RE_TURN
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Foto serie with Kayapó- und Assurini- artefacts of the Lukesch Collection
Karmeliterplatz / Antoniuskirche/ Studienzentrum Naturkunde, Universalmuseum Joanneum
Graz, Austria
on the occasion of the Restitution of the collection to the Museu Nacional do Rio de Janeiro – 09.03.2020
Daniela Brasil, ILA & Karin Lernbeiss, 2019
we are coming home. but to which home can one return to? what has been displaced? who has been dispossessed? what do we possess?
The Lukesch Collection of daily and sacred artefacts of the Kayapó and Assurini people is returning to Brazil, yet Styria has been their home for more than 40 years. What do emplacement and temporality imprints in an object? Which affects & effects do objects imprint into personal and collective narratives?
To restitute is one way in taking responsibility for the traumatic colonial and structural violence of our shared histories – that persists into the present, even if often invisibilized. These objects are returning to a safe space of protection and preservation of memory. But, which memories are we preserving? Which of them have been destroyed forever? The National Museum in Rio was on fire, the Amazonian forests were and are on fire, which peoples, which cultures are being burned?
Can the act of restitution, as well as the acknowledgement of our political, economic, material and spiritual entanglements — within an expanded idea of kinship — contribute to the restoration of relations by fostering a new history writing?
This photographic project displaces our understanding of home, family, and kinship while making a tribute to Kayapó leader Raoni, one of the greatest indigenous and earth rights defenders of the Xingú and the Amazon, and the wider struggles he represents. The Tribute series alludes to the correlation between the extractivist industries that feed our consumer society and the systematic violence and destruction that indigenous peoples, and their sacred territories, are subjected to.
This work was done in cooperation with Universalmuseum Joanneum, Thank you to Dr. Gabrielle Wolf and Dr. Wolfgang Muchitsch
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