The aim is, then, for an aesthetic crossing of contemporary indigenous art and contemporary art, bringing together artistic productions that are available to each other. A disposition found in the languages of visual arts, whether in painting, sculpture, video, etc... a place that translates the corporeal experience. It is about perceiving the body as a subject, as an agent, as a means that generates other forms. So it is possible to look at the works present here and perceive the body in overflow.

With a PhD in Environmental Sciences and Sustainability in the Amazon, a master's degree and a degree in Visual Arts, Kassia Borges (Goiânia, 1962) came into contact with ceramics when she was still a child, playing with traditional Ritxoko dolls. These are Karajá dolls, the same ethnicity as the artist, which portray life in the village through figures that represent their relatives in daily activities, such as: grating cassava, doing body painting, fishing in a canoe, among others. It was from her experience with her grandmother Alice, who had knowledge of the ceramics and body painting of her people, that the artist first became interested in art.

Dealing mainly with the handling of clay using the accordion technique, burnishing and painting with engobe and natural pigments from mineral oxides and plant extraction, her work continues the Karajá material culture. Presenting a series of ceramic totems with images of tits, vulvas and snakes, mainly, these are the consequence of a ritualistic practice that is repeated in compulsion. From a ritual that is passed down from generation to generation, which is aimed at the prayers of shaman women, since they are the ones who have the knowledge of herbs for the production of tea and baths. In the artist's words, I'm going to become a shaman, that's my mission.

It is also important to emphasize that each fauna and flora being plays a specific role in the indigenous worldview, varying according to the particularities of each ethnic group. From Karajá's perspective, for example, the snake reminds its people of finitude, as it is watching over the hole of the origin of life in the Araguaia River, allowing the old to continue with the old and the young not to want to return to immortality. Full of meanings and mysteries, the images that are materialized in totemic figures carry within them the power of prayer and reflection.

Through the feminist becoming that evokes Kassia Borges, one can also explore the work of Sophia Pinheiro (Goiânia, 1990), a white woman who brings to the field of arts, in its broadest sense, a political militancy that was passed on to her by her mother. Each in their own way and place of speech, it is possible to notice a conversation between the work of both artists, as if their images of vulvas and tits “spoke the same language”, that of women who fight for autonomy and rights to their bodies.

From the experience of radical otherness, as Sophia Pinheiro herself puts it, in order to understand what indigenous women are doing to themselves and their worlds, their cosmopolitical agencies and their feminisms in community, she develops artistic and activist work in villages for more than a decade. With a PhD in Cinema and Audiovisual, a master's degree in Anthropology and a degree in Visual Arts, she is an ally of the causes of indigenous peoples and her practice moves simultaneously through the field of cinema and visual arts.

Presenting a series of works made with natural pigments that intertwine painting and drawing techniques, the chromatic palette that pulses on the surface of the papers carries the strength of red earth and women's blood. Of a blood that talks about death and life, as if saying: I wish blood were only that of menstruation[1]. In linen works, there is a shift from figurative images to more abstract images, which talk about the transformation of surfaces from stone to fur to tree bark to snake skin.

Approaching the issues that permeate womanhood and indigenous activism in another way, the work of Kaya Agari (Cuiabá, 1986) is inspired by the graphics present in her Kurâ-Bakairi people to construct her poetics. It is about understanding body painting as a Kurâ-Bakairi resistance, since this practice was one of the few that managed not to be exterminated by coloniality, thanks to its cosmological relationships prior to colonization and its peculiar ability to metamorphose, as ir is rightly put by researcher Isabel Teresa Cristina Taukane in her doctoral thesis[2].

Artist and Nutrition student, a healthy body both inside and out is Kaya Agari's guiding subject in creating her paintings. So the geometric and graphic motifs present in her works act as a garment of protection, identity and tradition. It is about understanding graphics as ancestral resistance, provided with cosmological knowledge and artistic potential specific to each ethnic group.

Made in cotton fabric dyed with herbs and painted with genipapo and annatto, her paintings come from a direct channel between the artist and the tradition of Kurâ-Bakairi graphics. However, the fact that his artistic production “floats on the wall” points to an innovation in the understanding of body painting. As if it were expanded to an enlarged field, going from human skin to tissue skin. One can, then, understand the idea of graphics in Kaya Agari as collective, typical of its people, while the expression and the way of bringing it to the exhibition is individual, particular to the artist.

The sharing of the common also appears in the sculptures of Claudio Cretti (Belém, 1964), a white artist with a degree in Fine Arts who works mainly with materials that are part of Brazilian material culture. Just like Kaya Agari's graphics were not created by her, the materials used in Claudio Cretti's works were not invented by him nor manufactured. What can be seen in both, each in their own way, is an operation of producing artistically in an authorial way with what is collectively conceived.

Pipes, beads, fishing articles, pieces of wood, lines, ropes and straws are some of the materials that stand out to the eye in his sculptures. They are materials that evoke the presence of other bodies, other gestures, other times. Because they are elements that do not cease to be what they are, no matter how much the exercise of their function has been subverted by the non-functionality of art. For example, even if a pipe is unable to be used for smoking, as seen here, it will always be a pipe. So that the projection of the smoke is inherent in the pipe, since it is in its agency.

And as much as the original form of materialities precedes the artist's process and awakens agencies, they only become a unity when articulated by Claudio Cretti, who in addition to appropriating the objects also designs and sculpts some of the pieces. It is through the joining, the fitting, the artisanal process of sculpting, the intuitive projection and the meeting of objects that the sculptural body overflows. In this sense, it is possible to think about the relationship between the agency of objects and the state of sculpture. And why not say that this relationship enables the creation of magical bodies?

One can therefore notice the presence of a mystery that runs through all the works in the exhibition, whether due to the cosmological meaning of Kassia Borges' images, the chromatic and political composition of Sophia Pinheiro, the ancestral graphics of Kaya Agari or the magic that inhabits the sculptures by Claudio Cretti. A mystery that is inherent to the impossibility of understanding the body as a single truth.

For all this, the body that overflows "forms" both as a noun and as a verb. It is with this double meaning that the word "form" acts as a possibility of being available to others, to other forms, with artists in living and continuous transformation. As mentioned at the beginning of the text, each body is a universe, so that there are many worlds in one world.

Paula Borghi
São Paulo, July 2023