The Abya Yala Sowing Tour 2023 – Pe ataju jumali/Hot Air (Ar quente)
The Abya Yala Sowing Tour 2023 was a series of public screenings of Pe ataju jumali/Hot Air (Ar quente) and artist talks with filmmaker and performance artist Juma Pariri (Hemispheric Encounters collaborator and former Postdoctoral Fellow) across Brazil, Colombia, Canada, and the USA. The Abya Yala Sowing Tour was co-presented by Hemispheric Encounters and Collective United Against Colonization: Many Eyes One Heart.
Pe ataju jumali/Hot Air is an experimental, magical, performative storytelling by the forest creatures of the Global South of their perforMAGIC ACTivations that reveal the face of the carbon credit system of the global north that purports to protect forests. In the film, the forest creatures reveal this great farce and invite everyone into a great cosmic spiral in which environmental justice, Indigenous knowledge, and lives are centered.
Abya Yala is the Indigenous Kuna name for the continent known as America. Abya Yala means flourishing land. In this series of exhibitions across Brazil, Colombia, USA, and Canada, we will share our audiovisual seeds to sow other possible worlds together here and now.
Pe ataju jumali/Hot Air was produced by the following artists’ sowings: Margarita Weweli-Lukana, Juma Pariri, Frê Arvora, Gurcius Gewdner, Amaya Torres, Jules Zinn, Juan Camilo Herrera Casilimas, and Juliana Pongutá Forero.
Volume 9, Issue 1 of the journal Revista Arte da Cena on Ecoperformance and Ecopolitics of the Scene features an essay by Frê Arvora about Pe ataju jumali/Hot air (Ar quente).
Juma Pariri is an artivist based in Abya Yala that seeks to listen and learn from forest (r)existences. They move in the friction between the arts of the body, undisciplined pedagogy, and the Indigenous struggle for environmental justice. Among others, they activate the performance platform AGITPORN! – no to inequality, for social decolonization!, to learn (and create) from indigenous ancestors about anti-monocultural processes around sexualities, foods, crops, “cannibalism”, menstruation and rituals. Their current research project is called (In)dig(e)nous perforMAGICAL ACTivations against the farce of colonial representation. They also curate events that unite arts and Indigenous cultures, as the: MIACAY – Indigenous Exhibition of Performing Arts in Abya Yala: dance the impossible to move worlds.
Arvora says, “Based on the questions and images brought up by Pe ataju jumali/Hot Air, the text tries to reflect on the condition of a colonized and modernized world shaped according to the financial and industrial monoculture of the Global North and its urban condition, which suffocates the Earth to reproduce itself, in the face of the present environmental crisis as a direct consequence of its model of civilizing progress.”
The article, “Palavras-Semente Para Plantar o ar que nos Falta: Notas sobre Pe Ataju Jumali/Hot Air (Ar Quente)” (“Seed-Words to Plant the Air we Lack: Notes on Pe Ataju Jumali / HotAir”) is available online in Portuguese and English.
