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Paper short abstract:

This paper presents an ongoing process of photoreturn and collaborative filmmaking among the Guarani-Kaiowá (Brazil) that draws from the encounter of members of the source community with a photograph collection of an indigenist organization that holds precious images of their ritual practices.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper I present an ongoing process of photoreturn and collaborative filmmaking among the Kaiowá, a Tupi-Guarani speaking people who live in central-western Brazil. Such process emerges from the encounter of members of the source community with a historical photograph collection of a catholic indigenist organization that holds precious images of ritual practices of this people. In our work, we concentrate on a set of photographs that document the community to which belong the indigenous filmmakers who have been conducting the mentioned filmmaking process. This experience has raised questions concerning the way members of the source community have seeked to re-appropriate their images; the novel ways in which they choose to share them; how photographs transit among various mediums - digital and physical - and states of (in)visibility and (i)materiality; and how they mediate relations and produce effects or, in other words, act upon the social world (human and non-human) in which they are embedded. We undertake this process assuming its experimental character and poetic quality, with the intention of illuminating the relations that the Kaiowá establish between the domains of visuality and orality, between image and word. Along this path, we have collaboratively woven an exercise in visual experimentation that has shown to create a fruitful interconnection between archival materials, narratives and life trajectories; between images and words; between Ára ymã (old space-time) and Ára pyau (new space-time), pointing to the imagination of alternative futures.