UÝRA

Uýra Sodoma is a manifestation of the biologist, ecologist, visual artist and art educator Emerson Pontes. Uýra tells stories to and for their community via the emotion of the imagination, made possible through art.

Nothing alive resides isolated in this world - and this is independent of time and space. Even under the radical solitude inside a room, the wind blows and brings us memories. The organs of a cell are, for themselves, what the natural phenomena are of the planet: inseparable, codependent and affect each other. I like to think of the phases of our human lives in this way, interconnected by the steps/times that build us; where every path, whether or not accidental, on the continuum between good and bad, influences what we do and the way we influence the world.

I have decided not to slice my life anymore: saying what year I became an artist, which year I become a biologist or an educator. If these titles happen, it is because they come from somewhere - and this ‘where’ is life. Academic knowledge is as valuable as traditional/experimental knowledge, but the former ignores the latter - even if it has its basis in it. They make a nice pair, but these times we are living in have put both of them to fight. With my art and trajectory, I insist they make peace.

As an Indigenous person, I am also a scientist, and via art, I tell stories of the natural. I have already told many of them in scientific articles, to foreigners - lots of numbers and reason. I learned that wasn’t enough for me. Today, I gather these codes and also tell stories to my own people via the emotion of the imagination made possible through art - using paints and leaves as arrows. The aim? The imaginaries of the worlds, and mine, largely sicken. The world of reason is limited and authoritarian, but it lives in the wrong. Its cousin, the world of certainties, forgot that doubts do it good. The world of emotion, on the other hand, is silent - in the void of devaluation. How can we voice life without emotion? How can we say “hey, value forests”, without making this value felt?

Education was the one that taught me that value, navigating to create art with young people from the banks of the Japurá, Amanã, Negro, Solimões, Mariepauá, Aripuanã rivers and many others. Places where possible art, with its unique value, is the one that is built in play, with feet on the ground, sewing the material (leaves, seeds, earth...) and the immaterial (stories, beliefs, enchantment...) from life’s own backyard. I continued writing about living things but I became them too. It was no longer researcher versus object. It was their fusion. A study of colours, behaviours, songs and stories - glued to the body.

Uýra is not just from the forest, it inhabits, and is also, the city. I’ve learned a lot from the movements of peoples, who, like me, are excluded from the ‘big’ society. I started to see in my neighbourhood and in the nation of Brazil, the violence, erasures, lies and inequalities - all the wounds of European colonialism. In addition, I am also strengthened by the stories of resurrection and resistance by all Indigenous, Black, LGTBQI+, northerners and northeasterners of Brazil.

From then on, in addition to cross-referencing knowledge, I sought inspiration for us in the stories of animals and plants. The world was and still is too anthropocentric, ruled by small and arrogant groups of humans: white male corporations, cisgenders, heterosexuals, phonies and squares. We’ve already seen what that’s done to the planet. From this, metaphors emerge from my works that bring together the worlds of more diverse humans and other creatures, also resignifying layers that these aforementioned men created for me: racial (which comes first), social, territorial, sexual and spiritual - all in this great and challenging forest-city landscape.

I believe that only with sincere dialogue and respect, we build other worlds. My works are an invitation to dialogue: it presents the violence, beauty and struggles of my territory so that Brazil and the worlds really get to know the Amazons. For centuries, white people have entered our territories and lives, without wanting any dialogue, only stealing, killing, enslaving or erasing us. I might not want dialogues, as I already didn’t, I might just want revenge, as I already did. I insist on dialogue, not for a possible pacification of these worlds. They already have violence and hopelessness deeply embedded in their structures. The sky is already touching our heads, as corporations make up the climate crisis and nations sleep at night thinking they live in a racial democracy. It’s another world that we need, and it can’t be managed by the same people as usual. Art helps us to imagine - and that is very powerful.

Let’s think: the world has more ears than mouths. Even so, there is only talk in it, talk and talk. We forget about the ears, even if they are glued to us. And whoever speaks, I say has a voice from the places of power, is the aforementioned small group of mouths (those of the white and straight patriarchy). So other human mouths must speak, and these are the Indigenous, Black, transvestites, from the Amazon and from the worlds of people, whose experiences can be the basis for another world. But it’s not just people that the planet is made of - and we saw that just listening to (part of) the species also generated irreversible political, environmental, sociocultural and spiritual crises. We need to listen more beyond ourselves. Have you ever learned something from another animal? Have you ever felt different when being with a tree? Well, other creatures are the majority in the world, they live their own lives, each in their own unique way, and have a lot to teach us either through a contact that reminds us of ourselves or through an experience that allows us to imagine other worlds we can be.

This business of “decolonising” or “counter-colonising” is not for me. It takes too long and is too tiring. It is much more powerful, beautiful and, at this moment, possible, to achieve the cultivation and reforestation of our worlds. The recovery and strengthening of our self-esteem, of our knowledge, values and flavours, between and towards us, is already alive in our backyard, for it is ancestral.

We Indigenous people and other people of the Amazon need dialogues with the great worlds to guarantee the protection of the forests and the ecologies we inhabit. We need dialogue to tell ourselves in a dignified way, in the first person, beyond the racist stereotypes that exist about us; it is through dialogues that we also access these spaces of economic and symbolic value, from which we are historically excluded. It is in these dialogues that we provoke ancient cures that are deeply present in the now, where we re-demarcate our knowledge, cultures and values. We carry infinite voices, many that are not even of people.

Uýra, which in ancient Tupi means ‘flying animal’, is also a plant. She is the goddaughter of Paxiubinha, ‘the walking tree’ - that’s why she has also been walking through the great worlds, and sewing all the phases of my life. She is each part because she is the whole. It’s the child, the biologist, the artist, the educator - anyway... it’s me.