‘ORIGEM’: Queering Indigeneity through Participatory (Audio)visual Methods in Northeastern Brazil

Abstract

‘ORIGEM’ (2020) was a queer kind of research project from its inception. Its original funding was for research impact, yet no formal research project came before it. Instead, academics based at the University of Leeds (Paulo Pepe and Thea Pitman) used a modest pot of impact funding to support the work of two emerging artists (Laryssa Machada and Antônio Vital Neto Pankararu) with personal contacts in Queer Indigenous circles in Northeastern Brazil who set out to creatively honour and reflect on their relationships within those communities through digital photographic portraits and short video interviews. The UK-based researchers remained in the UK throughout the process, leaving the artists free to travel between the communities involved (the Pankararu community at Brejo dos Padres in southern Pernambuco, and the Tupinambá community at Olivença de Ilhéus in Southern Bahia) and explore the topic as they saw fit. Since then, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the results were circulated online via a website and promoted on social media, and, with the post-pandemic return to offline encounters, they were also exhibited at the Bolivia International Digital Art Fair in Cochabamba in September 2022. The present article seeks to showcase the project and the work that came out of it, interpreting it as a form of decolonial research using participatory, creative methodologies (arts-based Participatory Action Research), and to explore the perspectives of a cross-section of those involved in the project – the artists, their friends and relatives who agreed to be interviewed and photographed (including most notably Fykyá and Bia Pankararu) and the academics too – as they engaged in the original project and its subsequent exhibitions. In so doing, it seeks to reveal the deep learning to be derived from the project without shying away from any tensions that this form of working can engender.