GLICÉRIA TUPINAMBÁ
Bordunas
Glicéria (Célia) Tupinambá (Buerarema, Brazil, 1982)
Tupinambá Ibirapema Clubs – Cosmotecnics of the Tupinambá Clubs, 2024–2025
Digital documentary video, 10:26, sound, projection on two fabrics, map, botanical drawings, and digital photography.
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.