The Tree of Abundance: On the Indigenous Emergence in Contemporary Latin American Art

Abstract

The Tree of Abundance is an origin story for many nations in the Amazon basin. It recounts a time when all people(s) lived under a mother tree, until those with an ax arrived and the tree collapsed. This is the act of coloniality, which produced a new landscape. The story serves as a conceptual metaphor to analyze the production of an emerging generation of contemporary visual makers of indigenous origin. These cultural producers are set in a historical context, which represents long temporalities of cultural-production resistance and re-existence in Latin America (called here Abya Yala). The text introduces a way to rethink contemporary art in the region under conditions of coloniality and names the artists “embodied territories” since they have particular connections to the places they live and work. This article is organized into three parts presenting artwork by several indigenous and intercultural subjects (with emphasis on those living in indigenous territories of Colombia): (1) A short genealogy from modernity to contemporaneity brings indigenous cultural production to the academic space as another source for a critical understanding of the lived experience in Abya Yala. (2) An account of themes derived from the contested histories highlights how indigenous and intercultural artists produce responses to them. (3) The genealogy and themes are then set in spatial terms offering two case studies, on one hand, the toppling of historical figures by indigenous activists as performance in the public space and, on the other, the exhibitions “Visual Sovereignty” and the “Indigenous Salon Manuel Quintín Lame”. The article concludes stressing how this emerging generation builds on long genealogies of sovereign representation, responding with a wide range of contemporary means (visual, textual, bodily, and multimedia) to issues that still affect their communities (land grabs, resource extraction, racialization, marginality, etc.). Adaptation, resistance, and re-existence occur when embodied territories recognize historical realities (time), location (space), and forms of liberation (action) within coloniality.