To accompany the 2021 Amazonia Festival edition, CULTURESCAPES publishes „Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology“, a book devoted to Amazonia, its peoples, allies, and nonhuman spirits, and their myriad material and immaterial practices, from certain cosmopolitics and visual languages to past and present forms of resistance.
In all their various lines (and circles) of ecological and epistemological thought, the artists, elders, writers, theorists, shamans, curators, poets, and activists whose ideas, images, and struggles comprise this book, are concerned with Amazonia as both a place and a point of view.
Through their weave of voices, myths, ancestors, and territories, and all their radical subjectivities, we understand language in this anthology in an extended sense: as testimony, textile, painting, river, forest, animal, ancestor, song, spirit, and sacred medicine.
Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology enquires into decolonial feminisms and Indigenous temporalities, externalized memory and erasure, sacred plants in the shadow of pandemic, corporate-state extractivism and systemic violence, the activist possibilities of the mythic imagination, and the common visual matrixes of the Amazonian universe. The anthology also weighs the Western imaginary of the Amazon, both its colonial roots in racial capitalism, and its corporate, technological, paternalistic present.
Centered, however, is Amazonia itself, in all its many and numinous worlds and languages—visual, oral, botanical, ancestral, cosmological—by which it becomes narrated, passed on, and then narrated again.
With contributions by Maria Thereza Alves and the Association of the Movement of Indigenous Agroforestry Agents of Acre (AMAAIAC), Claudia Andujar, Denilson Baniwa, Christian Bendayán, Chonon Bensho, Rita Carelli, Enrique Casanto, Felipe Castelblanco, Carolina Caycedo, Taita Hernando Chindoy, Smith Churay, Víctor Churay, Tiffany Higgins, knowbotiq, Davi Kopenawa, Ailton Krenak, Gredna Landolt, Nereyda López, Renata Machado Tupinambá, Maurício Meirelles, Gerardo Petsaín, Aníbal Quijano, Djamila Ribeiro, Abel Rodríguez (Mogaje Guihu), Pamela Rosenkranz, María Belén Saéz de Ibarra, Bárbara Santos (with Cuenco de Cera, Reynel Ortega, and Stephen Hugh-Jones), Shoyan Shëca (Roldán Pinedo), Paulo Tavares, Daiara Tukano, Eduardo Viveiros De Castro, Márcia Wayna Kambeba, Santiago Yahuarcani, and others.
„Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology“ is edited by Kateryna Botanova and Quinn Latimer, designed by Gaile Pranckunaite, and co-published by Sternberg Press, a Berlin-based publishing house.
The publication can be ordered here.
