion.

Following discussion with residents, a designated ‘oca’ (traditional Xingu dwelling) was built to house visiting artists, who came for two-week residencies. Two weeks was regarded as the maximum time that wouldn’t compromise the communities’ daily activities. The aim was to make these residencies useful for both sides, with non-Indigenous artists learning from working in a context they would never usually have access to, and the Kuikuro benefiting from those visiting. The artists were putting their expertise at the service of the community’s request to document and preserve their cultural heritage, and generate international awareness of their culture. For example, the Factum Foundation, a charity working on digital documentation of cultural heritage at risk, was involved in the first set of residencies. They gained understanding of the socio-political and environmental risks to tangible and intangible heritage of the Xingu and went on to provide support to help preserve this.

‘When we invited artists, like the team from Factum, they brought with them their expertise and technology. But they didn’t arrive there saying, “We want to do this”. Instead, our approach was: “We’ve brought some specific laser scanning equipment. That’s how it works. If you think these materials could be useful for your desire to safeguard some of your most valuable heritage, what would the community like to do?” From there, ideas emerged from the community on how we could best serve their priorities at that time. For instance, this included the photogrammetry of the Ipatse village of the Kuikuro and the 3D scanning of the vandalised rock panels of the sacred cave of the Kamukuwaká.’

Thiago Jesus

Through conversation, it emerged that the Kuikuro were planning to soon move their village to a new site. PPP worked with the Factum Foundation to produce 3D digital documentation of the village before it was abandoned. This was combined with footage filmed by Takumã to create immersive documentation of a Kuikuro village, which was shared in museum settings internationally. The exhibition helped to develop understanding of Indigenous cultural practices as presented by an Indigenous artist, without the need for intrusive direct contact, which would be dependent on high-carbon travel.

Environmental and climate justice

The exchange was not initially framed through the lens of climate change. However, environmental threats to the Xingu are deeply interconnected to the communities’ identity, memory and culture. Environmental issues, such as drier circumstances and poor harvests, mean they now rely on the city to buy food, highlighting the fragility of their traditional ways of life. These issues came up among other concerns like the arrival of technology, losing younger generations to another dominant culture and loss of traditions. For the Xingu communities, nature and culture are indivisible, a view that differs from the compartmentalised approach of Western knowledge systems.

The situation has worsened over the past decade with increasing deforestation for meat and soy farming. Forest fires associated with illegal logging are now reaching their villages. People developed asthma and bronchitis from air pollution, and some were hospitalised. Environmental threats became existential, with the loss of forest resulting in scarcity of food and water. The partnership with PPP increasingly focused on these threats, and looked to provide practical help and use creative methods to develop social and political support for the Xingu.

Examples of this work:

• Takumã collaborated with Brazilian designer Gringo Cardia, who participated in one of the residencies, to create a video installation, OCA RED: The Nature of Living Together, which was presented at the Venice Biennale in 2021. The film highlighted environmental threats to the Xingu and the careful path they needed to tread to maintain ancestral traditions in an uncertain future. It also highlighted what can be learned from Indigenous communities as custodians of some of the world’s most environmentally significant territories.
• In 2022, PPP collaborated with London-based artist Simon Butler to develop the project From the Ashes. They travelled to the Xingu Indigenous Territory to visit the areas of the forest burnt down due to illegal logging. He was permitted to bring back ash and charcoal from the site, which were used to produce paint, ink and pastels. These were distributed to contemporary artists such as Tacita Dean, Richard Long and Cornelia Parker, who created new artworks to sell at auction and raise funds for two Indigenous associations of Upper Xingu, to sustain fire brigades and run reforesting initiatives.
• In 2021 and 2023, PPP produced ECHOES, a biennial Indigenous Film Festival curated by Brazilian Indigenous filmmakers Takumã Kuikuro, Graciela Guarani and Ziel Karapotó. Hosted by the ICA London, the festival explored the future of Indigenous peoples through their experiences, addressing topics such as ongoing struggles for land rights, the impact of the climate crisis on Indigenous cultural heritage and the significance of their artistic expressions.

Another consequence of deforestation and proximity of new farmland to the Xingu territory was an increase in tensions between Indigenous peoples and farmers, which eventually resulted in the likely deliberate vandalism of the Xingu sacred site, the Kamukuwaká cave, in September 2018. The petroglyphs in the cave were an irreplaceable document of Indigenous beliefs, customs and ancestral history, including environmental knowledge of the area. It was testament to the depth of the relationship that had been established that the Wauja people were willing to share information about this site with PPP and Factum Foundation. Co-ordinated by Piratá Waurá, an Indigenous filmmaker and scholar from the Wauja people of the Xingu region, the Wauja led an international network of organisations, academics and volunteers to create a meticulous digital restoration of the sacred engravings. Using original drawings and photographs by Indigenous peoples, Factum Foundation produced a replica of the cave, in both a full-size physical version and virtual reality version. Although the site itself was irreplaceable, this helped the Xingu to preserve important heritage associated with the cave. It also proved to be an important tool for sharing Indigenous perspectives at high-profile international events, including the high-level launch event of the United Nations’ International Decade of Indigenous Languages.

The collaboration is ongoing. In August 2024, Piratá Waurá received support from Itaú Rumos, a Brazilian arts foundation, to develop a new virtual reality (VR) experience in partnership with PPP and Studio KWO, a creative studio specialising in immersive and interactive technologies. The new VR will explore the issues of climate justice and Indigenous resilience in the Amazon through the lens of the Kamukuwaká ancestral history for non-Indigenous audiences. It will be launched at COP30, the United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties, which will take place in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025.

Sustainability issues

• The partnership deployed culture-led methods to support Indigenous peoples to respond to existential environmental threats to their culture and livelihood. This included documenting and preserving sites that were damaged or at risk, and providing practical support to respond to threats like forest fires, using art projects to fundraise for associated costs.
• The partnership helped to document Indigenous perspectives on climate and environmental justice issues. By working with artists and academics, they brought these perspectives into global north arts sector contexts, associated with concentrations of wealth and power, where these perspectives would not ordinarily be present.

• The partnership fostered international exchange and understanding without the need for extensive travel. Artist residencies provided opportunities for a smaller number of people to spend extended periods of time with the Kuikuro, and equivalent extended residencies were created for Kuikuro artists, which profoundly influenced creative work produced on both sides. Work to document aspects of Kuikuro and Wauja cultures in detail through digital and virtual reality methods were shared with large numbers of people in the global north without them needing to travel and intrude on the villages.
• The project highlighted environmental repercussions of high-carbon lifestyles. The farmland encroaching on Xingu territory includes the second largest producer of beef and the largest producer of soy (largely for animal feed) in the world. The environmental harms of these farms were felt by the Xingu because of high-carbon diets of people elsewhere in the world. Creative work allowed the local communities to document their ongoing struggles and humanise this unjust imbalance of cost and benefit on Indigenous territories.

Lessons, tips and advice

• Long-term collaborations allow the time to develop mutual trust and understanding. The more in-depth work carried out more recently was made possible by building on the long process of exchange enabled by the series of artist residencies focused on protecting the culture, land and way of life that sustains the Xingu. These developed the trust necessary for the Kuikuro and the Wauja to give access to and share knowledge about cultural heritage sites like the Kamukuwaká cave.
• Embracing cultural differences and interdisciplinarity. There is a need to go beyond disciplines when collaborating with Indigenous communities, as such framing is not relevant to people whose cultures and knowledge systems are much more integrated. From the Xingu, the PPP learned how arts and cultural practices are essential to the preservation of life, and focused on designing their projects to be more challenge-focused and to contribute to solutions beyond disciplinary constraints.

‘It was a real process of communication, constant communication, constant decision making and adapting and translating.’

Thiago Jesus

• Creating equitable partnerships requires dealing with power imbalances. The approach to the partnership was carefully co-designed with Takumã Kuikuro to address potential power imbalances between the global north organisations and Indigenous peoples involved in the project. In practice, this meant a focus on dialogue so that actions taken could reflect the needs and interests of everyone involved. This led to steps such as creating equal opportunities for Indigenous artists to develop cultural work in the UK, alongside opportunities for non-Indigenous artists to visit Xingu territory, as well as Indigenous knowledge-holders being recognised as researchers within higher education funding opportunities in the UK.
• It was important for members of the Kuikuro to ‘be the protagonists of their own story’. Takumã Kuikuro highlighted a tendency for creative work that was visible in the global north to be ‘about’ Indigenous peoples rather than created by them. It was powerful to share films and other creative work produced by Indigenous artists and centering their perspectives.

Partners and stakeholders

• Kuikuro and Wauja peoples: Indigenous communities based in the Upper Xingu region in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. Part of the wider group of Xingu people, which comprises 16 distinct ethnic groups, these communities collaborate most actively with PPP.
• People’s Palace Projects: A charitable subsidiary of Queen Mary University of London, established in 1997. PPP collaborates with artists, academics and activists to challenge social and climate injustices globally, using creative methods to make change through the arts in areas including equality, climate justice and health.
• Takumã Kuikuro and Piratá Waurá: Two Indigenous filmmakers from the Xingu who are associate artists at PPP and are the main points of contact with the Kuikuro and Wauja peoples. They have produced a number of different film projects through work with PPP, which have been screened internationally.
• Many other artists have been involved throughout the collaboration, including theatremaker Simon McBurney, designer Gringo Cardia and visual artist Simon Butler.
• Factum Foundation: A non-profit organisation that creates high-resolution, accurate digital documentation of cultural heritage sites and artworks around the world. It worked with the Wauja to create a replica of Kamukuwaká cave.

Funding

PPP is a charitable subsidiary of Queen Mary University of London and, since 2008, has been a National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) of the Arts Council England. As an NPO, PPP receives approximately £130,000 of public funding annually, which accounted for 13% of their income in 2023. Queen Mary University of London donates services to PPP, amounting to over £200,000 in 2023.

Most of the PPP’s work is funded by research grants. PPP’s Indigenous Exchange and Climate Action work was part-funded by Arts and Humanities Research Council funding distributed by UKRI, grants from various organisations in the UK and abroad such as Iron Mountain’s Living Legacy Initiative, and in-kind contributions from partners. These contributions included Factum Foundation’s role in producing a full-size replica of the Kamukuwaká cave, and the pro-bono transportation of the replica from Spain to Brazil by Crozier Fine Arts (more than 8000km by sea and road to ensure the project was significantly less impactful for the environment than air freight).

Selling artwork at auction has raised funds for the Xingu. For example, the artworks produced in the From the Ashes project and sold at auction raised funds for two Indigenous associations of Upper Xingu to sustain fire brigades and run reforesting initiatives.

Relevant links

• • Factum Foundation page on Kamukuwaká Cave
  • Takumã’s video about forest fires