Paper short abstract:

Francy Fontes Baniwa is an anthropologist and researcher of the Baniwa people. In her project to safeguard the linguistic and cultural heritage at Museu do Índio in Brazil, she sought to deepen the decolonial relationship of building a collection through the active participation of her community

Paper long abstract:

Francy Fontes Baniwa is an anthropologist and researcher of the Baniwa people. In her project to safeguard linguistic and cultural heritage at the Museu do Índio in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, she sought to deepen the decolonial relationship of building a collection through the active participation of her community. The work consisted of requalifying pieces from the Baniwa collection, reworking nomenclatures and relationships with museum collections from a native perspective and building new methodological paths. In this paper, we will look at the third phase of the project coordinated by Francy, which consists of the meeting of ceramic makers with two of the team's researchers, Carolina Campos, a Baniwa ceramicist, and Julia Sá Earp, a designer, ceramicist and anthropologist from Rio de Janeiro. Carolina Campos' community is located in the middle of the Amazon and is approximately 30 hours away from Rio de Janeiro. On their way there, between boats and planes, around 24 pieces of pottery that were to be incorporated into the museum's collection broke. Chance then led us to recompose and recreate the pieces using Baniwa techniques and contemporary urban ceramic technology and materials. These pieces ended up forming Francy's second collection at the museum, undoing rigid assumptions and composing new stories and proposals for decolonial methodologies for ethnographic collections.