Probing Colonial Fictions with Denilson Baniwa

The country of Brazil derives its name from the Portuguese pau-brasil, or brazilwood, one of the first natural resources that Europeans extracted from Brazil’s coast beginning around 1500. This etymology betrays the structural and historical biases that underlie Brazilian history: from Europeans’ very first encounters with Brazil, they understood the land in terms of resource extraction. This understanding was then written into Brazil’s history through the production of books, maps, documents, and even the name by which it came to be known. The Indigenous Amazonian artist Denilson Baniwa (born 1984) tries to lay these biases bare in his work, exposing “colonial fictions” and calling attention to the ongoing effects of colonization. This is why Baniwa—together with two Indigenous cocurators—renamed Brazil’s pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale the Hãhãwpuá Pavilion, opting for an Indigenous (Pataxó) name for Brazil. Baniwa foregrounds Indigenous perspectives in all his work, some of which is on view in Denilson Baniwa: Under the Skin of History at Art@Bainbridge.

Under the Skin of History highlights the breadth of Baniwa’s practice, with one gallery comprising works made in response to objects Baniwa encountered in the Princeton University Library’s Special Collections. In a series of six photographs titled Fera Utopia, Baniwa and the photographer Thiago da Costa Oliveira rearrange Playmobil’s safari- and jungle-themed “Wiltopia” play sets to re-create some of the colonial images they viewed in the Library. Three are based on illustrations from a multivolume history of the Americas published in the 1590s by the Flemish engraver and publisher Theodor de Bry. Though de Bry never left Europe, his publications became standard reference volumes for Europeans interested in the Americas, and his illustrations were cited and reproduced for centuries afterward. Baniwa was struck by how the Playmobil sets reflect some of the same exoticizing views of Indigenous people as earlier colonial images. The resulting tableaux may at first seem fun and playful, but they reference an insidious history of reductive and offensive images of Indigenous people that date back to de Bry and persist in toys made today.

The same gallery contains two large hand-drawn maps that employ conventions of colonial publications from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. In one detail of the map Porto Seguro (Safe Haven), labeled “K-DRAMA LAND,” three figures squat and weep while gathered around a television. These figures, too, find their origin in a de Bry illustration. As de Bry had never been to the Americas, his volumes combined various existing accounts with a heavy dose of artistic license. His sources themselves were in turn often heavily plagiarized, embellished, or fabricated. De Bry’s image, published in 1592, was based on illustrations in works published by Hans Staden in 1557 and Jean de Léry in 1578. Using dehumanizing language, the accompanying texts sensationalized the way that Indigenous Tupinambá mourn the dead. Léry describes: “Above all, it is amazing to hear the cries of the women, as loud as the howling of dogs and wolves.” In recasting these figures as spectators of a television show, Baniwa presents us not with a sensationalist scene made for the colonial gaze but with an almost banal contemporary experience—viewers weeping at the conclusion of a Korean drama.

Other citations in the map similarly draw on historical sources. A man getting his beard trimmed in “BEAUTY LAND” is adapted from Hippolyte Taunay’s 1822 publication Le Brésil, ou Histoire, moeurs, usages et coutumes des habitans de ce royaume (Brazil, or The history, morals, uses and customs of the inhabitants of this kingdom). The book’s title page boasts that its illustrations were made from Taunay’s firsthand drawings, but many were actually copied from earlier sources such as de Bry. Taunay’s nineteenth-century publication, which purported to be a true and “scientific” ethnography of Brazil and its inhabitants, was in fact part of a long lineage of repurposed (mis)information going back more than 250 years. The image’s prototype comes from Staden’s 1557 Warhaftige Historia . . . eyner Landtschafft der Wilden Nacketen, Grimmigen Menschfresser-Leuthen . . . (True history . . . of a country of wild, naked, savage, cannibals . . .  ), in a chapter on “the ceremonies at which [the Tupinambá] kill and eat their enemies.” Again, Baniwa transforms the sensational into the commonplace, reclaiming racist and reductive images promulgated in European histories.

Baniwa’s choice to emulate maps is significant in that maps are often thought of as objective, but they nevertheless entail a perspective. The earth is not flat, so distortions of scale are inherent to mapmaking. When one opens Google Maps, they see the world rendered in the Mercator projection developed by a Flemish cartographer in 1569. Landmasses closest to the equator, such as South America and Africa, are shown disproportionately small, while Europe and North America are oversize. These are consequences of a history that has been written largely from a European perspective and applied to the rest of the world. Baniwa’s maps of imaginary coastlines populated by reinterpretations of earlier colonial images call attention to the fact that maps are contrived to serve their makers. They are, as Baniwa asserts, colonial fictions.

Jun P. Nakamura
Assistant Curator of Prints and Drawings

Art@Bainbridge is made possible through the generous support of the Virginia and Bagley Wright, Class of 1946, Program Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art; the Kathleen C. Sherrerd Program Fund for American Art; Joshua R. Slocum, Class of 1998, and Sara Slocum; Rachelle Belfer Malkin, Class of 1986, and Anthony E. Malkin; Barbara and Gerald Essig; Gene Locks, Class of 1959, and Sueyun Locks; and Ivy Beth Lewis.

Denilson Baniwa: Under the Skin of History is co-organized by the Brazil LAB, the Department of Anthropology, and the Princeton University Art Museum. Cosponsors of the project include the High Meadows Environmental Institute, the University Center for Human Values, the Humanities Council, the Program in Latin American Studies, and the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. Additional supporters include the Department of Spanish & Portuguese, the Department of Art & Archaeology, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the Effron Center for the Study of America.