Monilla Amena. Amazonian principles to understand the cultural production of the Amerindian world
Using one of the stories of Amazonian origin, Monilla Amena (the tree of life and abundance), this transnational territory’s cultural and artistic production can be critically inserted as an account of Amazonian artists-territory who, with agency, intervene in hegemonic spaces of cultural production. This text offers some Amazonian principles to understand the cultural production of the Amerindian world, uses this myth as a timeline and space, and places situated aesthetics and embodied practice as methodological axes. This approach contextualizes and locates each practice in its place of enunciation in three dimensions. It emphasizes how the artist embodies its territory as a collective, not just an individual. Additionally, it introduces the notions of fable, dialogue, and listening in a sort of humananimal and vege-human polyglotism of the Amazonian world. This is a critical reading of the academic disciplines that look at cultural products, categorizing and separating them in taxonomic exercises of capture and control. Cultural producers are called artists-territory for this exercise since they work situated, contextually, and in continuous intercultural dialogue. Their embodied practices are documentary and symbolic (political-aesthetic) acts and events that interrupt spaces inside and outside the world of art and culture as strategies to exercise cultural sovereignty from the Amazon world. The corpus to be treated are rock paintings in the Precambrian tepuis of the Colombian Amazon. In comparison and contrasts with an audiovisual piece representing the shipibo-konibo people of northeastern Peru (Favarón, Bensho). Finally, the text introduces the emerging generation of Pan-Amazonian artists-territory. This contribution should also be understood as a tribute to Fernando Urbina Rangel, a guide to the Amazonian world and an embodied, ritualized, situated, contextual, cultural practice that would otherwise be a simple academic exercise.
