Mester

This article considers the video-performance “Manaus: Uma cidade na aldeia” by Uýra Sodoma. Divided into four acts, each part of the video-performance exemplifies a rupture with an anthropocentric model of modernity that privileges the human as the sole locus of experience, and it shows how indigenous healing through remembering renounces the naturalization of oppositions such as nature/culture, human/nonhuman. In my analysis, I present Uyra as an alter-political and decolonial figure, meaning that she both presents a path forward that is not necessarily predicated on adversarial schemas, and that she prefers to “contar outras histórias” by physically becoming something else, her body serving as the immanent/imminent site of perspectival differentiation. The video-performance points to the messiness of memory, history, colonial violence, and other forms of being and achieves a different outcome for the rivers, the frogs, and the trees, as well as for indigenous communities within and beyond Brazil.