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Contribution short abstract

This presentation develops a critical (art-)pedagogical framework through the project Atlas Brasiliensis, to activate the transformative potential of cura - healing - as a collective and processual practice.

Contribution long abstract

Building on João Paulo Tukano and Ivan Barreto’s conceptualization of the Palace of the Dead and their call for a Renascimento (revival or rebirth), we understand museum artifacts not as inert heritage but as “dismembered bodies” that require healing through Indigenous expertise.

Drawing from a collaborative research and artistic production experience between Munich, São Paulo and in Manaus, with Anita Ekman and members of the project Atlas Brasiliensis (Goethe-Institut), we propose incorporating the concept of cura - healing - into anthropological and critical (art) pedagogical frameworks. Distinct from health, the term healing highlights medicinal plants and museum artifacts as relational agents with the potential to foster ecological restoration.

In this sense, planetary healing designates pragmatic practices that go beyond merely fixing socio-environmental harm caused by human actions. Instead, it suggests transformative recompositions of knowledges and ecologies, where Indigenous epistemologies and critical pedagogy together create new constellations of meaning. The images, maps, and collages that we have produced are not meant to close interpretation but to open it - activating dialogue, provoking contributions, and enabling further stories to emerge.

We argue that healing in this sense is not restorative but generative, unsettling dualisms - between Western and Indigenous medicine, humans and nonhumans, health and illness - and making visible the transformative potential of cura as a collective and processual practice.